Introduction: Forum: early Soviet translation of English literature

This forum examines the translation of English literature into Russian during the early Soviet period, offering case studies of how a diverse cohort of translators, editors, scholars, and writers—including Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Gumilev, D. S. Mirsky, Mikhail Morozov, Boris Pasternak, Gustav Shpet, and Alexander Smirnov—worked to bring to Soviet readers classic and contemporary works by English authors, such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Coleridge, William Shakespeare, and Laurence Sterne. The four articles in the forum offer new insights into the politics and practices of literary translation as a highly productive form of cultural mediation in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. The articles also contribute to a new subfield within translation studies that analyzes archival materials, such as translators’ correspondence and translation drafts, in order to gain a better understanding of various processes of translation.