Sonnet 40. Russian Song Version.

The famous Russian singer Alla Pugacheva made several beautiful song versions of Shakespeare's sonnnets. In this musical excerpt from the Soviet film 'Love for Love' (1983) based on Much Ado About Nothing she sings Sonnet XL .




Shakespeare's text:

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed, if thou thyself deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet, love knows, it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.
     Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
     Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.


In Russian canon Samuil Marshak's translations of the sonnets, the full cycle, are considered best and are rarely critically challenged.

There are several curious places in the Russian version.

Take, for example, the lines

But yet be blamed, if thou thyself deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.

I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;

There is no clear, grammatically expressed gender in English, but sonnet 40 belongs to the sequence  addressed to the Fair Youth, not the the Dark Lady who appeared later, in sonnets 127-152. In Russian, where gender is shown through different endings of third person verbs in the past tense, Marshak gives them masculine gender:

Нет, я в одном тебя лишь упрекну,
Что пренебрёг любовью ты моею.     ~ fem. пренебрегла
Ты нищего лишил его сумы.     ~ fem. лишила
Но я простил пленительного вора. ~ fem. простила

The first two bolded words describe actions of the person to whom the sonnet is addressed, the third is Shakespeare talking about himself. So, in the Russian version a man addresses another man with a passionate, but forgiving rebuke.

Now, theories abound about Shakespeare's sexuality and who the Fair Youth of the sonnets might have been. The question is does Marshak refer to homosexuality here, or love in a broader sense, love as friendship and loyalty – betrayed? Perhaps it's the latter. The translation was published in 1948 during one of Stalin's last paranoid campaigns against 'enemies of the people' and when homosexuality was banned.

Henry Wriothesley, a possible Fair Youth

That is perhaps why 'lascivious grace' completely disappears from the sonnet's ending which is rendered as follows:

О ты, чье зло мне кажется добром.
Убей меня, но мне не будь врагом!

But how does Pugacheva deal with the man-to-man issue? She sings the sonnet from a woman's perspective, addressed to a man? That's clever: she changes the masculine third person past простил  (forgave) to first person future прощу (will forgive) where gender is not morphologically shown. The whole piece becomes a consistent woman-to-man text. The line is sung at about 1:20 minutes into the clip.

See also 'Sonnet 66. A Russian Video Project'.

Full text of the sonnet in Russian is on wikilivres here. 
Info about the film, in Russian, is here and here.
Image from here.