Nora Gal is a distinguished translator of English and French literature, whose works (Destined for Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Camus's The Stranger, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and many others) have long been part of the treasury of Russian literature. Her major theoretical work, The Living and the Dead Word, is devoted to literary translation and represents the quintessence of Nora Gal's experience as an editor and translator. In this work, far beyond a manual for beginning wordsmiths, the author brilliantly and humorously draws on the rich material gathered over more than half a century of working with texts, defending and protecting one of the most important assets of our culture—the purity of the Russian language.