Gumilev, Gilgamesh and the Translator's Studio
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46991/TSTP/2026.SI.3.123Keywords:
Soviet studies, translation theory, Nikolai Gumilev, Silver Age, ancient epicAbstract
This article reconsiders Nikolai Gumilev’s 1919 translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh through Maxim Gorky’s Vsemirnaia literatura in the years immediately following the Revolution. Rather than treating Gilgamesh as an isolated literary experiment, it situates the translation within Gumilev’s wider theoretical, pedagogical, and institutional activity: his “nine commandments” of poetic translation, his teaching at the Translators’ Studio, his engagement with non-European literary traditions, and his collaboration with the Assyriologist Vladimir Shileiko. The article argues that the fragmentary nature of the ancient epic made it an especially revealing test of Gumilev’s theory of translation, requiring reconstruction rather than literal transfer. Gilgamesh consequently becomes a stress-test of this model: a text reconstructed from fragments, mediated through scholarship, and transformed into Russian poetic form.
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