Tatyana Gnedich, arrested in 1945, translated Byron’s “Don Juan” in prison

“Gnedich was arrested right at the end of the war, in 1945. By her own account, she had denounced herself. What she told was scarcely plausible, yet it may have been the product of a peculiar wartime psychosis: supposedly she, then a candidate member of the Party (at the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement this was a necessary condition), brought her candidate’s card to the Party committee and left it there, declaring that she had no moral right to Party membership after what she had done. She was arrested. The interrogators pressed her to confess: what exactly did she have in mind? They did not believe her explanations (neither would I have, had I not known that she had something of the holy fool about her). Supposedly, at the request of some English diplomat, she had translated Vera Inber’s poem “The Pulkovo Meridian” into English for publication in London, in ottava rima. Having read it, he said: ‘If only you could work with us: how much you could do for Russo-British cultural relations!’ His words made an impression on her, the idea of a journey to Britain lodged itself in her mind, but she regarded it as treason. And she surrendered her candidate’s card. Naturally, the investigation did not believe this wild confession, yet no other charges presented themselves. She was tried (by then it had become the custom to ‘try’ people) and sentenced to ten years in corrective labour camps on a charge of ‘treason against the Soviet motherland’: Article 19, which covered an intention not carried out.”

Thus the literary historian Efim Etkind recalls the arrest of the gifted translator Tatyana Grigoryevna Gnedich, whom he had known from his youth. With the name of Tatyana Gnedich is bound up, perhaps, the most legendary episode in the world history of translation. Tatyana Gnedich is the author of one of the greatest achievements of modern poetic translation. She translated Byron’s poem “Don Juan”. The entire verse translation, some seventeen thousand lines, was completed while Tatyana Gnedich was in prison, and took two years of work.

The literary critic Vasily Betaki relates details he heard from Tatyana Grigoryevna herself: “While in pre-trial detention, she translated from memory the ninth canto of her beloved ‘Don Juan’. During one interrogation, T.G., who until then had neither spoken nor written anything, filled the interrogation sheet given to her with this ninth canto, writing in a tiny, beaded hand on both sides of the sheet more than a thousand lines. The investigator arranged for Gnedich to be placed in a separate cell and given books and paper… She was classed as under investigation until the work was finished. The translation of the whole enormous poem was completed in two years; it was typed up by a typist of the investigation department, and Gnedich proofread it. At her instruction, the investigator sent one copy to Mikhail Lozinsky for his opinion. The second copy went into the archive of the MGB, and the third, with the resolution ‘Not to be confiscated or read’, was given to Tatyana Grigoryevna, who took it with her to the camp, where she served the remaining eight years of her sentence.”

The ninth canto of “Don Juan” was translated from memory; for the rest of the translation Gnedich used a volume of Byron and Webster’s dictionary. After Gnedich’s return from the camp, the translation of “Don Juan” was published by the Khudozhestvennaya Literatura publishing house in a print run of a hundred thousand copies, and is still regarded as a brilliant masterpiece of the translator’s art.