A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS
A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS PASTERNAK was once rebuked by a pedant who came to his door bearing a long list of the poet's mistakes in translating Hamlet. The complaint was greeted with laughter and a shrug: "What difference does it make? Shakespeare and I — we're both geniuses, aren't we?" As if to justify his arrogance, Pastemak's Hamlet is today considered one of the glories of Russian literature. Andrei Voznesenski, who passed the anecdote on to me, was unable to recall the visiting critic's name. The poet as translator lives with a paradox. His work must not read like a translation; conversely, it is not an exercise of the free imagination. One voice enjoins him: "Respect the text!" The other simultaneously pleads with him: "Make it new!" He resembles the citizen...