Johnson's Russia List
#8366
14 September 2004
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A CDI Project
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#17
David I thought you and your readers might be interested in the review of
my new book published in the New York Russian language daily Novoye
Russkoye Slovo. Anyone wishing to buy a copy should visit the website at
www.alexanderpushkin.com
Julian Lowenfeld
Novoye Russkoye Slovo
Oleg Vulf
To Find Ourselves in Pushkin
A Review of My Talisman, The Poetry of Alexander Pushkin, Translated with a
Foreword and a biography by Julian Henry Lowenfeld, Green Lamp Press, New
York, 2004.
Once a poem has been published, it can't help distancing itself from its
creator. No more can be added to its sparkle or nuances of meaning, nor
can anything be subtracted from its flaws. Coming out into the world, it
slips from the poet's hands, just as events do in our lives, more and more
with the passing of time. Yet this does not apply to translators, those
patient bearers of literature past the borders of one language and culture
to another.
Pushkin called translators "the post horses of enlightenment". And yet the
boundaries of his own "universal expansiveness" have been, sadly, quite
circumscribed with respect to his own creations.
Virginia Woolf summarized the general experience of English translations of
Russian masterpieces as follows: "Only a coarse, rude, simplified and
downtrodden remnant is still left of the original meaning, after which the
Russian classics seem like naked waifs, clinging to their rags after an
earthquake or a shipwreck." The philosopher Georges Nivat noted: "Pushkin
has suffered from such rough handling more than anyone. In France Yefim
Etkind and a group of enthusiasts translated the major Pushkin works, and
presented and compared 26 translations of his poem "The Prophet" and all
in vain. Pushkin remains "unknown": Vladimir Veidel laments in his book
Russia's Task: "Europe has changed so much that it already cannot recognize
itself in Pushkin."
But the world has not changed. Not long ago, in the Russian State Library
there was a presentation of the first full translation of the works of
Alexander Pushkin into English. Russian, British and American Pushkin
scholars collaborated on the 15 volume collection, slecting the best
translations. But will the Petersburger Pushkin now become an Englishman,
as Shakespeare from Stratford-on-Avon became a "Russian" writer, adding to
the paranoid censhorship worries of Comrade Stalin?
On the 150th anniversary of Pushkin's death, Georges Nivat wrote: "The
paradoxical simplicity and clarity of that youth raised by Arina Rodionovna
and Bejamin Constant so far seem unsusceptible of transference to any other
culture." In our age, tired judgments that translations are inadequate to
convey the force of Pushkin's poetry indeed, of any poetry from one
language to another, have become commonplace. And this means that we in
truth demand from translators of our poetry nothing less than the
embodiment of a miracle. In other words, it goes without saying we want
not just punctilious professional scrupulousness and scientific rigor we
want brilliance. More than anything we want from a translation of Pushkin
a text that will shine and sparkle as his does, something that at the very
least will express the ineffable charm of his poetry, so that the general
reader will love his work as we do. We want something meant not just for
the specialist who knows Russian as a foreign language, or who has been
brought up to study our foreign culture. We want to reach out to everyone,
we want something for those, who while they may speak no Russian, can be of
that same spiritual build as we are when we read Pushkin, and become those
those living in "that particular state of being", in Nabokov's phrase, "in
which you feel yourself somehow, someplace, some way
linked to other forms of being, to a place where art, (meaning
curiousity, tenderness, goodness, grace, and joy) are the norm."
Such a norm, in this reviewer's view, is to be found everywhere in the work
of the American writer, poet, and translator Julian Henry Lowenfeld,
entitled "My Talisman, Selected Lyrics of Alexander Pushkin", containing
over 700 pages of truly inspired translations. This is a bilingual
edition, generously illustrated by Pushkin's own drawings, which contains
both the original text and translations of over 150 of Pushkin's best
poems, extensive selections from Eugene Onegin, and also a biography of the
poet.
