CO-TRANSLATING VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV’S RUSSIAN TRANSRATIONAL POETRY

Abstract This paper aims to analyze the translations of zaum poems by the Russian Cubo-futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov. One of the most influential Russian poets of the first half of the twentieth century, Khlebnikov resorted to and developed across his work a number of experiments with the innovative language found in several manifestos of the Russian avant-garde. The zaum – or transrational – language was first translated and published in the 1968 anthology of poems, Modern Russian Poetry. The re-translation is regarded in this paper as a dialogic process, which we view as a co-translation, by making use of and re-elaborating the material once translated by Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Boris Schnaiderman to the Portuguese language.