ABSTRACT
S ergei Aleksandrovich Osherov was a literary critic, translator and editor. He translated poetry and prose from Latin, Greek, Italian and German. An expert in classical languages and literatures, he authored one of the most important Russian translations of Virgil’s Aeneid, first published in 1971 by the prestigious series The Library of World Literature [Biblioteka vsemirnoi literatury] and later reissued in 1979 in the series The Library of Ancient Literature [Biblioteka antichnoi literatury] with an introductory essay by Mikhail Gasparov. Osherov’s numerous translations from classical literature also included works of Seneca, Sapho, Anacreon, Xenophon, Lucian, Demosthenes, Horace, Ovid and others. He also translated from the Italian: Renaissance poetry by Petrarch, Gabriello Chiabrera, Michele Marullo, and such important nineteenth-and twentieth-century prose works, as Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette morali, Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison, Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, stories by Alberto Moravia and many others. Similarly diverse in genres and styles were his translation from German which included works by Heine, Novalis, Goethe, Eduard Mörike, Hermann Hesse, Lion Feuchtwanger, Gustav Mahler and other writers. Osherov’s essays on translations appeared posthumously in To Find a Language for the Epoch [Naiti iazyk epoch, 2001], and in The Steps [Stupeni, 2011], published by his widow Dr. Inna Barsova. The impressive philological competency and breadth revealed in his publications were characteristic of a whole pleiade of the best Soviet translators of the period.
