The Early Auden

2020. No. 27.

Ostrovskaya E.

The paper explores the first translations of W. H. Auden into Russian in the context of the cultural projects of the Stalinist USSR in the 1930s. With ideological distinctions across the borders sometimes even more perceptible than linguistic, the translation was bound to be cultural as well as intralingual. The poetry of the “early Auden,” an acknowledged modernist and successor to T. S. Eliot, was enigmatic in densely modernist sense and characterized by acute social awareness at the same time. In translating Auden’s controversial poetic persona, reviewers and editors of periodicals and the editor and translators of the Anthology of New English Poetry chose different strategies: while the former discussed a “revolutionary poet,” the latter attempted to translate the modernist. Juxtaposing these two facets of the Russian Auden, the paper proceeds to analyze the translations of the anthology and to demonstrate how D. S. Mirsky, the compiler and editor of the book mediated Auden’s reception in the USSR.

Keywords: W. H. Auden, D. S. Mirsky, Soviet translation, USSR in the 1930s, У.Х.Оден, Д.Святополк-Мирский, Перевод в СССР, СССР 1930-е гг.

Publication based on the results of: Политика и поэтика перевода: "Антология новой английской поэзии" и поэтические антологии 1930-х годов (2018)