Pavel Radimov (1887 — 1967) poet, pedagogue, painter:
The first translator of Gabdulla Tukay’s “Shurale” and some other poems into the Russian language.
“What a great poet!” told Sergey Yesenin about Tukay. While having tea, he read his wife Sofya Andreevna Tukay’s poem “For Debased Tatar Girl” in my translation that was published in the collection called “Interrupted Dream” (it was written “Uzylgan Umid” by Russian letters on its cover).
Both Yesenin and Tukay are great national poets. They left this world very early, but impressed related literatures, the Russian and Tatar literatures, very deeply. Tukay wrote to the humiliated, insulted girl:
You do not even feel how by you
A poet with a kind soul passes,
How your miserable state
Tears his heart!
(word-for-word translation)
In the year when Tukay died, I taught literature at non-classical secondary school. That time I did not know the poet yet. The young Tatar students got acquainted me with some of his works, telling about their favourite poems. On April 2, 1913, I understood very well how the death of Gabdulla Tukay became a real tragedy for the Tatar nation.
In 1920, I translated some of Tukay’s poems into the Russian language for the first time. I think these translations were a little contribution into the great work of Tukay.