TRANSLATING AS “DIALECT OF WORLD-WIDE LANGUAGE OF POETRY”: RUSSIAN POETRY IN H.M. ENZENSBERGER’S “МUSEUM DER MODERNEN POESIE” (1960/2002)

“Museum der modernen Poesie”, published in 1960 and republished in 1979 and 2002 by the modern renowned German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, includes translations of five great poets of Russian Avant-garde period and modernism: Velimir Khlebnikov, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovski and Sergey Esenin, who have said a new word in the poetry, have developed progressive ideas and mirrored the creative sense of the epoch. It was necessary for H.M. Enzensberger to choose for his “Museum” poets and poems that have played an important role in the development of the world-poetry of the 20th century. This paper implies to show on the ground of influence between German and Russian cultures that only the joint creation of both – author and translator – can help to create the translation equivalent to epoch and to author’s stile. The poems of the Russian poets in the anthology of H.M. Enzensberger are translated by Alexander Koval, Karl Dedecius, Alfred-Edgar Toß, Christel Pesch, Paul Celan. All of them have some losses and virtues in their versions. Nevertheless, they have created their own variation of original as “dialect of world-wide poetical language” (H.M. Enzensberger). On the background of the translations of Coval, Toß and Pesch stand out the translations of Paul Celan, a great German poet, who has created the congenial translations of the works of S. Esenin and O. Mandelstam. They discover creative, high poetical, innovative approach to the metre like the original. Furthermore P. Celan used in his translations innovatory methods, which were specific for his own works and for the Avant-garde poetry of the 20th century: anagrammatical structures, over-naming, inversion, inclusion, subdivision, displacement, atonality, an ascent to “word-seeds” (V. Khlebnikov), paronyms, palindromes, “deautomation” (Yu. Tynyanov), “sense-words” (S. Biryukov).