Overview

The Bilingual Muse analyzes the work of seven Russian poets who translated their own poems into English, French, German, or Italian. Investigating the parallel versions of self-translated poetic texts by Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Andrey Gritsman, Katia Kapovich, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wassily Kandinsky, and Elizaveta Kul’man, Adrian Wanner considers how verbal creativity functions in different languages, the conundrum of translation, and the vagaries of bilingual identities. Wanner argues that the perceived marginality of self-translation stems from a romantic privileging of the mother tongue and the original text. The unprecedented recent dispersion of Russian speakers over three continents has led to the emergence of a new generation of diasporic Russians who provide a more receptive milieu for multilingual creativity. The book will be of interest to scholars in Russian literature, comparative literature, applied linguistics, translation studies, and the rapidly developing field of self-translation studies.

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9780810141247

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Reviews

The Bilingual Muse confirms Adrian Wanner as the leading scholar of Russian literary translingualism. His scintillating study of self-translation by seven disparate poets is attentive to the nuances of prosody as well as issues of cultural and personal identity. Especially luminescent are Wanner's discussion of the short-lived polyglot prodigy Elizaveta Kul'man, his recuperation of the painter Wassily Kandinsky as a formidable trilingual poet, and his account of why Vladimir Nabokov regarded autotranslation as 'self-torture. - Steven G. Kellman, author of The Translingual Imagination The Bilingual Muse is illuminating and useful. It is rare and unusual to see the kind of thorough treatment of all levels of language and prosody that Wanner provides. - Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, author of Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the First Emigration

The Bilingual Muse confirms Adrian Wanner as the leading scholar of Russian literary translingualism. His scintillating study of self-translation by seven disparate poets is attentive to the nuances of prosody as well as issues of cultural and personal identity. Especially luminescent are Wanner's discussion of the short-lived polyglot prodigy Elizaveta Kul'man, his recuperation of the painter Wassily Kandinsky as a formidable trilingual poet, and his account of why Vladimir Nabokov regarded autotranslation as 'self-torture.' -Steven G. Kellman, author of The Translingual Imagination The Bilingual Muse is illuminating and useful. It is rare and unusual to see the kind of thorough treatment of all levels of language and prosody that Wanner provides. -Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, author of Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the First Emigration

Author Information

ADRIAN WANNER is the Liberal Arts Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He is the author of Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story and Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora, both published by Northwestern University Press.

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