Nora Gal

Biography

She was born on April 27, 1912, in Odessa. Her father was a medical doctor and her mother a lawyer. As a child, she moved to

When she was still a schoolgirl she published some poems, while during her student years she switched to prose. Towards the end of the 1930s, she wrote many articles on contemporary foreign literature. She started her active career as a translator during

In the 1950s, she translated "

In 1972, she wrote Words Living and Words Dead (Слово живое и мёртвое), a manual on voice that contains numerous examples of translation, both good and bad. There, she challenged conventions and advocated lively word choice and sentence structure over passive, cluttered, and official tone, simplicity and flow over the accepted heavy, cold, and technical style; if it makes more sense but sounds rustic, then so be it. It was subsequently revised and had been reprinted four times by 1987. It has recently been reprinted twice in 2001 and 2004.

Legacy

In July 1995, the