Anna Akhmatova Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stanley Kunitz

SOURCE: "On Translating Akhmatova," in his A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly, Little, Brown and Company, 1935, pp. 39-46.

In the following essay, Kunitz discusses the difficulty in translating Akhmatova's poetry from its original Russian.

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, Pasternak's Hamlet is today considered one of the glories of Russian literature. My Russian friend 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!"...
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