Shakespeare’s Sonnets: on the translations new and newly found. W. Shakespeare, Sonnets 75–86 translated by M. Kuzmin

Abstract

In various publications on the history of the first Soviet academic Shakespeare (1936–1949) there flashed bits of information that Mikhail Kuzmin’s translation of the Sonnets was coming. He must have made considerable progress because by 1932 more than half of the job was rumoured to have been done. After Kuzmin’s death in 1936 and a pause in the work on the edition during the war years, his translations were lost, and for the final volume (1949) S. Marshak had translated the whole sequence. Recently 89 sonnets translated by Kuzmin have been found in a private collection. Now we publish Sonnets 75–86, a group known as connected with the ‘rival poet.’ In the preface to the publication, Kuzmin’s work is being analysed. Though unfinished and unedited (the process of editing translations in the academic collected works of Shakespeare was famous for its expert and hypercritical attention), Kuzmin’s translation presents the process of a stylistic search with its evident losses alongside the achievements that even 90 years since might claim to be among the best Shakespeare’s sonnets in Russian.