A Forgotten Translingual Pioneer: Elizaveta Kul’man and her Self-Translated Poetry

Elizaveta Borisovna Kul’man (1808-1825) is a unique figure in the history of Russian literature, or more precisely, the history of Russian, German, and Italian literature. A child prodigy with formidable linguistic gifts, Kul’man stands out both with her polyglot prowess and outsized literary productivity. At the time of her premature death at age seventeen, Kul’man left behind a vast unpublished oeuvre in multiple languages. The edition of her works published by the Imperial Russian Academy in 1833 contains a trilingual compendium of hundreds of parallel poems written in Russian, German, and Italian. The writing of poetic texts in three languages simultaneously makes Kul’man an early practitioner of what has been called “synchronous self-translation”. Not only are the poems linked horizontally as mutual translations of each other, they also pose as translations of a fictitious Greek source. Kul’man thus combines translation, self-translation, and pseudo-translation into a unified whole. This article discusses the genesis of Kul’man’s translingualism and explores her trilingual poetics in more detail by following the metamorphosis of one particular poem through its incarnations in Russian, German and Italian. It argues that Kul’man’s translingual creativity anticipates more recent developments in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry produced by globally dispersed Russians.