A Poet-Knight-Errant Traveling North: Three Russian Poets’ Translations of Li Bai

In 1918, the famous Russian writer Maksim Gorky took the founding of the publishing enterprise Vsemirnaia Literatura (“World Literature” in Russian), as an opportunity to envision a body of world literature for the Soviet Union. Fusing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s theory of Weltliteratur with the Marxian commodity of universal literature, Gorky’s project took shape through a tireless collective effort of translation. Great Russian poets such as Anna Akhmatova were drafted into the national project to translate poetry into Russian—including classical Chinese poetry, which would serve to introduce Oriental literature to Soviet readers. With no knowledge of Chinese, Russian poets had to rely on preliminary translations by sinologists in Russia; consequently, the translation of Chinese poetry in the Soviet Union represents a complex negotiation involving not only classical Chinese and contemporary Soviet poets, but also the language experts who bridged the two worlds. This paper analyzes the translations by Russian poets Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, and Aleksandr Gitovich of the acclaimed Chinese poet Li Bai 李白 (701–762), in order to trace the convoluted journey by which Chinese poetry arrived on Russian soil. By examining how Russian poets struggled with significant language differences and tackled “untranslatable” elements in classical Chinese poetry, including rhyme and allusions, this paper attempts to capture key moments of localization and foreignization in the three poets’ translations.