Meeting a Great Translator
It was our first visit to Yes-Club, so we felt a bit nervous. We had
thought it would be a kind of official meeting, but it turned out an entirely different
thing. The atmosphere was very friendly and informal. We were sitting at a round table and
Grigory Kruzhkov, a well-known translator of British and American poetry, was sharing his
ideas, emotions and feelings with us.
He read out some nonsense poetry in original and his own translations, and then he passed
on to William Butler Yeats. G. Kruzhkov knows a great deal about that 20th-century Irish
poet. It is not actually the sense of Yeats’s verse, but it’s diction, its power that
fascinates the reader. We sat without uttering a word. Our guest said, «Maybe, I’m
getting boring». But this was not true, our minds were simply outside that small room,
where reality and fiction were inseparable.
We were surprised to find out the fact that the famous translator is a physicist by
education. And we were really impressed by his self-criticism. He even said he was ashamed
of his early translations. The job of a translator is not an easy one. Translating poetry,
as well as prose, you are to get into a different cultural background. Grigory
Kruzhkov’s are not word for word translations; he recreates poems using different images
to embody the idea of original and at the same time he establishes links between the two
cultures.
Unfortunately we didn’t have much time, otherwise we would get to know far more about
Grigory Kruzhkov.
By the way, at the end of our meeting we were lucky to get the famous translator’s
autograph.
By Tatyana Sleptsova and Anna Zanemonetz
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