The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

The nineteenth century can be described as the golden age of Russian translation. If the previous age had made translation a professional activity, the nineteenth century raised this activity to the level of high art. The new Russian school of translation began to take shape thanks to the outstanding contributions of such prominent personalities as the historian Nikolai Karamzin and the poet Vasily ZHUKOVSKY. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century Karamzin published many translations in several periodicals. He regarded translation as an effective tool for improving a writer's style as well as an invaluable source of information, undertaken for the sake of curiosity, for establishing historical facts, for entertaining women, to provide material for new magazines, or to acquaint readers with books that have not yet become well known. Karamzin's translation activity covered an impressive range of genres and languages: he translated the works of classical and contemporary authors from Greek, French, Latin, German, English, Italian and some oriental languages.

Pushkin referred to ZHUKOVSKY as 'the genius of translation'. Zhukovsky was a talented Russian poet but translations accounted for a considerable part of his output. He translated from English, French, Old Russian, Latin and German. Thanks to him, Russian readers gained access to many works of Schiller, Goethe, Byron, Walter Scott and other giants of world literature. The range of his creative translation activity was staggering. He translated fairy tales by Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers, a complete translation of Homer's Odyssey and a translation of the famous Old Russian epic Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Tale of Igor's Host). Zhukovsky is one of the leading names in the history of translation in Russia.

Like Karamzin, Zhukovsky advocated free translation, which sometimes resulted in a paraphrase or even a new story on the subject of the source text. He would occasionally transfer the setting to Russia, give the source text characters Russian names, and so on. His outstanding talent, however, enabled him to reproduce the style, rhythm and tone of the original poetry, and his best translations were remarkably faithful to their sources. The Russian school of translation owes much to Zhukovsky's legacy.

The practice of taking liberties with the source text was also characteristic of prose translations of the period. Irinarkh Vvedensky, a talented and very popular translator of many novels by Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, would typically add several pages which had nothing to do with the source text. In his translation of Dickens's David Copperfield, for example, he introduced his own texts at the end of the second chapter, at the beginning of the sixth chapter. And he justified such contributions by the desire to please the reader, claiming that the translator had the right to freely recreate the spirit of the source text, to give a new life to the ideas of the author in a new situation – 'under another sky', as he put it.

Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, the two great Russian poets, also played a major role in the history of translation in Russia. Although translations occupied a relatively modest place in their poetry, they made a significant contribution to the improvement of literary translation in Russia. In their poetic paraphrases and imitations they managed to reproduce the most important features of foreign poetry. Their renderings were works of art in their own right, in no way inferior to their original masterpieces. These free translations served as a model for other translators and established an important principle, namely that a good literary translation should be part and parcel of the national literature in the target language. The role played by Pushkin in the development of the Russian school of translation deserves special attention. He always showed great interest in the problems of translation, and his critical analyses of translations were exemplary and thought-provoking. He emphasized the importance of the initial selection of the literary works to be translated. His insistence on loyalty to the source text, coupled with the high quality and expressiveness of the translator's literary style, was a positive influence on the best Russian translators of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Although the majority of translators during this period advocated and practised free translation, a few insisted on complete faithfulness to the source text, on literalism even to the detriment of sense and clarity. Among them were such prominent men of letters as P. A. Vyazemsky, N.l.Gnedich and A.A.Fet, all of whom translated from a number of different languages. However, they did not always practice what they preached. Sometimes the translator's artistic intuition and talent broke through the barrier of literalism. Free translation was also practised as a means of promoting democratic ideas.

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