IGOR SEVERJANINI HENRIK VISNAPUU TÕLKED JA NENDE RETSEPTSIOON
Igor Severjanin’s Translations of Henrik Visnapuu and their Reception

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the function of poetic vocabulary in Igor Severjanin’s translations of Henrik Visnapuu’s poetry. The main attention lies on the neologisms used by Severjanin in his translation of Henrik Visnapuu’s collection „Amores” and the critical reception of his translation in Estonian as well as in Russian. For Severjanin, the beginning of his Estonian period means a gradual withdrawal from his previous modernist attitude and more attention paid to classical Russian verse. He views the production of contemporary Estonian poets much like a repetition of the early period of his own creative pursuits as well as of Russian modernism in general. In his translations he not so much aims at a precise rendering of the source text as at creating a poetic model of contemporary Estonian poetry, based on his new aesthetic position. This position is not entirely unambiguous. On the one hand, it involves self-irony, thinking of his own past full of restless experimentation and his advocacy for such experiments, and irony for those Estonian poets who neglected classical verse and used assonance rhymes (which sound, by the way, quite natural in Estonian poetry, being organic to folk songs). On the other hand, while translating „Amores”, memories of Severjanin’s own early days as a writer also seem to evoke some pleasant feelings, all the more that the author of „Leander’s grand piano” and „Classical roses” actually never quite abandoned his early poetic devices.

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