Notes of a Recidivist Translator

Grigory Krzhizhanovsky - a poet and translator, literary critic and essayist, laureate of prestigious literary awards, professor at RGUG and honorary doctor of literature at Trinity College Dublin.

Every good translator is a researcher, in love with someone else's word. Each... of us has our favorite poets, but making a journey through five centuries of foreign poetry, overcoming the formidable reefs of untranslatability, and not getting stuck in the heavy ice and hummocks of dictionaries - such is not achieved by everyone. Grigory Krzhizhanovsky succeeded in this. His insatiable thirst for discoveries took him far to the islands where his beloved poets ruled and sacrificed to Apollo: John Keats and Lewis Carroll, Robert Frost and William Yeats, John Donne and Emily Dickinson. Everything he saw and experienced in this literary journey demanded to be captured. As a result, there emerged a captivating narrative about the translator's life, its comedies and dramas, the secrets of the craft, and his favorite poets and translators.

Appendix contains a mini-anthology of selected translations by the author, printed parallel to the originals, allowing the inquisitive reader to get closer to the amazing world on the border of "one's own and the other's" and to reflect independently on the metamorphoses of translation.

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