The essays of Marina Tsvetaeva in Czech translations

Czech translations of six essays by Marina Tsvetaeva that focus on poetry writing and on the work of fellow-poets were examined, following a detailed analysis of Tsvetaeva's style and the historical and biographical context of her prose. The evaluation criteria for the translations were: accuracy in reproducing the author's meaning, the ability to distinguish the characteristic features of Tsveateva's style from the systemic features of Russian and the translators' creative input in reproducing especially the lexical and euphonic intricacies of the original. In addition to providing a general overview of translation problems posed by the author's style the work attempted to trace differences between the approaches of two translators of Tsvetaeva's princi pal essays on art: Jana Štroblová (Art in the Light oj Conscience) and Jan Zábrana (Poet and Time, The Epic and Lyric ofContemporary Russia). All Czech translations were found seriously lacking in accuracy; the errors in the reproduction of meaning are partly due to the idiosyncrasies of Tsvetaeva's style (e.g. punctuation), but sometimes to sheer carelessness. Remaining faithful especially to the emotionality ofthe style occasionally entails the transference oftypically Russian syntax or word order into Czech. The effort to reproduce or compensate for..