ABSTRACT
M ikhail Leonidovich Lozinskii was a poet, translator, and literary critic. Having started his literary career as a poet, he soon shifted his interest to translation. During his long career as translator, he worked on both poetry and prose, translating from several European languages. His translations include works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, Sheridan, Corneille, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Lope de Vega, and many others. Lozinskii’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1939-45) is considered to be the finest version of Dante in Russian and was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1946. In a 1920 diary entry, Aleksandr Blok praised Lozinskii’s translations from Leconte de L’Isle, describing them as of ‘the highest quality’. Nikolai Gumilev placed Lozinskii’s poetic translations even higher than those of Zhukovskii. One of the most important twentieth-century literary translators into Russian, Lozinskii also wrote many scholarly articles on the theory and practice of translation. Akhmatova’s tribute to Lozinskii, published in this collection, is yet another proof
The Art of Poetic Translation (1935) Translated by Brian James Baer
Every work of poetry represents a complex amalgam of inter-connected and interactive elements, such as rhythm, melody, architechtonics, stylistics, and the conceptual, figurative, and emotional content of words and their combinations. The elements, taken together, are designed to produce a synthetic effect in the consciousness of the perceiver.
