Malika Kadyrova

on translating Sergei Yesenin

As someone with a fondness for fancy words, I often find translating Yesenin to be an exercise in restraint. His style is uncluttered, often colloquial, and sometimes abrupt. He paints pictures with words you wouldn’t quite associate with what he is trying to convey — when you think about the essence of a country, do you picture cemeteries and huts? Yesenin does. The “huts” also posed a problem — when you hear the word “hut” in English, what do you think of? Probably not a ramshackle peasant house in the countryside, which is what Yesenin meant (in the end, I went with “cottage”). He repeatedly refers to his “hooliganism” (a recurring theme in his poetry) — a sentiment I used two words to convey: “pranks” and “mischief.” I also chose to step back from Yesenin’s tight rhyme scheme in favour of a freer structure. I felt it better allowed me to express the poet’s calm acceptance of falling in love and the new energy it’s given him.