Boris Kabur

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Boris Kabur (born September 2 . Jul / 15 September  1917 greg. In Tallinn , † 28 January 2002 in Tartu ) was an Estonian , engineering , youth author and translator .

Life

Boris Kabur comes from a working class family, his father was Mordwine . He went to school in Tallinn from 1925 and graduated from the commercial high school for boys in 1936. He then studied physics from 1937 to 1941 at the University of Tartu and graduated with a master's degree. During the German occupation of Estonia in World War II , Kabur worked as a physicist in Tartu and studied medicine on the side.

After the war, he worked briefly in Moscow, but was soon taken prisoner. He spent the years from 1947 to 1954 in a special camp for designers in Siberia. Here he was involved in the development of the Druzhba chain saw. In 1954 he was able to return to Estonia, where he then lived as a freelance writer and translator. Since 1966 he was a member of the Estonian Writers' Union .

Boris Kabur was married three times, including the writers Salme Kõiv and Astrid Reinla .

Literary and translational work

Boris Kabur is best known for doing some plays for children. They focus on a school boy and his robot, based on the relationship between which the author deals with the problem of “conscience and the relationship between good and bad”. His only science fiction book, which takes place in the 24th century and lets three young people discover a hostile missile center founded in the 20th century on a distant planet, bears "anti-fascist and anti-racist traits" without being "ideologically intrusive". to be.

Boris Kabur's translation work is probably more important than his own literary work. He started doing this much earlier, namely as early as 1941. He transferred both specialist literature and literary texts, mainly from English , Russian and Armenian . He wrote, for example, the Estonian translations of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass , Wiktor Borissowitsch Schklowskis Sentimental Reise , Edgar Lee Masters ' Spoon River Anthology , Henry Wadsworth Longfellows The Song of Hiawatha , Jeghische Tscharenz ' Das Land von Nairi and Mary Shelleys Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus . The Estonian translation of the Armenian epic ' David of Sassoun' and the Gilgamesh epic 'also come from his pen.

bibliography

  • Cosmosis rannavetes. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat 1966, in German: The trail leads to the Hermes. Science fiction. Translated into German by Alexander Baer. Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben 1970. 159 pp. ( Kompass-Bücherei 137)
  • Rops. Rops aitab kõiki. ('Rops. Rops helps everyone'. Drama) Tallinn: Eesti Raamat 1967.

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ That means 'friendship', as Stalin cynically had his products made under forced labor named. Kabur himself would have preferred to call the saw 'Taiga', s. Vikerkaar 5/1997, p. 76.
  2. ↑ Eesti kirjanike leksikon. Koostanud Oskar Kruus yes Heino Puhvel. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat 2000. p. 161.
  3. ↑ Cornelius Hasselblatt : Estonian literature in German translation. A reception story from the 19th to the 21st century. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2011, p. 202.
personal data
SURNAME Kabur, Boris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Estonian author and translator for young people
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Tallinn
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 2002
Place of death Tartu