Whose Foreign Is Foreign? Form And Norms Of Translation Of Contemporary Russian Poetry Into English

Discussions of poetry translation from Russian into English often touch on issues related to the concepts of domestication and foreignization. This article considers issues of poetic form, especially rhyme and metrical patterning, as a domestic or foreign element in anglophone poetry itself and as an important aspect of poetic translation from Russian into English. The article analyzes four individual translations from the point of view of their treatment of formal elements and finds a shift toward greater metrical and rhyming equivalence in more recent translation work. Examples include poems by Innokenty Annensky, Konstantin Batyushkov, Olga Sedakova, Polina Barskova and Joseph Brodsky