High art. Principles of artistic translation

When the Chekhov “cherry garden” under the pen of an eccentric translator turns into Mr. Cherry Orchard, it is easy to find a mistake and point out a discrepancy-worse if not words or phrases, but style perverted. It is worth torture the burning epithet, somewhere to destroy rhythm, etching warm paint-and now nothing remains of the original. Moreover, the translator can act out of the best motives: to copy for the sake of the accuracy of the literal - “slave” - translation by alien foreign syntax, or to make the text unfortunately, without realizing,
that the girls are not only beautiful, but also useful or pretty, And a person is not only thin, but also dry or puny.
Translation, says Chukovsky, an art that needs to be studied, and N.V. Gogol exactly caught his ideal: “The translator did not see him: you don’t see him: It turned into such a transparent glass that it seems, as if there is no glass. ”