Abstract

An interview with Roman Doubrovkine, known in Russia for his poetic translations from English, French, German, Modern Greek and Italian. Since the 1980s, Doubrovkine has been lending his voice to Petrarch, Michelangelo and many Italian classics. His last effort involved translating Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, a work that enjoyed tremen- dous success in Russia before falling into oblivion during the Soviet era. This first translation of Tasso’s masterpiece in more than a century recreates with accuracy its 1.917 octaves. A fragment of the translation, published in “Inostrannaja Literaturaµ, was awarded the “Ma- sterµ prize from the Union of Literary Translators in 2014. Doubrovkine’s new translation of Gerusalemme Liberata was published in 2020 by “Ivan Limbakhµ (Saint Petersburg).