TRANSLATION IN KYIVAN RUS' DURING
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understood the inner power of these kinds of literary works and consequently demanded that all translators of prose and poetic works render strictly, fully and faithfully not only the richness of content, but also the stylistic peculiarities, the artistic beauty and the spirit of the source language works. His resolute criticism of the unrestricted freedom of translation and verbalism found strong support among the most outstanding German poets such as Gothe and Schiller among other prominent authors. He also found support among the literary critics in Germany and other countries. This new approach, or rather a new principle of truly faithful literary translation, was born during the period of Enlightenment and developed during early Romanticism (the last decades of the eighteenth century). It began slowly but persistently to gain ground in the first decades of the nineteenth century. This faithful/realistic principle, naturally, was not employed in all European countries at once. After centuries long employment the word-for-word and unrestricted free translation could not be discarded overnight. As a result, the free sense-to-sense translation/unrestricted free translation as well as free adaptation (or regular rehash) continued to be widely employed in Europe throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and even much later. In Russia and in Ukraine, free sense-to-sense translation/free adaptation was steadily practised almost uninterruptedly both during the first and second halves of the nineteenth century. Among the eighteenth century Russian poets who constantly resorted to free sense-to-sense translation and free adaptation were Lomonosov, Sumarokov, Trediakovskii and others. In Ukraine, free sense-to-sense translation in the second half of the eighteenth century was occasionally employed by H.Skovoroda (in his translations from the Latin). During the nineteenth century the number of free interpretations increased considerably, among the authors in Russia being Zhukovskii, Pushkin, Katenin and Vvedenskii1, and in Ukrainian P.Hulak-Artemovs'kyi, P.Bielets'kyi-Nossenko and others. Every translator mostly employed free sense-to-sense translation or even free adaptation of foreign poetic and prose works. Only Zhukovskii would sometimes change his former practice and try to versify some poetic works as, for instance, Byron's Prisoner of Chilton (1819) faithfully, i.e., conveying full sense, the poetic meter and the artistic merits of the original work.
1 See: Федоров А.В. Основьі общей теории перевода. - Москва, 1983, р.43-45, 52.