Quote:
Originally Posted by hdw
I've just finished translating a Swedish biography of the Russian Futurist poet V.V. Mayakovsky. The book contains copious examples of Mayakovsky's poetry, in the author's Swedish translation, which I've translated into English along with the rest of the text. So Mayakovsky's apparently very vivid and idiosyncratic Russian is being filtered through Swedish into English. There's no other way to do it, as I don't know Russian apart from a few words and what I can guess from my slight knowledge of Polish and Czech.
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Just out of curiosity - I've seen several translations of books which incorporate quotes from other works, where the translator has used previous existing translations for the quotes (which I suppose is even preferable in many cases, if the older translation is familiar to many readers). Is there any particular reason you couldn't use previous English translations of Mayakovsky? Is it a copyright issue?