In compiling an anthology, space considerations always impose difficult choices. This is true even for collections dealing with fairly narrow or self-limiting themes—perhaps the works of a single author or literary school, or of a particular historical period. The present volume has broader ambitions. We hop to provide the general reader with an introduction to the incredibly rich trove of fantasy and science fiction produced over the span of many centuries by Russia’s folk singers, fabulists, poets, novelists, and masters of other genres more difficult to pigeonhole.
About half of the works in this volume have been newly translated, with the remainder borrowed from previous publications. By necessity and choice, ours was not a unified method. Ideally every work would be presented in its entirety, but this is rarely possible and in fact was not practicable for us: some works are here in full form, and a few have been cut.
Naturally, shorter poetic works, such as the poems of Blok, Briusov and Zabolotsky were kept intact. But long verse narrative like Lermontov’s The Demon, or a lengthy text like Blok’s The Twelve, for example, are represented by selected excerpts. Our approach has been flexible in other ways as well. Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman is also a narrative poem: although the work is brief enough to appear here in its entirety, our new translation renders only the prologue in rhymed verse. For the remainder we chose instead unrhymed but rhythmical prose (metered in iambic octameter), which we feel presents the imagery and themes of this seminal text to the general reader in a more accessible form, with paragraphs corresponding to the irregular stanzas by Pushkin. The same method was applied to Derzhavin’s folkloric Zlogor.
It is not really the case that translating prose is less demanding than translating poetry. Master prose writers—19th century “giants” like Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev, or 20th century classics like Bulgakov, Remizov, Pilniak, and Olesha—work with subtleties and shadings as complex as any poet’s. To convey some sense of this in English was a challenge that deepened our appreciation of their varied narrative genius.
Moreover, whenever possible we have been at great pains to match the scansion of an English line with its Russian original: our poetry translations are rhymed and retain their original meter, as we have taken seriously Joseph Brodsky’s axion: “Meter is everything.”
ALEXANDER LEVITSKY
MARTHA T. KITCHEN