The translations are strictly faithful to the original meanings, and to
their natural ease of expression. Yet they are also majestic, faithful
syllable by syllable throughout to the powerful rhythms and sweeping
cadences of Pushkin's verse. Remarkably, the rhyme scheme is also
invariably kept (with just a few exceptions in approximative rhyme, usually
in the first and third lines of just a few of the Onegin stanzas, which
slight adjustment, in context, also considering the awesome complexity of
the Onegin stanza's construction, seems plainly deliberate on the
translator's part, in those cases, in order to keep the exuberant freedom
of the rhythm while accurately translating the sense, in a way that
actually increases the artistry of the choice of language used). The avid
Russian reader, brought up to love Pushkin since infancy, will enjoy the
Pushkinian economy, sharp clarity and transparency, the precise word for
word accuracy and the richness of meaning conveyed in the Pushkin verse
that somehow appears so effortlessly in this English translation:
Во глубине сибирских руд
Deep in your dark Siberian mine
Несчастью верная сестра /
Надежда
Misfortune's loyal sister, Hope.
Я думал, сердце позабыло
I thought my heart had long forgotten
Роняет лес багряный свой убор
The forest casts its scarlet raiment off.
Лишь я, таинственный певец,
And only I, mysterious bard,
На берег выброшен грозою,-
Was cast ashore by storm and lightning.
It is not just that the rhythm, the rhyme, and the meanings exactly match
the original text literally. It is not just that the amount of syllables
and the placing of strong and weak stresses match exactly, which is usually
never obtained by English translations, and which indeed was something I
had long thought impossible. What is astounding is that the music, the
tonal flavor of each poem is kept exactly, kept somehow by using an elegant
spareness, managing the words as not just words but sounds, sounds,
treating even prepositions, pauses, interjections and linking words as part
of the music with as much zest and efficiency, energetic richness and
density as Pushkin does, keeping to the pithiness and brilliance of
Pushkin's style, yet always with a light touch. The translation is
fearlessly displayed right next to the original side by side on opposite
pages, seducing the bilingual reader with its simplicity and transparency,
as well as its breezy joy in itself, its apparent ease. That ease and
simplicity are, of course, part of the show, for such great mastery and
artistry of language can only seem simple. The sheer labor, courage,
skill, and creative effort this book required are left unspoken, while the
illustrations, all Pushkin's drawings, delicately take us back to Pushkin
himself, and give us the impression in some way that we are reading the
drafts of Pushkin's own manuscripts, ever covered and inscribed with the
poet's restless drawings. In this book, the original and translation seem
somehow effortlessly woven together, and live in true harmony like two
equal vessels, with the latter almost a part of the former, and not only as
a product of the immense talent of the translator, but as a very practical
result of years of painstaking labor involved in surmounting the heights of
linguistic difficulty, as well as acquiring the astounding richness of the
vocabulary of the English language chosen for this romantic, inspiring
translation.
Reading translations of Pushkin is usually no laughing matter for us
Russian readers. After all, the English iamb is a far freer bird than the
Russian iamb. All kinds of problems arise in the different means of
measuring syllables, in strong and weak, masculine and feminine rhymes in
Russian and English. After the famous quarrel between Nabokov and Edmund
Wilson about the futlity of translating Pushkin, one would have thought it
would not be easy, indeed, it would be foolhardy to embark upon such a
fundamental new translation. In this context, I wish to praise Julian
Lowenfeld's introduction, which focuses in a novel way on the phenomenon of
Pushkin and his life, on his creative process as itself being an act of
courage, as well as on his brilliant brief biography of the poet, which is
fresh, informative, entertaining, and incredibly moving. One senses how
the creative process of becoming a poet made Pushkin's life itself into a
work of art, with even its tragic end having the joyously daring
inevitability of his most powerful poetry. One senses that the fate of the
poet has almost become intertwined with the fate of his devoted translator,
so intense is the emotional understanding and warmth and uncanny insight
with which its narrative is written. In its focus on Pushkin's uniqueness,
and in its fascination with the mystical coincidences and parodoxes of the
poet's life, in the many odd questions it raises as well as those it
answers, in sensitive hypotheses and interpretations, this biography always
maintains rigorous standards of scholarship, yet expresses itself with
passion and with immense love, wit, intelligence, perception, and admirable
stylistic economy. This biography of the poet is not something you read:
it is something you swallow whole, smacking your tongue, in one breath,
delightedly.
