I
n Aleksandr Pushkin’s great novel in verse Evgeny Onegin, Tatyana has a dream about a swarm of demons who are made up of bits and pieces of incongruous animal shapes. They point at her with their “tufted tails, fangs, whiskers, blood-stained tongues, horns and bony fingers,”and each one shouts, “She’s mine! She’s mine!” Efim Etkind, the foremost Soviet expert on problems of poetry translation, who now lives in France and whose book on the subject, L’art en crise, should be required read-ing for anyone interested in this topic, once likened the fate of Pushkin’s poetry to the plight of Tatyana surrounded by those dream demons.
No literary figure arouses people’s proprietary instincts to the extent that Pushkin does. In Russia, he has been claimed as precursor, ally, or spokesman by every political faction, from monarchists to Bolsheviks; by people of every religious persuasion, from fundamentalist Christian to atheist; and by adherents of just about every literary trend from his day to ours. In English-speaking countries, where Pushkin’s reputation was not really consolidated until a century after his death in 1837, editions of his work have tended to be accompanied by an outline of the method the translator claims to have devised to overcome Pushkin’s notorious untranslatability. This is also the case with the new volume of Pushkin’s lyrics, verse tales, and plays put into English by the novelist D. M. Thomas, the author of the best-selling The White Hotel.
In the original Russian, the brilliance, virtuosity, and depth of Push-kin’s poetry are garbed in a style of extreme simplicity and modesty. Be-cause of this, when one of his poems is divested of his own words it is often turned into an unprepossessing frog, cruelly deprived of whatever made him a prince in his original incarnation. Translators are aware of this. The solutions they have so far tried come in three varieties. The first is to forget meter and rhyme and to render Pushkin’s lyric and narrative
1 Review of The Bronze Horseman: Selected Poetry of Alexander Pushkin, trans. D. M.
Thomas (New York: Viking, 1982). Originally published in New York Times Book Review, 26 September 1982, 11, 25–26.
poetry into maximally precise English prose. This method, exemplified by Edmund Wilson’s version of The Bronze Horseman included in his book The Triple Thinkers, satisfies the reader’s curiosity about what Pushkin has to say. But it leaves out the verbal music of the text, which in Pushkin’s case means that it leaves out the poetry.
The adherents of the second method seek to convey Pushkin’s meters through their (very approximate) English equivalents. They try to repro-duce his rhyme schemes by facile English rhymes of the “singing-winging-ringing,” “love-above” and “passion-fashion” variety, though anything this trite is the very antithesis of Pushkin. Besides, as Andrei Bely demonstrated years ago, the melodic quality of Pushkin’s meters derives from his variable pattern of withholding the metrical stress from positions where it would be expected in traditional Russian iambic tetrameter and pentameter.2 This subtle effect cannot be duplicated in English, which is why the various translations of Evgeny Onegin in rhymed English iambic tetrameter (e.g., the recent one by Sir Charles Johnson, undeservedly overpraised by critics, to my mind) produce on a person closely familiar with the original the effect of a Chopin nocturne played in the tempo of a military march.
The third method is a compromise of the first two: The translator settles for vaguely metered prose, arranged on the page to look like verse, thus preserving a semblance of Pushkin’s iambic or trochaic pattern while avoiding the filler words and other distortions necessitated by scansion or rhyme. This was the path chosen by Vladimir Nabokov in his well-known translation of Evgeny Onegin, a translation that makes sense within his voluminous commentary (for which it is actually a pretext) but no sense at all if considered on its own.3
2 The reference is to four technical analyses of Pushkin’s verse collected in Andrei Belyi, Simvolizm (Moscow: Izd-vo Musaget, 1910). SK greatly admired Bely’s prose fiction and his narrative in verse, The First Rendezvous (1921). See his review of translations of The Silver Dove and Kotik Letaev, “Unknown Here, Suppressed There,” New York Times Book Review, 27 October 1974, 1–2; and his “Symphonic Structure in Andrej Belyj’s
‘Pervoe svidanie,’” California Slavic Studies 6 (1971): 61–70, included in the present volume. See also his entry “Bely, Andrey,” in the Columbia Dictionary of Modern Euro-pean Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 70–71.—Ed.
