Ubiquitous at home, unknown abroad
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Roma Rodriguez offers his translations of two poems by Pushkin, the Russian literary titan under-read in Britain.
Yesterday morning, my mother, sitting in our charmingly shabby flat a stone’s throw away from the Moscow townhouse of Russia’s beloved Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, sent me several poems he penned while quarantined in Boldino on account of the horrific cholera pandemic that ravaged Russia in 1830-1831. In Russia, Pushkin is widely considered to be the country’s greatest writer, and the jewel in the crown of the nineteenth-century Russian literary “Golden Age”. Only Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky are mentioned in the same breath as him. He is to a Russian what Jane Austen’s Mr Crawford opines Shakespeare is to an Englishman: a part of his constitution. “One gets acquainted” with him “without knowing how”, and suddenly he suffuses one’s life. Children are raised on his romantic fairy tale, Ruslan and Ludmila, a homage to the Russian folkloric tradition. Poltava, his encomium to Peter the Great’s victory over Charles XII of Sweden, is essential reading for any historically-curious Russian. The epigrams and letters written by him in the 1820s are an invaluable insight into the burning moral and political indignation felt by much of the Russian aristocracy’s intellectual preserve at Tsar Nicholas I’s absolutism. Boris Godunov remains one of the country’s most popular tragedies (and is one of my favourite plays). Dubrovsky, The Captain’s Daughter, and Pikovaya Dama are tirelessly studied, invoked, and adapted for the screen.
Yet, Pushkin is almost unread and unknown in the West. His sparkling, humane prose works exist in but a few predominantly turgid translations, and most people think of the opera or ballet, rather than his inimitable verse novel, when the words Evgeniy Onegin are clunkily pronounced. While Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and Nabokov are well-represented on the bookshelves of every discerning household, Pushkin is usually conspicuously absent. I recall one of my English teachers at school looking utterly blank when I asked him what he thought about the technical and linguistic similarities between Pushkin’s and Byron’s writings. “Sadly, I’ve never read any Pushkin”, he guiltily replied. (This was a man who could talk for hours on any of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and quote large sections of any of Shakespeare’s plays extempore.)
As for Pushkin’s lesser known lyric poetry, such as the poems my mother sent me a copy of yesterday morning, it has seldom been translated into English. Coming from a family of linguists, I have long felt that it is high time that I undertake some serious translation. So, in an attempt to bring the thoroughly-Russian sensibility and the profoundly-universal resonance of Pushkin to an Anglophone audience, here is my first attempt at rendering his verses into English.
Elegy
The faded mirth of frenzied years
Is as heavy as the bruising hangover.
But, like a wine – the sorrow of the bygone days
Grows stronger in my soul with age.
My path is doleful. The stormy sea
Presages toil and woe for me.
But, my friends, I do not want to die;
I want to live – to contemplate and suffer;
And I know I’ll have some joy
Amidst the woes, concerns and perturbation:
Once more shall I be drunk with harmony,
I’ll weep again about some fantasy,
And perhaps, love will shine upon my melancholy final days
With a parting smile.
A.C. Pushkin (Boldino, 8 September, 1830).
~
Two emotions are remarkably dear to us
Two emotions are remarkably dear to us –
In them our hearts obtain their nourishment –
The love towards our hearth and home,
The love towards our fathers’ graves.
O life-giving sanctities!
The world without them would be as barren
As the desert
And the unconsecrated altar.
A.C. Pushkin (Boldino, 15 October, 1830)