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Literary translation constituted an essential element of Korney Chukovsky’s career from the beginning. A life-long student of language, he devoted much of his time and energy both developing a conceptual framework for a professional translator and demonstrating its effectiveness by his own efforts, earning himself a firm standing in the field.

Despite originally being bilingual, with Russian and Ukrainian as his native languages, Chukovsky made English his principal area of expertise. According to his own account, as a boy he taught himself just from a battered textbook and subsequent chance reading.

Scattered in periodicals, his translations started to appear in 1904, when he was barely twenty-two years of age. For the most part it was from British and American poets, such as, among others, Robert Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Keats, Henry Longfellow and Thomas Moore. The first book-publication of his translations presented, however, the work of his one favourite author – Walt Whitman. From the original edition of 1907 to the last (during his life-time) of 1969 the book went through no less than a dozen substantial revisions.