Russian literature. A short introduction

about poetry getting lost in translation. Certainly, Pushkin is best read in Russian, just as Aeschylus is in Greek, or Dante in Italian. But reading these writers in English is better than not reading them at all. And, as the cases of Shakespeare in Russian or Dostoevsky in English make clear, great writers are best served by a proliferation of translations. Only if the whole range of a writer’s work is available does his or her diversity become clear. At least until the 1990s, when more ambitious translation projects got under way, Pushkin in English meant Evgeny Onegin plus a handful of famous love poems – ‘I remember the wonderful moment’ (1825), ‘I loved you’ (1829), ‘On the hills of Georgia’ (1829). He came across as a sort of Russian Byron, though much of his verse is far closer in spirit to Pope, or then again to Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth, or even Burns. The more translations there are, the more likely readers are to find in one or other poem, or in one or other version of the same poem, the ‘sense of discovery’ that is (as the Italian writer Italo Calvino has argued) one of the most important reasons for reading a classic writer.

This ‘sense of discovery’ does not necessarily make itself felt when the text reads easily in English. Ted Hughes’s version of Pushkin’s Romantic poem ‘The Prophet’ (1827) uses harsh consonant clashes not found in the original, as well as dispensing with rhyme. But the use of a rough, abrasive manner is probably the only way in which the mythic force of Pushkin’s belief in the poet’s messianic gifts (not a notion with which an Anglophone audience is immediately comfortable) could be captured in 1990s English. Nabokov’s annotated prose version of Evgeny Onegin, a supplement to the Pushkin text rather than an autonomous ‘translation’

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in the ordinary sense, shows another method of proceeding, one according to which the rendering is deliberately made so inadequate to the original as to leave the latter’s integrity intact.

My own translation of Pushkin’s 1836 poem ‘I have raised myself a monument’ below is of this second kind – finickingly literal, without pretensions to being an independent poem. It is nearly half as long again in terms of word count, an inevitable result of the fact that word-units are longer, on average, in Russian than in English. Therefore, the English sounds much more verbose than the Russian. While some alliteration survives (by pure chance), the metre, with the use of the shortened fourth line in each stanza to puncture the grandeur of the first three, does not. There are some problems with vocabulary too. The beautiful word podlunnyi becomes sublunar, a word that sounds like a citation from a NASA bulletin; the term nerukotvornyi (Greek acheiropoietos), applied to a miraculous icon, has to be paraphrased. Yet the translation draws attention to some of the hidden problems in a piece so often anthologized and learned by heart in the original Russian that its subtlety becomes blunted. And though workaday English cannot convey the way that Pushkin orchestrates his themes linguistically – with a sound play on ‘p’ to bring out the grandiose motif of posthumous survival – the dramatism of the piece still comes through.

‘Я памятник себе воздвиг нерукотворньІй’

Exegi monumentum

Я памятник себе воздвиг нерукотворньІй, К нему не зарастет народная тропа, Вознесся вьІше он главою непокорной Александрийского столпа.

Нет, весь я не умру – душа в заветной лире Мой прах переживет и тленья убежит –

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И славен буду я, доколь в подлунном мире Жив будет хоть один пиит.

Слух обо мне пройдет по всей Руси великой, И назовет меня всяк сущий в ней язьІк, И гордьІй внук славян, и финн, и ньІне дикой Тунгус, и друг степей калмьІк.

И долго буду тем любезен я народу, Что чувства добрьІе я лирой пробуждал, Что в мой жестокий век восславил я Свободу И милость к падшим призьІвал.

Веленью Божию, о муза, будь послушна, ОбидьІ не страшась, не требуя венца, Хвалу и клевету приемли равнодушно И не оспаривай глупца.

‘I have raised myself a monument not made by human hands’

Exegi monumentum

I have raised myself a monument not made by human hands, The path of the people to it will never grow over, Its insubordinate head has risen higher Than the Alexandrian Pillar.

No, I shall not fully die – the soul in my fateful lyre Shall survive my dust, and shall escape putrefaction – And I shall be famous, wherever in the sublunar world Even a single poet lives.

Tidings of me will go out over all great Rus, And every tribe and every tongue will name me:

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The proud descendant of the Slavs, the Finn, the Tungus Who is now savage, and the steppe-loving Kalmyk.

And for long I shall remain loved by the people For awakening noble feelings with my lyre, Because in my cruel age I have celebrated freedom, And called for pity to the fallen.

O Muse, be obedient to the command of God, Do not be fearful of abuse, do not demand a crown, Accept both praise and slander with indifference, And don’t dispute with fools.

Even in English, ‘Monument’ (to adopt the title commonly, if incorrectly, attached to the poem) gives not only a feeling of ‘discovery’, but something equally important in a ‘classic’ text, what Calvino calls ‘the sense of rereading something we have read before’. This comes partly from the fact that Pushkin’s poem is itself a free translation, or imitation, of an ode by Horace, as the Latin quotation ‘Exegi monumentum’ makes clear. ‘Monument’ also plays on an earlier imitation of Horace by the great eighteenth-century poet Gavrila Derzhavin. Derzhavin’s poem was both a literal version of Horace and a literal version of the statue motif: Derzhavin’s monument has nothing airy or mystical about it, but is ‘harder than all metals and taller than the Pyramids’. Pushkin’s poem, on the other hand, is teasingly insubstantial: a ‘monument not made by human hands’ is from some points of view not a monument at all.

In some ways, this idea of an art work about the impossibility of making an art work seems more characteristic of the twentieth century than of the early nineteenth century: it seems Modernist rather than Romantic. But many other themes and motifs in Pushkin’s poem – for instance, the idea of dignified survival in the face of a ‘cruel age’ – evoke the Enlightenment ideals of civilization in whose abstract existence Pushkin

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fervently believed, even if his own life gave him little chance to experience them in practice. And the theme of art’s endurance is common to this poem and to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, also written under a self-glorifying monarchy (‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme . . .’), while some phrases in ‘Monument’ play on the finale to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, hinting at Pushkin’s long devotion to Ovid, another poet exiled by a capricious ruler.

‘Monument’ is not only a quintessential classic, in Calvino’s terms, because of its teasing familiarity, but because it ‘comes to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations’. Most commonly, the poem is understood as Pushkin’s poetic testament. It is one of only a handful of complete poems surviving from 1836, the last year of Pushkin’s life, a time during which his existence was made almost unbearable by financial worries, by the struggles to launch his new literary journal The Contemporary, and by anxieties aroused by the persistent rumours of his wife Natalya’s infidelity – rumours that were to lead directly to Pushkin’s death in a duel in January 1837, at the age of only 37. The references to ‘dust’ and ‘putrefaction’ can be associated with the emotional contemplation of cemetery scenes that had recurred obsessively in Pushkin’s writings from the late 1820s. In this perspective, the fact that the icon of Christ known as ‘not made by human hands’ was traditionally