Russian poetry is becoming better known, thanks very largely to the Internet and to the many translations by Russian speakers domiciled in the west. Most readers will know something of Pushkin and Pasternak, and will probably have heard of several others Blok, Mayakovsky, Evtushenko and Brodsky, etc. Why my interest here, and what further can be done?
My main hope is to make the translations of Russian verse more acceptable English poems. This is not a comment on previous or contemporary translations, many of which are excellent, but a shift of emphasis. Most existing translations are rather simple: they scan and they rhyme — which is a considerable achievement given the very different languages, especially where the feminine rhyme is concerned.
But in both languages, Russian and English, poetry needs a great deal
more than these basics to come alive. Different traditions are involved, and
indeed different sensibilities. From the nineteenth century onwards, Russian
poetry has been very susceptible to European influences, but they have been
given a very Russian flavour. In all the arts indeed in painting, novels,
short stories, poetry — and possibly music, though the argument becomes
somewhat nebulous — Russia has divined a more universal man, a basic humanity
that works, loves, hopes and suffers, an intuited morality called ‘the
Russian soul.
That is a feature of the arts generally in Russia, and I shall
try to include notes to these parallel developments, so that the poetry is not
seen in isolation, but as one strand in many that made up the contemporary
literary scene.I shall translate Russian verse into English verse, and have nothing to do with
the contemporary fad for 'free verse', which is generally prose, and often an unlovely prose
at that.
Russian poems usually rhyme, and it was this and their musicality that
kept
them memorized through the Stalinist years of repression, when it was
dangerous
to write poetry or even possess written versions. The feminine rhymes I
shall
translate as appropriate, when they add something positive to the
translation,
and not as a matter of unyielding principal. The feminine rhyme places
great
restrictions on poems of any length, tending to make them un-English
and
contrived, as translations of Eugene Onegin have rather shown.
I shall
make extensive
use of previous translations where they exist, though more to see
what's possible and
what
should be avoided, than to copy. Nonetheless, I certainly shan't twist
my
renderings into odd shapes simply to avoid repeating a happy phrase a
previous
translator has found. Translation is a cooperative venture, not a
competition,
and I frankly do not understand those who refuse to look at previous
translations in case it influences their own work. It should
influence
their work, not unduly, but in the sense that each rendering opens up
new
avenues of thought, new ways of using the resources of English verse to
achieve
a certain objective - which in my case is a
living English poem rather
than
what is obviously a translation.
The larger intention is that outlined in the
Prologue to Tony Kevin's book Return
to Moscow {1}: a desire to
understand a nation still demonized in the west:
His 'book is dedicated to the unique
resilience and courage of the Russian people, who have triumphed over
unimaginable cruelties at the hands of both invaders and their own past
rulers, to create a society that is today worthy of admiration; to the
beauties of Russia’s landscape, history and culture; and to the grace
of Russia’s women, who continue to inspire me, in life as in art.'
A nation's literature cannot be understood without knowing something of
its history — its cultural traditions, the make-up of its
classes, institutions and social aspirations, and why these differ from
country to country. Russia began in the city states of the Ukraine —
Kiev, Novgorod and Vladimir, with their
complex religious and cultural inheritance from Byzantium — but
these were overrun in the 13th century by the Mongols, who
plunged the country into centuries of backwardness. The Grand Duchy of
Moscow began its preeminence by acting as tax collectors for the Golden
Horde, but a succession of strong-willed, indeed tyrannical, tsars
gradually expanded the state and gained increasing independence from
their Muslim rulers, though the threat remained. Russia's turn towards
the west began with Peter I, who imported ideas, technologies and
experts from Europe. Autocratic and centralising tsars —
Anna and particularly Catherine the Great —
continued those westernising trends, and pushed Russian control
eastwards over the fraying medieval Muslim states of central Asia. By
the mid-19th century, Russian rule stretched unbroken to the Pacific,
but control was still tenuous and sometimes contested. Also imported
from the west were European notions of democracy, wildly repugnant to
the paternalistic Russian state. {2}
Alexander I (1796-1825), who suffered Napoleon's invasion but made
Russia a force on the European stage, was succeeded by his
brother Nicholas I (1825-55). The Decembrist uprising, which tried to
demote him into a constitutional monarchy, only made the new tsar even
more autocratic and suspicious of new ideas. Alerted by the Crimean War
and other disasters, Alexander II (1855-81) did finally introduce many
much-needed reforms, most importantly the abolition of serfdom, but was
assasinated by anarchists, just as ministers had warned. Alexander III
(1881-94) was a throwback to the tsars of old, and those outmoded
beliefs he passed to his son, Nicholas II (1894-1917), who
unfortunately lacked the acumen and iron will needed to survive the
disasters of W.W.I.{3}
The Romanov dynasty, founded in 1613 after the explusion of the
Poles, ruled through families they
ennobled, and from whom they took advice, but such a system of
government required the tsar to be far-sighted, politically astute,
sensitive to social and economic concerns, and of strong personality.
