ABSTRACT
A leksandr Sergeevich Pushkin is univer-sally acknowledged as Russia’s greatest poet and the ‘father of Russian literature’. His poetry, short stories, novels, dramas, articles, and letters have had a major impact on the development of Russian culture. His legacy in all genres and modes of literature has been extended to translation. In his own translations, Pushkin mostly tried to reproduce the general poetic and national spirit of the original, and less so to preserve its literal meaning and form. During the 1810-1820s, inspired by French poetry, he translated Voltaire, Mérimée, and Chénier; he later shifted his interest to Italian literature, producing translations from Ariosto and Alfieri. From Latin, he translated Catullus, Horace and Juvenal. His translations of Greek authors Xenophon and Anacreon were based on previous French versions. His interest in English literature resulted in free translations from Coleridge and Cornwall, and unfinished translations of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Byron’s Mazeppa. His unfinished article ‘On Milton and Chateaubriand’s Translation of Paradise Lost’ [‘O Mil’tone i Shatobrianovom perevode ‘Poteriannogo raia’’], published posthumously in 1836, was an important contribution to the development of the theory of literary translation in Russia. Many of his essays and letters contain additional valuable commentary on various aspects of translation practices of the time, and his aphorism that translators are the “post-horses of civilization” is widely cited.