3 SK’s cagey evaluation of the first edition of this translation appeared in an unsigned review in Choice 2, no. 4 (June 1965): 232–33:
Nabokov’s version of Pushkin’s novel in verse, despite an iambic metrical pattern, reads like a prose translation. It is remarkable in its fidelity to the nu-ances of the original, although the translator’s excessive scruples at times lead
Pushkin Re-Englished
Until now, Pushkin’s English translators have selected one or another of these methods. D. M. Thomas is, as far as I know, the first to have opted for all three at once. That is, some of the poems that were metered and rhymed in Russian do have both meter and rhyme in this translation, while others are provided with a modicum of meter but no rhyme. For the most part, however, Pushkin’s verse has been turned into prose, pure and simple, despite the verse-like typography (e.g., the title poem, The Bronze Horseman, or the long lyric that begins “Winter. What shall we do in the country?”). But the play The Stone Guest, written by Pushkin in blank verse of matchless elegance, has been rendered by Thomas in jangling couplets of rhymed iambic pentameter (with such dubious, un-Pushkinian rhymes as “chance-mischance” and “creature–at your feet for”). This is a procedure that strikes me as being as peculiar as arranging Hamlet’s soliloquy in limericks.
him into mannerism and archness (e.g., “dulcitude” and “juventude” are used where the Russian says “sweetness” and “youth,” merely because Pushkin used the slightly archaic Russian variant of the latter word). The translation, which occupies only a part of the first of four volumes, is really a pretext for publishing a wide array of highly subjective scholarly commentary by Nabo-kov on Pushkin, Onegin and various tangential matters too numerous to cite.
His commentary on Onegin tells us almost as much about Nabokov as it does about Pushkin. With all that, Nabokov is an informed and imaginative literary scholar as well as a master stylist. He has the additional advantage of being free from the compulsory sociological and political approach that is now imposed on the Pushkin scholarship in the Soviet Union. For all its lack of objectiv-ity and occasional unfairness (Nabokov’s blanket dismissal of various lesser Russian poets is seen in proper perspective with the realization that Molière and Corneille are similarly treated by him), his commentary is a valuable contribution to Pushkin studies and can be used with pleasure and profit by scholars and specialists. It is far too special and erudite for the general reader.
It is happy circumstance that this anonymous review—typically judicious—probably remained unknown to Nabokov. Over the years he and SK established a friendly rela-tionship and correspondence, SK published analyses of Nabokov’s fiction and wrote several laudatory reviews of his novels (both those translated from the Russian and those written in English). SK’s remarkably comprehensive knowledge of Nabokov’s biography and writings led to his selection (by the widows of the two writers) to edit and annotate the epistolary exchange between the Russian writer and the American critic Edmund Wilson: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940–1971, edited, annotated, and with an introduc-tory essay by Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, rev. and expanded ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001).—Ed.
Trying to compare Thomas’s work to the originals in order to check its accuracy, I soon realized that much of the book was not translated from Pushkin’s Russian but rather adapted from two earlier volumes of Push-kin translations into English. The first of these is John Fennell’s anthology Pushkin, which contains Russian texts “with plain prose translations of each poem.”4In his acknowledgment section, Thomas admits to having been “much influenced” by Fennell’s “lucid prose versions” of Pushkin.
But influence seems hardly the right term when we juxtapose the end of the first part of The Bronze Horseman as “translated” by Thomas (six lines as compared to Pushkin’s eight):
And he, as though bewitched, as if riveted To the marble, cannot get down! Around him Is water and nothing else! And, his back turned To him, in unshakeable eminence, over
The angry river, the turbulent Neva, stands
The Image, with outstretched arm, on his bronze horse, with Fennell’s “plain prose,” which runs:
And he, as though bewitched, as though riveted to the marble, cannot get down! Around him is water and nothing else! And with back turned to him, on unshakeable eminence, over the turbulent Neva, stands the Image with outstretched arm on his bronze horse.
Or consider how much translating Thomas had to do in these three stanzas from “To the Sea,” followed by their source in the Fennell book:
Farewell, free element!
Before me for the last time Your blue waves roll
And you shine in proud beauty.
. . . .
4 Pushkin, introduced, edited, and translated by John Fennell (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964).
Pushkin Re-Englished One cliff, the sepulchre of glory … There, majestic memories subsided Into chill sleep; the memory Of Napoleon went out.
. . . . Your image was stamped on him, He was created by your spirit.
Like you, he was powerful, gloomy, deep;
Like you, nothing could daunt him.
Farewell, free element! For the last time you roll your blue waves before me and shimmer in your proud beauty.
