The blue-yellow stains on the shredded, red flag : A comparative analysis of Swedish translations of Blok, Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva

This essay presents a comparative analysis of five Swedish translations of three Russian poems: The twelve (Двенадцать) written by Alexander Blok, Requiem (Реквием) written by Anna Akhmatova and End song (Поема конца) written by Marina Tsvetayeva. The introductory readings of the Swedish translations texts are combined with a parallel reading of the Russian original. In addition to the primary literature I execute readings of secondary literature concerning the Russian, modernistic context, the poets’ biographies and the translator’s commentaries concerning the working process of translation. The method used for the analysis is comparative and on the basis of theoretic perspectives including different translation practices, equivalence and literary context the analysis will foreground and discuss how Swedish translators of Russian poetry conduct their work, how they handle the confrontation with the Russian structure and rhyme, the translator’s use of equivalence in translating challenging/untranslatable words, how much place they choose to give the Russian context in the translated poems and what function the Russian origin have for the Swedish readers, how interjections and smaller words are transformed into Swedish text and what place and role the translator’s own context have in the translations. The essay’s fundamental ambition is hence to combine the perspective of linguistic components and translation strategies with the notion of context, historic background and cultural validity and by doing so present conclusions on how these three Russian, modernistic poems have been transformed and are currently transformed into a Swedish existence through the work of translators