Уильям Блейк, <i>Песни невинности и опыта</i>: William Blake, <i>Songs of Innocence and of Experience</i>

Abstract

In 2009 one of the largest Russian museums, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, joined with the Tate and the British Council to begin to organize a Russian exhibition of Blake’s works for the first time ever; it opened in November 2011. The British Council also suggested that a new translated edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience should be published on the occasion. The Russian State Library for Foreign Literature partnered with the council to organize the workshop of translators and publish the book. The publication is unusual for Russia in that it is based on an earlier boxed small-format edition issued by the Folio Society (1992), later republished unboxed by Tate Publishing in 2006 and 2009. For the first time in Russia, this edition reproduces the illuminated prints of the Songs, and all translations are new, the result of a competition among members of the translation workshop. The translations judged most successful were included alongside the images, with introductions by Richard Holmes and Gregory Kruzhkov as well as critical commentary by Sasha Dugdale. The translations presented in the book represent a modern vision of Blake and successfully compete with a number of classical translations of Blake into Russian, such as those by S. Ya. Marshak, S. Stepanov, and others.