Нет cлов. К переводам ‘Перед зеркалом’ Владислава Ходасевича

In connection with five English translations of Vladislav Khodasevich's famous poem ‘Before the Mirror’, the essay discusses the problem of translatability of a poetic text that features very prominently such semi-auxiliary words as “razve” and “neuzheli” that have no exact equivalents in English. It shows the crucial role these words play in the poem's structure and intertextuality, in particular, in its references to texts by Lev Tolstoi, Ivan Goncharov and Aleksandr Pushkin. The consistent lack of such keywords in the translations may account for the failure of an indisputable gem of Russian poetry to claim its due place in the world literary canon.