ИСТИНА

This paper developed some of the ideas that were expressed at the meeting of the Translators’ Section of the Soviet Writer’s Union (28 December 1934) where the ex-formalist leftist critic Osip Brik’s talk on new Russian translations of Heinrich Heine’s Germany was presented and discussed. The meeting was presided over by prominent literary theorist Boris Jarcho (Yarkho) and featured leading Russian translators – in particular, Dmitrii Usov and Lev Penkovsky. Brik argued for equirhythmical translations of Heine’s dolniks and maintained that equimetrical translations are impossible due to the differences between the Russian and the German systems of verse. Usov and Penkovsky, on the contrary, argued for equimetrical translations and maintained that equirhythmical translations are impossible due to the differences between the accentual systems of the Russian and the German languages. Jarcho developed a theory, according to which every versification system is characterized by primary and secondary features. The primary features represent a determinist norm and should be reproduced in translation to the full extent, while the secondary features represent a statistical norm: they may be reproduced in a proportion that the language and the poetic tradition can afford and that is at the same time similar to the proportion found in the original text. Liapin and Pilshchikov discussed three Russian poetic translations of Heine’s celebrated “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam…” from the point of view of their equimetricity/equirhythmicity, and compared their metrical and rhythmical structure with various rhythmic types of the Russian dolnik.