For my summer project, I worked with Nikolai Firtich to translate the works of four Russian Futurist poets: Elena Guro, David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Vasily Kamensky. The purpose of our translation work was to focus on translating the untranslated works of the above poets, for the purposes of publishing an annotated bilingual collection of their work. The four poets we translated represent something of a gap in current literature in translation – while the two highest-profile of the Russian futurists, Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky are well-translated at this point, their compatriots in the movement have gone ignored by English language translators. Our hope is that our bilingual collection will serve as an important teaching aid and tool in the classroom, in addition to expanding the amount of excellent Russian poetry available to an English readership. In total, with Firtich’s help and careful review I translated approximately 150 pages of previously untranslated poetry from Russian into English.

I originally applied for this project due to my love of Russian verse and my love of writing poetry. I am a poet in my own time, and write and read equally voraciously. I believe that this is, frankly, a prerequisite for proper verse translation; a poetic translation requires a poet’s touch, and while translation is not the same as creative writing, nearly all skills transfer. I also came to this project with some experience in translation – I had for credit translated the entirety of Russian Symbolist poet Mikhail Kuzmin’s multi-part epic/collection Форель разбивает лед (The Trout Breaks the Ice) the previous summer – and found that both the most interesting aspect of the process was deciding what methods were best to translate each poem individually. While the four poets were part of a shared poetic movement – the Russian Futurist movement, and even more specifically, the Hylean Group of the Futurists – and did share some similarities in style or subject matter, their respective oeuvres were very evidently different. A greater puzzle came from how commonly there were significant stylistic differences within a single poet’s work. The Futurists were in part defined by their experimentation with language; how was a translator to approach the variety of their work?

I took my cues in the process of translation ultimately from a favorite translator of mine, Paul Schmitt, who translated an excellent collection of fellow futurist Velimir Khlebnikov’s poems many years ago. Schmitt’s approach to translation is purposefully anti-dogmatic – in translation, Schmitt argues, one should approach each poem as itself, and pick the style of translation based on what the poem is able to accomodate. The process of translation is always somewhat of a compromise; no language is ever fully intelligible with another, and as a result all good translation requires many intentional decisions carefully made, in the attempt to both preserve the content of the poem, its form, and its original quality. Sometimes one of these things must be sacrificed: the majority of my translations are in free verse, that is, unrhymed and with no standard meter, which is not true of the poems in the original Russian. This is ultimately because, in all but a few cases, I felt that fully preserving the content of the poet’s work was more important than attempting to emulate the poem’s form, when said attempts would already lead to a compromise of sorts.

A simple example of how I applied Schmitt’s advise, and made it my own, was in attempts to translate zaum language throughout the poets’ works. Zaum, or “beyond-mind” language was a Futurist technique where neologisms were derived from Russian roots. While many of the Futurists dabbled with it, Kruchenykh was its master and primary theoretician (alongside perhaps Khlebnikov). In translating zaum, I used a variety of techniques: while in many cases I simply transliterated it to preserve the original sound, in cases where I felt the etymological origin of a particulaer neologism was more important I constructed English language neologisms from English, Old English, and Latinate roots.

Professor Firtich was an enormous wealth of information on Futurism and the Russian language, and was absolutely vital in providing me with knowledge on the meaning or tone of specific diction, and with decyphering the etymology of many of the complicated neologisms the Futurists utilized. It was truly wonderful to partner with him on this project, and I look forward to continuing to collaborate on this project and further polish our translations as we approach publication.

What I hope to have effectively communicated here is that translation requires a series of complicated choices that are both analytic and artistic. With the advent of artificial intelligences that compete with existing translators, and a movement against the humanities in favor of academic disciplines that can drive greater short-term returns on investment, there are significant forces from both within and outside the American Academy that seek to automate away the very thing that has made the Humanities possible for centuries: thought. The Ford program, which supports projects like ours, serve to ensure that the loss of one of the key engines of human art and knowledge does not occur.