The Art of Translation: Kornei Chukovsky's ' A High Art'

Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. (1984). First Edition. Hardcover. 0870494058 . Previous owner's signature and rubber name stamps on front endpaper. Some pencil marginalia and underlining. ; Text in English. xxxii, 294, [1] pages. Beige cloth boards with green and black lettering on spine. Page dimensions: 216 x 139mm. An interesting title. Chukovky wrote children's books in Russian, and did translations from English, including of Walt Whitman, into Russian. Includes a section on translating Shakespeare. "We have just seen that there is absolutely no basis for the illusions of naive readers who imagine that the most artistic translation is that which most precisely copies the phraseology of the original" - page 52. "Which means that the translator who is insensitive to the delights and meaning of sounds must never undertake to translate 'The Aeneid'. There are some minds for which words mean only what they learn about them in dictionaries. Such minds are able to create excellent scientific works, but the translation of so much as a single line of 'The Aeneid', or ' Metamorphoses', or the ballads of Coleridge, or Victor Hugo's 'La légende des siècles' is a task beyond them" - page 148. ; 8vo .