“Why did I sell my best years for somebody else’s words?”

Abstract

Scholars and philosophers often turn to metaphors when discussing translation. While metaphors serve as tools to define the complex nature of this process, they can also offer unexpected insights into a specific cultural epoch, revealing implicit ideological biases and covert assumptions. In this article, I explore the use of metaphors in the programmatic statements of the Soviet Literary Translation School, as well as in several poems from the 1930s–1960s devoted to translation. The article outlines the dominant thematic groups of metaphors in connection with the ideological context, and compares them with more personal responses by several poet-translators, including Arsenii Tarkovskii, Boris Slutskii, and Vera Zviagintseva. The analysis suggests that while Soviet critical discourse on translation reflected the underlying ideological assumptions (such as the reception of the cultural “other,” or the views on creativity and artistic norms), the use of metaphors allowed poets and scholars to express conflicting opinions and voice artistic dissent.