Not everyone knows that A.S. Pushkin was not only a poet and writer, but also translated other people's works and was fond of learning languages. According to researchers, in addition to Russian, to one degree or another, he was familiar with sixteen languages, although he was fluent in French only.
Instruction manual
1
Pushkin was fluent in several languages in order to read works in them in the original and understand them in general. Even if he did not know the literal meaning of any words, he knew how to grasp the essence. In addition, he liked to translate foreign works, as well as his own compositions into foreign languages, mainly into French. He considered the translation a very worthy occupation and a good way to enrich domestic literature with the best examples of foreign.
2
Translations for Pushkin were not professional activities. He received satisfaction from them as a creative person, since in this way he had the opportunity to fix his artistic perception of the work or passage that impressed him and express it, as well as acquaint other people with it. Most often, the writer translated his favorite authors and folklore. In the transfer, Alexander Sergeyevich always brought something of his own, so a new work was born in some way, while maintaining the national originality of the source.
3
Pushkin translated Moldavian and Serbian songs, poems by English poets (including white ones), sonnets of Italian and French authors, excerpts from the Koran, excerpts from the biblical Song of Songs and much more.
4
Among the specific authors whose works were translated by Pushkin is the French philosopher Voltaire; playwright Antoine-Vincent Arnault; poet Anthony Deschamps; comedian Kazimir Bonjour; English poets William Wordsworth, George Gordon Byron, Barry Cornwall, John Wilson, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge; English preacher John Bunyan; Italian poet Francesco Gianni; Italian playwright Ludovico Ariosto; Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz; Brazilian poet Tomas Antonio Gonzaga, etc. Pushkin also undertook the translation of Horace, Plato. Basically, these are not translations of whole works or poems, but their fragments, probably the most interesting from the point of view of the poet.
5
As the basis for the plot of his "Tales of the Golden Cockerel" (1834), Pushkin took the short story of the American writer Washington Irving, "The Legend of the Arab Starship." And the tale "The king saw before him
."(1833) of the Russian poet is a free revised translation of the fragment" Legends of the Arab astrologer.
6
"The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights" by Pushkin appeared as a free poetic arrangement of the tales of the Germans by the Brothers Grimm, as well as the "Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish".
7
In 1836, the poet translated eleven Russian folk songs into French in order to introduce the French to Russian folk poetry.
8
For several years of his life, Pushkin was fond of translating memoirs and ethnographic literature.
