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Poetic Translation and the Canon: the Case of Russian Auden
The paper outlines the history of poetic translations of W.H. Auden into Russian, from those included in M. Gutner’s Anthology Of The New English Poetry (1937) to anthology and magazine publications of the 1970s, to two monographic collections of verse printed within a short interval of time at the turn of the 21st (Auden, W.H. Collection of Verse, trans. V. Toporov, 1997; Auden, W.H. Labyrinth, trans. V.P.Shestakov, 2003) and discusses them in the context of the canon. The issue of writing poetic translation into the canon is addressed in both historical and translation study perspectives along the lines introduced by Andre Lefevere in his works Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992) and Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Framework (1992). Historically, the key publications are considered in the international context of both Auden and canon-formation. In this respect the 1930s deserve a special attention as the time of constructing of the canon of modern poetry, i.e. time of anthologies, both internationally (Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) and Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 (1936)) and in the USSR (apart from Gutner’s anthology the paper discusses the approach to forming the canon of the International Literature magazine and their correspondence with Auden concerning translation of his verse in 1938). The popularity of the British-American poet in the late Soviet time and the first post-Soviet decade is also considered against the canon-forming processes in the West and the concept of world literature.