Such was Peter the Great, but the last tsar was far happier acting as
paterfamilias than ruling a vast and vexing empire, about which there
was still much strange and medieval outside the cities and new
industrial zones. Nicholas II came to the throne when his father died
prematurely in October 1894, married Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt
(Alexandra) within the month, and became in due course the amiable
father of five children. {4} Only social banalities feature in his
diary entries, and indeed in no matters of an economic and/or political
nature did Nicholas show much interest or understanding.
The country
was his to rule without laws or parliaments, guided only his conscience
before God. Indeed officialdom barely reached into the countryside,
where the Church and local communes retained their inveterate and often
barbaric customs: wife-beating, drunkenness and floggings for trivial
offences. The court, city life, the professions and industry were a
world apart from the countryside, and even the aristocracy owed their
lands and position to the military and administrative services they
provided the tsar, making them an ineffective counterweight to
autocratic rule. The educated class that had grown up in the later
nineteenth century could see what was needed, but censorship was strict
and political change stifled. Well-read in European thought and
literature through social mobility and ready access to university
education for both sexes, they lovingly depicted the countryside in
paintings, novels and short stories, but attempts by such Populists to
idolize and reform communities were fiercely resented by all parties.
{3, 5}
The nobles wanted their large estate kept
unchanged. The peasants trusted only themselves. They had been
emancipated from serfdom, but were still their backward, superstitious
and unruly selves, forced to rent the better agrarian land from the
gentry class or find work in the expanding mines and factories towns,
from which they sent money home, or returned themselves at harvest
time, but where they also picked up ideas made ever more extreme and
subversive by government repression. {5}
Factory life was hard and dangerous, and more so in the many small
workshops, which had even fewer safeguards. Strikes were legion, and
often flared into riots, pogroms and machine-breaking rampages. Trade
unions were banned until 1905, blocking democratic expression through
moderate socialist parties. An intelligentsia, themselves newly
emancipated from rural servitude, joined an exploited working class,
and revolutionary movements smouldered beneath the surface, ready to
break out with dangerous violence when disasters struck. {5}
And disasters came from all sides. The great famine of 1891 and the
death of half a million from cholera and typhus a year later had
polarized opinion badly, but Nicholas did not accede to political
demands for change on his accession to the throne: quite the contrary:
rule akin to his father's was his solemn duty, though he lacked
Alexander's domineering personality. Relief was organized by district
councils, which slowly added political influence to their philanthropic
aims. Government prestige was further damaged by defeat in the 1904-5
Russo-Japanese War. When St. Petersburg crowds peacefully demonstrating
for food in January 1905 were mowed down by cavalry and rifle fire the
mood hardened. The middle classes were horrified. There were protests,
strikes and mutinies across the country, even a mutiny of the Black Sea
fleet, made famous by Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin'. The more
educated demanded some form of representative government, the Duma,
which Nicholas had to accept, though it was largely consultative and
repeatedly dissolved. {5}
Russia was ill-prepared for W.W.I, though Nicholas could not keep
his
throne without respecting his treaty obligations to Serbia. The court
was rumoured to be too pro-German anyway, and the unwholesome influence
of Rasputin on his wife, and through her to Nicholas himself, provided
yet more scandal. The war was the turning point. After some Russian
successes, the Germans rolled back the huge but ill-supplied and
misdirected Russian armies, and the heavy losses were difficult to make
good. Factories fell behind in supplying clothing or armaments, and
many divisions had find their weapons on the battlefield. Heavy
conscription led to food shortages in cities, and to long queues and
mutinies when troops refused to fire on rioting crowds. In a move that
damaged his prestige further, Nicholas assumed command of the army,
though his previous title of colonel was largely honorary. Food queues
grew longer and more threatening. Rather than quell disorder, troops
fired on the police. When in February 1917 his ministers admitted that
they could no longer implement his measures, or even count on the
loyalty of the army, Nicholas was obliged to abdicate, which he did
calmly, as though finally released from a distasteful duty. {5}
A Provisional Government was formed, and then a
more progressive one under Alexander Kerensky. But with opportunity
after opportunity for sensible dialogue and compromise wasted, the time
for distant promises was over. Only immediate power would satisfy
peoples brutalized by war, hunger and exploitation. Peasants had seized
gentry lands, and workers had taken over factories — aided by the Red
Guard, which the Bolsheviks controlled. Lenin, who had arrived at the
Petrograd Finland Station in April 1917, announced his terms: an
immediate peace, all power to the Soviets, and no cooperation with
other parties. Many thought him unrealistic, or mad even, but the
Bolsheviks gained a good showing in subsequent elections, and promptly
took over Petrograd in a coup d'état. Russia broke into warring
factions. Nicholas and family, already irrelevant to the country and
denied exile in Britain, were executed by the Bolsheviks at
Yekaterinburg in July 1918. Ahead lay vast and often catastrophic
social experiments: collectivisation and the elimination of the kulak
small-holding class, rapid industrialization under Stalin's ambitious
five year plans and always political repression: the purges, gulags and
the great terror. All could have been avoided had Nicholas risen to the
occasion, but what the tsar lacked in vision and determination the
Bolsheviks had in plenty. {5}
The Soviet Union did not become repressive by
industrializing: the Bolshevik state was repressive from the first.
