One Sang the Body Electric: The Twentieth Century Russian and Bulgarian Approaches to Translating the Poetics of Whitman
Abstract
The article focuses on four translations of Walt Whitman’s poem I Sing the Body Electric into Russian and Bulgarian by Balmont, Zenkevich, Stoyanov, Svintila. The choice of the Russian and Bulgarian languages which share historical and cultural experience in their pre-communist, communist and post-communist periods enables us to define the main strategies applied to the highly unconventional poetics of Whitman by his Russian and Bulgarian translators constrained by the rules of the Socialist Realism and the literary canon of different historic periods of the twentieth century. The results obtained demonstrate an evolution of translation approaches to the structure and poetics of the original.
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References
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