Experience of Collective Poetry Translation («Я помню чудное мгновенье»)

Abstract

This article analyses the experience of the collective poetic translation done by a group of the students and professors of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies and Higher School of Translation and Interpreting of Moscow State University (MSU). The whole work was done under the direction of Joëlle Guatelli-Tedeschi, a professor of the Universidad de Granada (UGR). The authors believe that this method of working with a literary text can have a positive effect on students’ foreign language studying, getting interested in and better understanding its literature, especially poetry, developing their creativity and ability to work in a team. The article provides a detailed comment on the prosaic version of the collective translation of Sergey Goncharenko’s poem into Spanish and explains its objective and subjective successes and failures. In the end, two poetic versions of the translation by Spanish poets and traslators Antonio Carvajal and Joaquín Torquemada Sánchez are given and analysed.