Notes of a Recidivist Translator

Grigory Kruzhkov is a poet and translator, literary critic and essayist, laureate of prestigious literary awards, professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, and honorary doctor of literature at Trinity College Dublin.

Every good translator is a researcher, in... love with foreign words. We all have favorite poets, but undertaking a journey through five centuries of foreign poetry, overcoming the fearsome reefs of untranslatability, and not getting stuck in the heavy ice and ridges of dictionaries is not something everyone can achieve. Grigory Kruzhkov succeeded in this. His insatiable craving for discoveries took him far, to islands where his favorite poets reigned and offered sacrifices to Apollo: John Keats and Lewis Carroll, Robert Frost and William Yeats, John Donne and Emily Dickinson. Everything seen and experienced on this literary journey demanded to be captured. As a result, it turned into a captivating tale of the translator's life, its comedies and dramas, the mysteries of the craft, and beloved poets and translators.

Included in the appendix is a mini-anthology of selected translations by the author, printed alongside the originals, allowing the curious reader to get closer to the amazing world at the boundary of "one's own and the foreign" and to independently ponder the metamorphoses of translation.

The book is illustrated with portraits and fragments of handwritten texts of the translated poets, illustrations from early book editions, as well as reproductions of works of art that restore the cultural context of the time.