Recreating the Rhythm of the Spanish Octosyllable: Two Russian Experiments in the 1930s and 1940s

The article focuses on the rhythmical analysis of experimental Russian translations that imitate the structure of Spanish octosyllabic verse. These are folk romances interpreted by the distinguished Russian medievalist Boris Yarkho published in 1938, and the romances from Federico Garcia Lorca’s Romancero gitano, translated by the overlooked Russian poet Konstantin Gusev and published between 1941 and 1946. Despite working independently, both translators share a common approach in meticulously selecting formal equivalents to interpret the syllabic verse.I examine the formal characteristics of Yarkho’s and Gusev’s translations, such as the syllabic length of lines and their accentual patterns, and compare them with the originals and other translations. Yarkho and Gusev employ a translation technique based on the principle of rhythmical copying; they aim to faithfully convey the accentual and syllabic features of the Spanish originals, thus creating a similar acoustic impression in Russian. This approach extends even to the level of individual lines in the text: the translators, particularly Gusev, take great care to ensure that the recitation of the Spanish originals and the Russian translations correspond to each other.