MAWAR EMAS. BUNGA RAMPAI SASTERA RUSIA. Penyelenggara dan Penterjemah Victor Pogadaev. Kuala Lumpur: Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia, 2009. 281 ms.*

An anthology of Russian literature in the Malaysian language, published by the National Translation Institute of Malaysia, has been published in Malaysia. Compiled and translated by Viktor Pogadaev. This book is remarkable in many ways. First of all, it is the first anthology of Russian literature in the Malay world - previously, neither in Indonesia, nor in Malaysia, nor in Singapore, and even more so in Brunei, there was no such publication in Malay (Indonesian).

Based on the fact that among the Malay-speaking reading public in these countries, Russian literature can only be known to a narrow circle of specialists-writers and philologists - V. A. Pogadaev begins the book with a brief overview of the history of literature in Russia and the Soviet Union, where he outlines the complex path of Russian literature: its heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries and subsequent stagnation, a surge of poetic creativity during the thaw, new opportunities for free creativity opened up during Perestroika and complete freedom after the Yeltsin Revolution. At the same time, the author does not ignore the bitter moments in the literary life of the country. So, he tells about the difficult, sometimes tragic, fate of Russian writers (some of them were not included in the anthology) - N. Gumilev, O. Mandelstam, V. Mayakovsky, S. Yesenin, M. Tsvetaeva, who were physically destroyed, about the moral tyranny over B. Pasternak, M. Bulgakov, about those who were expelled or forced to leave their homeland I. Brodsky and A. Solzhenitsyn.

The time and genre scope of the presented literature is impressive - from ancient to modern times. These are epics (excerpts from "Sadko", "Words about Igor's Regiment"), fairy tales ("Kroshechka-Khavroshechka"," The Fox and the Jug"), riddles and ditties, folk songs ("Rowan","Khasbulat Udaloy"). Russian literature is represented by 37 names. Examples of Russian classical poetry and prose are included: "The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish", "The Young Peasant Lady" and poems by A. S. Pushkin; "The Sail", "The Golden Cloud Spent the Night"," I Go Out Alone on the road " by M. Yu. Lermontov; stories for children and excerpts from the novel by L. N. Tolstoy "War and Peace"; short stories by A. P. Chekhov; excerpt from the novel" The Idiot " by F. M. Dostoevsky; "Song of the Falcon" by A.M. Gorky. Poets of the "Silver Age" of various directions, as well as poets of the Soviet era and our contemporaries are not ignored: A. Akhmatova ("The Verdict"), B. Pasternak (excerpt from the novel" Doctor Zhivago "and the poem" Hamlet"), E. Yevtushenko ("Do the Russians want war"), K. Paustovsky ("Do the Russians want war").Golden Rose", which gave the name of the entire anthology), etc. I will confine myself further to just listing the famous names: A. Blok, M. Tsvetaeva, K. Balmont, V. Bryusov, S. Yesenin, V. Khlebnikov, V. Mayakovsky, S. Kirsanov, B. Akhmadulina, A. Voznesensky, R. Rozhdestvensky, I. Brodsky, I. Bunin, A. Fadeev, M. Sholokhov, A. Solzhenitsyn, A. Vampilov, V. Tokareva, A. Evplanov, A. Dudoladov. Russian-language writers representing the former national literatures of the Soviet Union are also not forgotten: the Tatar poet Musa Jalil and the Kazakh novelist B. Kanapyanov. The anthology also includes poems by the contemporary poet Elena Taneva, who took part in the Poetry Days in Malaysia (2002), and the young poet Svetlana Gorshunova.

For the compiler of such an extensive anthology in terms of time scope and rich content of Russian literature, the difficulty lies in the selection of authors and their works. And losses are inevitable here. So, if Pushkin, Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova are represented quite well, then Bunin and Blok are much weaker, and Zhukovsky, Gogol, Nekrasov, Griboyedov are only mentioned in the review. One can also understand the difficulties with writers of great form (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pasternak (prose), Solzhenitsyn), whose work is given only in fragments.

However, it would be unfair to accuse the author of the anthology of incomplete coverage of the material. The only omission, in my opinion, is the absence of even a mention of I. S. Turgenev's story "The Song of Triumphant Love", one of the characters of which is a Malay medicine man, which would be interesting for Malaysians to learn about.