Lenin seized power in a coup d'état, and added forced labour camps,
terror, torture and wholesale murder to the autocratic system he
inherited. Perhaps a million people disappeared in these early years of
communism: there is little way of knowing for sure. But then few
democratic counterweights had existed to government in tsarist Russia.
Books and newspapers were strictly censored, and even the educated
classes had limited contacts with the common people. The serfs had
become land-owning peasants, but were driven just the same by rural
backwardness and poverty to the new cities and factories where, denied
political expression, they supported a socialist intelligentsia with
extremist policies.
Worse appeared under Stalin: the 1937-8 Great
Terror, the labour camps or gulags whose output became essential to the
Soviet state, and collectivisation that led to starvation and
destruction of the peasant's way of life, seen by many historians as a
catastrophe from which the system never fully recovered. And if
desperate measures were born out of the miseries of WWI, they were only
intensified in WW II. Troops were stiffened with commissars to prevent
desertion, and victories achieved with horrific loss of life. Yet even
this truly heroic period — credited to Stalin and unyielding communist
principles — was unmasked by Khrushchev's 1956 speech when the reality
of Stalin's despotic rule was disclosed, only partially, but sufficient
for disillusion to set in. The young turned away from the stern
principles and suffering that characterized their parent's and
grandparent's lives, and looked to the west for alternatives. The great
social experiment was over, and, though the Union was kept together by
political and military force for several decades more, its end was
inevitable when Gorbachev relaxed that force. {3,5}
Vladimir Putin is a controversial figure but remains popular in
Russia by rescuing the country from Yeltsin, whose election was
financed by western
institutions, and whose government proved more
destructive than the
Great Depression in America. {6} Putin ended the war in Chechnia,
turned the economy around, and made Russia a respected player again on
the world stage. {7} The annexation of the Crimea, the war in
Syria, the shooting down of MH17 and now the Ukraine invasion are all seen differently
by the Russian press, as indeed by independent media outlets. We
need informed and balanced views when reading Russian literature.
'Living' does not mean 'a free rendering' but
one that understands how the Russian poem works in the Russian
tradition, and renders it, as faithfully as possible, in something that
belongs to the English tradition. In doing so I shall look closely at
details of Russian poems and suggest parallels in English. More than
that cannot be claimed. Russian is only a moderately difficult
language, nothing like Arabic or Chinese, for example, but does use
sounds that have no equivalent in English, and employ a slightly more
taxing grammar. That means that lines can only occasionally be rendered
word for word, and that the special ways that Russian poetry employs
language will not necessarily have counterparts in the English
poetry. But I shall do my best. If the Russian poem is
humorous,
colloquial, sly or whatever, I shall try to make its English
equivalent comparable. {6-7} The translations are not generally given a final polish, which I
hope will allow readers to suggest improvements or corrections before I think about collecting the pieces in ebook form.
Finally, please note that I don't generally give the literal sense of
the Russian in the longer poems, but readers can copy and paste
the Russian text into one of the many online
translation services to see what changes I have made to arrive at the rhymed version. I have
also added 'recordings' made with text-to-speech software to give a general idea of
how the poems sound. Live recordings are obviously better, and many can be found by
googling audio, poet, poem title and/or first lines, all in Russian.
Evening Bells by Isaac Levitan.
(87 x 107.6) 1892.
Tretyakov, Moscow. Levitan (1860-1900) was influenced by Impressionism, but his
paintings are more subdued, with a melancholy poetry that is distinctly Russian.
Behind his paintings there was usually some trace of narrative, if only
an intimation of man's place in the universe, usually a rather somber
place.
Levitan saw his
mission as combining atmospheric effects with poetry in the lives of
Russian peasants, and beyond them, the larger spiritualizing aspects of
poverty. Epic panoramas had already appeared alongside intimate motifs
in Savrasov’s work, and the difference between a study and a finished
painting became merged in Polenov’s work.
Levitan brought to these trends a formal clarity, broadening their
scope and unifying their disparate elements, in a markedly romantic
style. Some of outdoor paintings indeed surpassed those of the French
Impressionists, whose work he studied at first hand when he travelled
through Europe in the 1890s.
References can now be found in a free pdf compilation of Ocaso Press's Russian pages.