More than Words: Robert Burns in Armenian Translation through Russian

Abstract

This article examines the Russian and Armenian translations of selected poems by Robert Burns, focusing on the versions produced by Samuil Marshak and Vahagn Davtyan. Rather than evaluating the translations in terms of fidelity to the source text, the study approaches them as instances of cultural reinterpretation shaped by distinct literary traditions, historical circumstances and aesthetic values. Particular attention is paid to the role of indirect translation, as Davtyan’s Armenian versions were produced not from the Scottish originals but through Marshak’s Russian translations. Drawing on a comparative analysis of several well-known poems, including Comin thro’ the Rye, Wha is that at my Bower-door?, Song — (O Whistle, and I'll Come to Ye, My Lad), The Joyful Widower, For a' That and a' That and John Barleycorn, the article demonstrates how poetic meaning is transformed as texts move across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The analysis reveals that Burns’s poems acquire different tonal, ethical and symbolic dimensions in Russian and Armenian. Marshak’s translations tend to foreground musicality, emotional immediacy and the conventions of Russian lyric poetry, while Davtyan’s versions reinterpret Burns through Armenian cultural perceptions of memory, fate, endurance and collective experience. The study argues that translation should be understood not merely as the transfer of meaning between languages but as a process of cultural mediation and poetic recreation. In this context, the Russian and Armenian translations of Burns do not represent different degrees of accuracy but different ways of reading and reimagining the poet. The article concludes that the enduring vitality of Burns’s poetry lies in its ability to sustain multiple cultural lives while remaining recognisably its own. Translation, therefore, emerges not as a distortion of the original but as a mode of literary continuity through which poems acquire new voices, new meanings and new cultural homes.