SOURCE: Ober, Kenneth H., and Mara R. Wade. “Moßkaw/Moskva: Sumarokov's Translations of Fleming's Sonnets.” Germano-Slavica 6, no. 5 (1990): 259-84.

In the essay below, Ober and Wade offer a close analysis of Sumarokov's translation of sonnets by Paul Fleming, contesting the view of an earlier critic that Sumarokov drastically changed the content of the original works and maintaining instead that the Russian presents a faithful rendition of the works while making them accessible in another language.

Although Michael Henry Heim has pointed out that “translation was … no more than a sideline for [Aleksandr Petrovich] Sumarokov”¹ (1717-77), and Harold B. Segel has established that Sumarokov has “virtually nothing in common with the baroque,”² this Russian literary pioneer, whom Segel has called “the first truly modern writer in the history of Russian literature,”³ provided the Russian reading public in 1755 with its first translations of three sonnets by the German Baroque poet...