The opportunity to get acquainted with foreign literature is given by translators, because few people read the works of foreign classics in the original. For translated literature, one of the key points is the quality of the translation. There are many talented translators among famous writers.
Writers-translators of world literature
One of the first well-known translators was Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky. More than half of what he wrote is translations from ancient Greek, German, English and other languages. It was he who revealed Goethe and Schiller to the Russian reader. The translated works of Zhukovsky the poet are perceived as masterpieces of not only translated, but also literature in general. They rightfully deserved worthy attention among readers, some of the works turned out to be stronger than the originals. According to Vasily Andreyevich, the reason for the success of his translations lies in the fact that he himself liked the works he undertook.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries Vikenty Veresaev presented the reader with translations of ancient Greek works: Iliads, Odyssey, Sappho, etc. Veresaev's translated works are almost more known to the reader than his own.
Akhmatova, Balmont, Blok and other poets of the Silver Age translated a lot and varied from German, French, and English. Popular is the translation of "Madame Bovary" by Flaubert and the short stories of Maupassant, performed by I. Turgenev. This Russian writer knew French and English perfectly. Another writer of the 19th century who translated the prose of world classics is F. Dostoevsky. Popular among readers is his translation of the novel "Eugene Grande" by Balzac.
From the point of view of translation, Vladimir Nabokov is interesting. This is a bilingual writer whose authorship belongs to works in Russian and English. He translated a lot from Russian into English, for example "The Lay of Igor's Campaign" and his own novel "Lolita".
German anti-fascist writer Heinrich Belle translated many of the works of English writers into German. Together with his wife, they discovered the works of Salinger and Malamud for Germany. Subsequently, the novels of Belle himself were brought to the Russian-speaking reader by the Soviet writer Rita Rait-Kovaleva. She also owns the translations of Schiller, Kafka, Faulkner.
The modern writer Boris Akunin, who has won fame among the Russian reader as the author of works of the detective genre, is no less famous for his translations. His translation has been published by Japanese, English and French authors.
Children's translations
Many fairy tales for Russian children were translated by Kornei Ivanovich Chukovsky. With his help, the kids met Baron Munchausen, Robinson Crusoe and Tom Sawyer. Boris Zakhoder translated The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. For many Russian children, the first book they read was the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm in an excellent translation by S. Ya. Marshak. The tale about Cipollino was translated by Z. Potapova. Elena Blaginina, a famous children's poet, translated humorous poems for children and adapted them to Russian realities.
