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Russian Children's Poetry: Multiple Approaches to English Translation

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Using examples from two anthologies of Russian children’s literature in English translation, this lecture explores the diverse strategies employed by contemporary translators. Translating children’s poetry requires navigating meter, rhythm, and rhyme while preserving the poem’s essential poetic nuance. Translators adopt multiple approaches to rendering cultural context, proper names, and toponyms; often poets themselves, they engage in a complex balancing act between domestication and foreignization, semantic precision and poetic form, literal equivalence and idiomatic English. But do we—translators and readers of poetry—ever truly know what is right and what is wrong? Translating children’s poetry offers no simple or definitive answers. Instead, this lecture invites us on a journey through poetic lines to examine the many choices, compromises, and creative solutions different translators have made.

Event Sponsor
LLEA Speaker Series, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Joy Logan, 808-956-4163, logan@hawaii.edu