ABSTRACT
A leksandr Aleksandrovich Blok was a poet, playwright, and prose writer. A leading Symbolist poet of his time, Blok has entered literary history as a writer who transformed the Russian poetic idiom and introduced numerous experimental innovations into drama. Blok’s interest in the European literary tradition, so evident in his writings, led him to undertake translations from Byron (1905) and Heine (1909, 1920-21), the latter being the most important of his contributions to poetic translation. He also translated Latvian, Finnish, and Armenian poetry. In 1908, he published The Youth of Théophile [Detstvo o Teofile], a translation of Le Miracle de St. Théophile [The Miracle of St. Theophilus] by the French troubadour Rutebeuf, and after that, The First Mother [Pramater’], a translation of the play in verse by the Austrian poet [Franz] Grillparzer The Ancestor [Die Ahnfrau]. In addition to poetry and verse drama, Blok also translated prose; his best known translation was probably that of Flaubert’s ‘La Légende de St. Julien l’hospitalier’ [‘The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller’] which appeared as ‘Legenda o sv. Iuliane Strannopriimtse’ [‘The Legend of St. Julian’]. After the Revolution of 1917, Blok held several government jobs and supervised the work of various cultural committees. Between 1918 and 1921, as part of his work for Gorkii’s publishing house World Literature, Blok wrote numerous reviews of translations, and was active in establishing the translation policies of the publishers. His reviews provide extensive comments on the work of other translators and contribute to the understanding of Blok’s own poetic theory and aesthetic standards.
