H W. Burnett

Poems of Feeling H W. Burnett

This book contains a selection of English, Russian and German short poems with translations where appropriate. Some of the contents were put together in moments which I was able to snatch from a very busy and demanding career at the English Bar and some have been added after retirement. The translations are original translations by myself [to ensure that they really are original I have been totally resolute in restraining myself from reading any other verse translation]. Since I have made every effort to convey the literal meaning of each word it would not be correct to describe the translations as ?free translations?. It must however be understood that my overwhelming priority throughout has been to try to reproduce the rhythm and music of the original language and in order to achieve this it has occasionally been necessary to choose, without distorting the sense, a word or words which are not an exact translation of the original [often in the case of the Russian text this is because the Russian word contains more syllables than any literal English equivalent]. Very rarely the same approach has been taken in order to achieve a rhyme which in its context was considered to be more important than a literal translation. Thus for example in one of Bunin?s poems the Russian word for ?knees? has been translated as ?feet?.