One cliff, the sepulchre of glory … There majestic memories subsided into chill sleep: there Napoleon’s flame died out.
Your image was stamped upon him, he was created by your spirit: like you, he was powerful, deep, and gloomy; like you, nothing could daunt him.
(The one independent contribution by Thomas is a total misreading, since
“there Napoleon’s flame died out” should have been “there Napoleon slowly expired,” i.e., on St. Helena.) Both “To the Sea” and The Bronze Horseman (especially the latter’s famous prologue) contain numerous pas-sages based on the Fennell version, either quoted verbatim or re arranged but still recognizable. This also occurs throughout the rest of the book.
The lyric “Lines Written at Night during Insomnia,” though printed as verse, is repeated in its entirety and almost word for word from the prose version in the Fennell Pushkin.
The other source on which Thomas has heavily drawn is Pushkin Threefold by Walter Arndt.5 This volume contains translations in verse, followed by original Russian texts and “linear” (i.e., metrical prose) trans-lations. It is these last that Thomas used, as can be easily seen by comparing his versions of the poems “Young Mare” and “Echo” with those of Arndt.
Up to sixty percent of their text is simply taken from Arndt, and the rest
5 Pushkin Threefold: Narrative, Lyric, Polemic, and Ribald Verse, trans. Walter Arndt (New York: Dutton, 1972).
is adapted from him. Especially telling is the derivation of the rhymed version of the longest poem in Thomas’s book, The Tale of the Tsar Saltan, from Arndt’s prose rendition of it. The dependence is so strong that we see Thomas repeat even Arndt’s few misreadings: the magical transforma-tion of the young prince into a buzzing mosquito (komar, mistranslated as “a gnat”); the mosquito’s sting causing the prince’s slanderous aunt to lose sight in one eye (a point missed by both translators); and the tutor (diad’ka) who accompanies the thirty-three ocean-dwelling heroes (both translators misread his function, confusing it with diadia, and therefore made him these soldiers’ uncle).
A check of the table of contents of D. M. Thomas’s Pushkin collec-tion shows that more than three-quarters of the works he selected are also contained in the anthologies of John Fennell or Walter Arndt (or in both).
His reliance on the work of these two scholars (barely hinted at in the case of Fennell, unacknowledged in that of Arndt) is so wholesale that in all fairness Thomas ought to have at least named them as his cotranslators.
Significantly, it is when Thomas dispenses with the guidance of his two mentors that he comes to miss the meanings of certain poems. Thus, in
“Demons,” by materializing the demons and making them plainly visible in the third stanza, instead of at the end of the poem, as Pushkin did, Thomas wrecks the whole point of the poem, which is the traveler’s doubt as to whether he is seeing the blizzard or something supernatural.
But even apart from the derivative (if that is the right word) charac-ter of these translations, there are many other things that are wrong with them. Major cuts have been made with no indications in the text. The central digression in The Gypsies, with its oft-anthologized comparison of the protagonist to migratory birds, is left out. The opening section of The Gabrieliad is reduced from about a page to two lines, while the same poem’s epilogue is cut by about one-third. In the play Rusalka, one of the male characters has been turned into a woman. There is a strange mo-notony of vocabulary: when Pushkin mentions a maiden, a princess, a peasant lass, or a virgin, Thomas has only one word for all of them—girl.
Most unfortunate of all, the tone of these translations sounds closest to Pushkin when they repeat passages from the Arndt and Fennell books and least like him whenever Thomas strikes out on his own.
The dust jacket carries glowing endorsements from three literate people for whose judgment I have the highest respect. I am not sure what
Pushkin Re-Englished
this means, but my guess would be that the genius of Aleksandr Push-kin comes through, if only in part, even in less-than-competent transla-tions and that the two eminent Pushkin translators who, unbeknownst to themselves, were harnessed to help out with this project must have indeed helped. What I am sure about is that this volume has not brought us any closer to (to quote from one of the endorsements on the dust jacket) “the forever impossible goal of truly translating Pushkin.”
