Untranslatability in the Russian Poetry. The Palindrome

Within the combinatory poetry, the palindrome reactivates the debates regarding the pertinence of the interpretative theories of translation. In the Russian literature the palindrome has been known ever since the 17th century. It began to draw the specialists’ attention at the same time as the experiments of the Russian futurists, especially those of Velimir Hlebnikov. Starting from certain theoretical patterns, the present paper synthesises the reasons why the palindrome is deemed to be an example of untranslatability and illustrates some non-equivalence situations by text excerpts from the modern Russian poetry. Moreover, it tries to establish whether the palindrome is a completely aleatory composition aiming at poetic entertainment, or a complex structure imposing a hermeneutic act the translator cannot ignore in the transposition process.