One Text – Five Works: An analysis of the Translations of E.E. Cummings’s Poem Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town

Abstract

The article analyzes five Russian translations of a poem by E.E. Cummings, one of the most prominent avant-garde poets of the 20th century. In the last decade, in Russia we have seen a growing interest in his poetry, which inevitably increases the number of its translations. The author of the article has been attracted by the fact that there are several translations of the poem “Anyone lived in a pretty how town” made by modern poetstranslators, namely V. Britanishsky, D. Kuzmin, M. Stepanova, Ya. Probshteyn, and S. Boychenko. Interestingly enough, these five translations of one text are, in fact, five separate works that differ from each other as well as from the original. The author analyzes the specific translation solutions made by the translators in their attempts to convey the agrammatism of Cummings’s poetry in Russian. By comparing these five very different poetic texts with the original, the author tries to reveal the translation strategy of each poettranslator, determining the final result of his activity, i.e. the work that will be considered the ultimate translation of the Cummings’s poem. The author comes to the conclusion that the original, which has several translations, becomes part of translators’ arsenal that helps establish communication among the translated texts. Ternary relations emerge in which translation functions as an instrument of cultural transfer.

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