Mykola Zerov Unedited: Archival Translations and Commentaries

• In Event: Liberating Translation II: Liberating Cultural Mediators

Abstract

When, at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, skeptical writers like Maxim Gorky and early Soviet readers accustomed to poetry in Russian expressed doubts about the ability of the Ukrainian language to meet the requirements of the content and style of the “great Russian literature,” Mykola Zerov made translations, including from Russian classics and his contemporaries, which proved that translating into Ukrainian was not a waste of time. Disguised as a political idea of the Communist Party to spread Russian literature among the Ukrainian-speaking audience, this was a hybrid but effective linguistic decolonization that freed the Ukrainian language from the inferiority complex imposed on it by Moscow’s Russocentrism. In my paper, I will discuss Zerov’s unpublished archival materials that expand knowledge about his vision of the Russian school of verse translation and the formation of the Ukrainian translation school.

Author

• Lada Kolomiyets, Taras Shevchenko National U of Kyiv (Ukraine)