E. E. Cummings in Russian: an analysis of the poem’s «anyone lived
in a pretty how town» translations

The article analyzes five Russian translations of the poem
by E. E. Cummings, one of the most prominent avant-garde poets of the twentieth
century. In the last decade in Russia we have seen a growing interest in his
poetry, which increases the number of transfers. Author of the article attracted
the fact that there are several translations of the poem «anyone lived in a pretty
how town», made by modern poets-translators V. Britanishsky, D. Kuzmin,
M. Stepanova, Ja. Probshteyn, S. Boychenko. The author analyzes the specific
translation solutions, which took the authors to convey agrammatism of Cummings’
poetry in Russian. Comparing these five very different poetic texts with
the original, the author tries to reveal the strategy of translation of each poettranslator.
Considered translations demonstrate different attitudes of their
authors to the language norm. According to the degree of clarity and focus
on the recipient these translations can be arranged in descending order of the
characteristics: Probshteyn’s translation most clear, transparent, made with
the installation on the reader, the next is Kuzmin’s translation, then Stepanova’s
one, the most «free» attitude to the language normally shows Boychenko’s text.
A special case is Britanishsky’s translation that carries the grammatical complexity
of the original to lexis and word formation. His translation in the grammatical
relation is normative, but at the level of vocabulary translator takes
a step toward the occasionality that weigh down the text and makes the translation
marginal.
The original, which has several translations, enters the interpreters arsenal
and becomes a way of establishing communication between the translated texts.
There are ternary relations in which the translation is an instrument of cultural
transfer.