Бажанов, А. Стихи и поэмы о саамском крае = Verses & poems on the Saami land / Аскольд Бажанов ; English translation by Naomi Caffee ; with an essay by Johanna Domokos. - Berlin : Nordeuropa-Institut der Humboldt-Universitat, 2009.

Translator’s Note ---- Naomi Caffee Translating poetry from Russian to English is a tricky task. Aside from the inherent untranslatable qualities of the verses themselves, there are vast differences in the mechanics of these two languages, as well as in the w idely divergent poetic values and traditions that correspond to them. However, thanks to the particularly multilingual and multicultural environment of the Saami, Askold Bazhanov’s poems contain a universality that lends them quite nat urally to translation. Rather than relying on complex (and some times constrictive) verse structures, these poems follow a more re laxed, natural pattern, reflecting the unpretentious rhythms o f the passing seasons, the tempo of everyday language and life. Most im portantly, they reflect the pace of Bazhanov’s poetic persona as he traverses the tundra homeland and encounters new environments of both estrangement and exploration (for instance, in the poems on pages 23, 73, 89, and 105). Throughout this volume, I have attempted to re-create the har mony and tempo of Bazhanov’s words, while also accurately pre serving the overall poetic meaning. I translated the shorter, more musical poems using relatively tight rhyme and meter (pp. 61 and 63), but I rendered the longer narrative poems into meandering pro saic translations (pp. 17 and 157). I attempted to preserve the gen eral idea of Bazhanov’s aural »sound picture« by re-creating the al literation and finding English parallels to his idioms and colloqui alisms (pp. 21 and 71). For instance, I frequently used contractions (that’s, it’s, etc.) to replicate the simpler tone of certain poems, and I drew on my own background of rural American English as a re source for folk expressions (pp. 21, 23, 27, 103, 109). Despite my best efforts, however, some of Bazhanov’s wordplay is lost in trans lation - most notably, when he plays on the similarity of the Russian words stikhiia, meaning »the elements« or »the environments and stikhi meaning »verses« or »poetry« (p. 33). Indeed, since a profound intimacy with nature is Bazhanov’s birthright, he is able to bring the two concepts together with special authority, as evidenced by his frequent personification of the seasons (pp. 43 and 49) and the