* * *
This piece stirred up a “battle royal” (as one of SK’s correspondents wrote) even before its appearance. As if to stoke controversy, a preliminary account of a first skirmish was published five days in advance of publication of SK’s review, in Edwin McDowell, “Author of White Hotel: A New Dispute,” New York Times, 21 September 1982. (Thomas had brushed off charges in the Times Literary Supplement earlier the same year that he had plagiarized Anatoly Kuznetsov’s documentary novel Babi Yar in his novel The White Hotel.) McDowell solicited statements by telephone from Walter Arndt, John Bayley (one of the “three lit-erate people for whose judgment [SK had] the highest respect”) and Thomas himself for his report. Thomas’s thunderous and lengthy counterattack was published in the New York Times Book Review on 24 October 1982. He likened the treatment of his work to a Soviet show trial; rejected allegations of pla-giarism despite evidence to the contrary; and, implicitly, derided SK’s compe-tence to judge his work. McDowell returned to his position on the sidelines in a second report, published in the Times on 12 November 1982, and in it he rehearsed yet another charge that Thomas had pilfered the prior work of Carl Proffer (the scholar, translator, and founder of Ardis Publishers) for Thomas’s English version of a long poem by Anna Akhmatova. McDowell had by then discovered the whereabouts of John Fennell of New College, Oxford, who was teaching that term at Stanford University, and extracted from him a letter regarding Thomas’s “use“ of his work. (The letter was never published, but a copy of it is to be found among the Simon Karlinsky Papers in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.) Echoes of “battle” resounded on a diminishing scale for several months thereafter, with interventions in local Berkeley papers, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the London Sunday Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal and the TLS.
“T
here are writers whose fate makes one gasp in astonishment:how could it have happened that the new contemporary readers know neither their names nor their writings?” With these words the Soviet literary scholar Evgeniya Khin began the introductory essay to her 1959 edition of selected stories and novellas by Prince Vladimir Odoevsky.2 A contemporary and friend of Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontov, who all regarded him as their peer, Odoevsky (1804–69) was a major figure on the Russian cultural scene between the 1820s and 1860s. His highly origi-nal tales of the supernatural, which made him the Russian counterpart of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe, were much appreciated by Rus-sian writers, readers, and critics of the first half of the nineteenth century.
Odoevsky also wrote antiutopias, which in our century have been included in collections of early science fiction, and humorous stories of social satire. His two big novellas, Princess Mimi and Princess Zizi (the titles come from minor characters in the comedy by Aleksandr Griboe-dov—another friend of Odoevsky’s—called Gore ot uma [Woe from wit]), with their sharp analysis of how the minds and characters of upper-class women could be warped by the artificiality of their upbringing, give Odoevsky a modest claim to be the earliest Russian writer with what is today called a feminist consciousness. His one book-length literary work,
1 Review of The Life, Times and Milieu of V. F. Odoyevsky, 1804–1869, by Neil Corn-well (London: Athlone, 1986). Originally published in Times Literary Supplement, 26 September 1986, 1067. [Odoevsky’s fiction figured prominently in SK’s graduate seminars in Russian prose of the Romantic period. See his study “A Hollow Shape:
The Philosophical Tales of Prince Vladimir Odoevsky,” Studies in Romanticism 5, no. 3 (1966): 169–82. A biography of Odoevsky comparable to Cornwell’s appeared in Russia some five years later: M. A. Tur’ian, “Strannaia moia sud’ba …”: O zhizni Vladimira Fedorovicha Odoevskogo (Moscow: Kniga, 1991).—Ed.]
2 V. F. Odoevskii, Povesti i rasskazy, ed. and with an introductory essay and annotations by E. Iu. Khin (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1959). A step to-wards redressing Khin’s complaint was the publication, in 1975, of a scholarly Russian edition of Russian Nights: V. F. Odoevskii, Russkie nochi, ed. B. F. Egorov, E. A. Mai-min, and M. I. Medovoi (Leningrad: Izd-vo Nauka, 1975).—Ed.
A Mystical Musicologist
Russian Nights, available in English translation, is a series of philosophi-cal dialogues interspersed with brief fictional episodes.3 In it Odoevsky expounds his antirationalist, antiutilitarian outlook derived from such idealist Western predecessors as Emmanuel Swedenborg and Friedrich von Schelling. The philosopher Schelling was for Odoevsky the Christo-pher Columbus of the nineteenth century who discovered “the hitherto unknown continent”—the human soul, a concept which in our day would be conveyed by “psyche.”
Odoevsky’s idealistic philosophy, combined with his interest in the occult and the rejection in his dystopian stories of all forms of social en-gineering based on materialist views or economic theories, turned against
Odoevsky’s idealistic philosophy, combined with his interest in the occult and the rejection in his dystopian stories of all forms of social en-gineering based on materialist views or economic theories, turned against