* Golden rose. Anthology of Russian Literature / Comp. and trans. by V. A. Pogadaev. Kuala Lumpur: Institute of Translations of Malaysia, 2009. 281 p. (in Malaysian)

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The undoubted advantage of the anthology is the brief information, and sometimes a detailed story about the life and work of a writer, such as Pushkin, where V. A. Pogadaev did not fail to mention the famous Malaysian writer Usman Awang, who dedicated his poem to the Russian classics. The author of the anthology is commendable for the perseverance, meticulousness, dedication and determination with which he treated his work. Based on the belief that visual acquaintance with the authors of translated literature is also useful for the foreign reading public, the compiler of the anthology precedes each chapter with a portrait of the writer, which required great effort and even resourcefulness. The author's discovery can be considered the name of the unknown Russian Malay poet Svetlana Gorshunova (who died in an accident at the age of 26), who wrote poems in the genre of Malay pantun.

A few words about the quality of translations. It is unnecessary to mention what level of language proficiency and what literary abilities translation into a foreign language requires. This is especially true for poetry, where the translator is also a co-author, and not a mechanical transmitter of meaning. V. A. Pogadaev has demonstrated this many times in his translations from Malay into Russian: several collections of poems by Indonesian and Malaysian poets (Tariganu, Bahi Zain, Kemaly)have already been published in our country. In my opinion, this time V. A. Pogadaev successfully coped with the difficult task of conveying the form of verse (rhymes, rhythm), so that, for example, the style of Pushkin and Lermontov is recognizable even when reading the Malay translation. This is not easy due to the structure of the Malay language, where words do not change and the number of rhymes is limited. At the same time, nuances of content are sometimes sacrificed, which in principle is inevitable. Although some translations managed to preserve both the form and content. For example, the Malay text of Lermontov's poem "I go out alone on the road" is also set to music and can be performed as a romance. The same applies to a number of translations of poems that became the words of the song, in particular, "The Ballad of Colors" by Rozhdestvensky. The translator managed to find equivalents that are understandable to the Malaysian reader. So, the phrase "I gave birth to my son under the sun" in Malay translates as "Anakku lahir di musim kemarau" ("My son was born in the dry season"), which is done to please the rhyme, but successfully, because the long dry season is associated with sunny weather in Malays. The phrase "Bede's loudspeakers thundered" is translated as " Gendang perang hebahkan bala di situ "("War drums thundered bede"): "war drums" is a popular image in Malay poetry. And finally, the phrase "Lucky her, lucky her, lucky" is rendered using the popular Malay proverb "Durian runtuh", which means"luck has rolled in". Such examples of translation once again confirm that a good translator knows not only the language, but also the culture of Malaysia.

Of course, only Malaysians themselves can fully evaluate the quality of translation into Malaysian. However, taking into account the rich philological and translation experience of V. A. Pogadaev, a well-known expert on the Malaysian language, culture and history of Malaysia, the author of a pocket encyclopedia about Malaysia, one of the compilers of the Malaysian-Russian and Russian-Malaysian dictionaries, who has been successfully working in this country for a long time as a teacher at the leading University of Malaya, I hope that his work will be appreciated and favorably received by the reading public in Malaysia. This confidence is also confirmed by the fact that the name of Pogadaev is already well known to book lovers in Malaysia: back in 2001, his translation of Leo Tolstoy's novel "Hadji Murad" was published here, the success of which exceeded all expectations and prompted publishers to print a second edition in five years.

The anthology undoubtedly deserves all praise and appreciation. What is perhaps to be regretted is not the content, but the printing-very small print, which makes it difficult to read the book.

National writer of Malaysia Abdul Samad Said highly appreciated the publication of the anthology, noting in the preface that finally Malaysians will be able to get acquainted with the treasury of Russian literature in translations made directly from Russian and preserving the freshness and lively intonation of the originals. To this we can add the statement of the Indonesian writer Idrus about the importance of Russian literature, which the author of the anthology cites in the introduction: "In Russian literature, an Indonesian (as well as a Malaysian and any foreign reader, etc.) will discover a world of lofty feelings, strong moral characters, deep suffering, terrible losses, burning passionate love for the motherland, noble aspirations, endless sacrifice."

The circulation of the book is 3 thousand copies, which is quite a lot for Malaysia. The anthology is intended for a wide audience interested in both Russian literature and Russia in general.

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