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Whitman’s “Baskets” Waiting to Be Newly Unpacked: the Challenges of [Re-]Translating “Song of Myself” As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread, Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization. . . ? Whitman’s broad recognition in Russia owes much to his life-long champion, Korney Chukovsky, who began translating the American poet in 1902, concluding only in 1969, the year of his own death. Chukovsky’s remarkable career as a translator developed when literary battles—with strong political overtones—raged in Russia between “realist” and “formalist/literalist” modes of translation. Chukovsky himself was a champion of the former. Translating Whitman, he strove to convey the poet’s ideas and images, the flow of feeling, the play of everyday flatness against flights of mysticism and hyperbolism i.e., that rhetoric which is recognizably “Whitmanian”. There is a more radical side to Whitman’s “language experiment”, however, that challenges a translator to seek “undomesticated” formal solutions. No such effort has been undertaken in Russian over century. The only other complete retranslation of “Song of Myself” into Russian was done by a young Uzbek poet, Alina Dadaeva (reproduced on the University of Iowa Whitmanweb site). It is somewhat different from Chukovsky’s canonical version but does not take the risk or even pretend to offer a strategic alternative. So is there a chance for a “new” Whitman to be re-constructed by and for the new generation of Russian readers – as radically as Whitman’s original invites? Exploring the reception of Whitman’s verses by my Russian students who have read them in both English and Russian, I shall suggest qualities a new original translation of “Song of Myself” might engage to appeal to these readers. The working assumption of my investigation is that the “baskets” left behind by Walt Whitman would swell the house of contemporary Russian (or any) poetic culture “with their plenty” only if “realized” without reserve and with a sense of possibility yet untried.