Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Translations from Dante’s Vita Nuova

Abstract

In 1913 the Russian symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) proposed to the famous patron of the arts Michail Sabashnikov a new Russian translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova for Sabashnikov’s publishing house. Shortly thereafter the poet began this work, which he was never to complete. In Ivanov’s lifetime, the only published evidence of this project was a part of chapter III from the Vita Nuova that he interpolated in his essay “On the Limits of Art” in 1914. Ivanov’s translations from various works of Dante were discussed for the first time by Pamela Davidson in her monograph The poetic imagination of Viacheslav Ivanov: A Russian symbolist’s perception of Dante (1989). Davidson devoted a chapter to Vita Nuova and its significance for the Russian symbolist. Continuing Pamela Davidson’s investigations, we examined all the material preserved in the Russian State Library (Moscow) that allows us to document Ivanov’s translations from the Vita Nuova: the drafts of chapters I and V and of an introduction that the poet planned for his Russian edition of the Vita Nuova. Among other things it was possible to decipher the draft of the masterful translation of the “sonetto doppio” from chapter VII. An addendum to the paper contains chapters XX and XXI from Dante’s Vita Nuova in Ivanov’s translation, likewise found in manuscript form in the Russian State Library.

Keywords

• russian modernism
• viacheslav ivanov
• translation studies
• dante’s vita nuova in russia.