This book is truly wonderful not just in its appeal to the educated
American reader, and its pithy asides from an American scholar of Russian
literature at Harvard and Leningrad State University. No, it is an event
unto itself, a marvelous creation by an original writer and polyglot who
speaks eight languages, one who perfectly understands the meanings and
nuances of words, one who takes unmistakable sheer delight in the play and
sparkle of language. Moreover, this effort, done at Lowenfeld's own
initiative, "at his own risk", one might say, without any support from any
foundations or libraries, or institutions (most of whom, as Joseph Brodsky
complained, approach European culture with a sense of shame and guilt for
their own Eurocentricity) somehow manages to completely match our inner
unconscious understanding of the essence of the original, of its energy,
and indeed, validates our proud feeling as Russians, that any translation
of Pushkin should be an independent feat of heroism, a sacrifice inspired
by love alone.
Last but not least, this book's whimsical unpretentiousness, its
independence and daring initiative, its spectacularly carefree inner
freedom from any need for approval or political conformity to institutions
or bureacrats, is felt throughout its pages, and gives it an astonishing
feeling of spiritual equivalence with its inspired original matter. This
book is both timeless and refreshingly young somehow, blithely lacking much
except the occasional ironic reference to any of the myriad conventions and
the cults of our sadly bureaucratic "Pushkinism" with which we all grew
up, which over the years were set up for ideological purposes as yet
another means of controlling us by the Soviet totalitaian machine. Pushkin
was, it must be said, imposed on us, assigned as "our all", placed on a
pedestal as the summit of our national culture, supposedly as the only true
spokesman for the ideal of the brotherhood of man, of absolute equality and
freedomall on behalf of a regime whose only interest in fact was our
complete subjugation in a manner completely indifferent to or even
destructive of true art. Poor Pushkin's verses were plastered onto posters
for every conceivable political banality; the poet's image was cynically
used and mass produced in countless "Office portraits", as if his sole
purpose in life had been to inspire true Party members. He was sold to us
as some kind of proto-Communist, a member of the Komsomol before his time,
a fiery freedom fighter against tyranny, a victim of the caprice of power
and political censorship (although, in part, of course, he was). Twenty
years after Mayakovsky reacted to all this by asking that Pushkin be spared
of his own cult, and "cast off the ship of modernity", any alternative
intepretation of Pushkin was completely forbidden. Indeed, expression of
any doubts in this regard could be seen as nothing less than dissidence, a
foolish doomed challenge to omnipotent authority.
Yet those who truly love poetry love Pushkin for his poetry, and love his
verse as one loves life itself: without the least regard for dogma or
ideology, but for love of the words themselves, taken all in all,
acceptingly, warmly, courageously, joyously, and freely, and with nothing
but contempt for any imposed values of "society" and "glory" so shamelessly
tacked onto his poetry by Party hacks for ends that had nothing to do with
it, ends for which he himself would have had nothing but contempt. This
true love of ours for Pushkin was in its way our own kind of real freedom,
perhaps the only freedom we had, one which was able to rise up above both
the pitifully niggardly limitations of punctilious bureaucratic and
politically correct "Pushkinism" with its spokemen and careful scholars
safe in their sinecures, as well as the whole hated hierarchy of
totalitarianism, the slogan-makers. Thanks to this true love Pushkin
inspired, many of us were able to keep something alive within our hearts
that otherwise would not have survived. Many of us, finding harmony with
Pushkin's poetry, were able to find ourselves in Pushkin. (The Slavic
scholar Thomas Shaw, incidentally, wrote a book on this, which I believe
has already been translated into Russian as well, entitled: The Poet and
the Hero: The Cult of Pushkin in Soviet Russia).
And today? Our human dimensions continue to expand. And the poet for us
is above all our gatherer of impressions, returning to the world some of
its lost sense of original wholeness and integrity through feelings and
observations expressed in words. And while modern physics has begun to make
what seems to make sense into something profoundly complex and mysterious,
and to deal with the true nature in the universe through concepts that go
way beyond any comprehensible or visible beliefs about daily reality as it
seems to us, great poetry does the reverse, making a harmony out of the
essence of incomprehensible things, marrying paradoxes, taking distant
meanings and weaving them together into a seamless whole. The depth,
solemnity and "inevitability" (Joseph Brodsky's phrase) of great poetry
become more and more indispensable to us. Even so, all the more
"inevitable", contemporary, fresh, deep, and sorely needed by all of us is
this splendid book by Julian Lowenfeld.
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