Sappho. Equal to God.

Vikenty Veresayev
Portrait by Sergey Malyutin, 1919.

Sappho's 'Equal to gods' is one of my all time favourite poems in Russian.

The polymath Vikenty Veresayev (1867-1945, wiki here) fell in love with Greece in 1910, when he travelled there. By that time he was an established realist writer and a practising doctor.

Veresayev isn't widely read these days but his name is well known, not least because quotes from his novels and essays are frequently used in Russian language text books. So precise, if not stylistically exiting, was his language.

Here is the Russian text (from here):

Богу равным кажется мне по счастью

Человек, который так близко-близко

Пред тобой сидит, твой звучащий нежно

                                                                 Слушает голос

И прелестный смех. У меня при этом

Перестало сразу бы сердце биться:

Лишь тебя увижу — уж я не в силах

                                                                 Вымолвить слова.

Но немеет тотчас язык, под кожей

Быстро легкий жар пробегает, смотрят,

Ничего не видя, глаза, в ушах же —

                                                                Звон непрерывный.

Потом жарким я обливаюсь, дрожью

Члены все охвачены, зеленее

Становятся травы, и вот-вот как будто

                                                               С жизнью прощусь я.

Но терпи, терпи: чересчур далёко

Все зашло…

And here is an English poetic translation (from Sappho: A Poem of Jealousy. 29 translations.)

To me that man equals a god

as he sits before you and listens

closely to your sweet voice

and lovely laughter — which troubles

the heart in my ribs. For now

as I look at you my voice fails,

my tongue is broken and thin fire

runs like a thief through my body.

My eyes are dead to light, my ears

pound, and sweat pours down over me.

I shudder, I am paler than grass,

and am intimate with dying — but

I must suffer everything, being poor.

Translated by Willis Barnstone (first version, 1965)

There has been a long argument about the last bit. One school of scholars says that it may not even belong to the poem. Others insist that it is a wonderfully integral part of it, indispensable. 

Another great lover of Greek poetry and symbolism was of course the great poet Osip Mandelstam who started writing at the same time as Veresayev was falling in love with Greece. Veresayev's translations of Sappho came up in a super-thread on Languagehat two years ago. 

The video below is a musical version of the poem from the cult 1976 album by David Tukhmanov 'On the Wave of My Memory' (Russian wiki here: "По волне моей памяти"), sung by the vocal group of the Sovremennik (The Contemporary) orchestra. Solo by Natalia Kapustina.

Poiskslov.

Knigochei

I'd like to recommend to linguists and students of Russian a simple and fun resource 

poiskslov.com 

It does what is says – poisk slov – word search. It looks like it was originally developed for lovers of crossword puzzles and Scrabble. Yes, there is a Scrabble in Russian! Same grid, same rules, but the letters are Cyrillic. Pioskslov links to definitions from major Russian dictionaries.  

Where linguists, professional and amateurs, may find it useful is in its omitted letters function. Type * sign or ? question mark instead of a sequence of letters and get a selection of words with the same sequence.

Each word found links to definitions in major Russian dictionaries.

What prompted me to go to poiskslov was an interesting – as they always are – discussion on Languagehat about the word книгочей – lover of books, bookworm. 

Vasmer's etymological dicitonary lists it as of Turkic origin, while for most Russians today it sounds perfectly home-grown: kniga (book) plus chei, a variation on чтей - чтец - читатель (big reader). 

Vasmer's analysis is very convincing, especially considering the rarity of the -chei ending in Russian and the comparison with казначей - kaznachei, practically identical to Turkic kaznacy. 

But there is also an odd one out – ручей – stream, brook, creek.  The first thing that comes to mind is рука - ручки - рученьки. Аnd the word рукав - sleeve has an additional meaning of branch, tributary, channel. Compare French la Manche – sleeve and the Channel. But again, Vasmer gives a completely different etymological background...

Picture: 'The Bookworm', Carl Spitzweg, c.1850, o/c, 49.5 × 26.8 cm (19.5 × 10.6 in), Museum Georg Shäfer, from here.

Mandelstam. Insomnia. Homer. Anthology.

Осип Мандельштам - Цыганка


A post by Languagehat on Osip Mandelstam's famous poem 'Insomnia. Homer. Taut sails' ("Бессонница. Гомер. Тугие паруса") has caused a huge creative outburst from the readers of that popular blog - lovers of poetry. 


Langugehat offered his own translation into English, and readers came up with dozens of alternative versions – translations, adaptations, humourous interpretations and paraphrases. And not just in English, but in Russian, French and other languages. They scoured the internet to find translations in German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, Chech - contributions are still pouring in as I write this.  A wonderful homage to the great Russian poet.


A few records of Mandelstam himself reading his poetry have survived. I couldn't find 'Insomnia' on the internet,  I am not sure if it exists, but here is another of his famous poems 'The Gypsy Girl' (click on the player above to start the audio clip). It gives a good idea of how he actually declaimed.


The text in Russian:

Цыганка

Сегодня ночью, не солгу,

По пояс в тающем снегу

Я шел с чужого полустанка.

Гляжу - изба, вошел в сенцы,

Чай с солью пили чернецы,

И с ними балует цыганка...

У изголовья вновь и вновь

Цыганка вскидывает бровь,

И разговор ее был жалок:

Она сидела до зари

И говорила: - Подари

Хоть шаль, хоть что, хоть полушалок.

Того, что было, не вернешь.

Дубовый стол, в солонке нож

И вместо хлеба - еж брюхатый;

Хотели петь - и не смогли,

Хотели встать - дугой пошли

Через окно на двор горбатый.

И вот - проходит полчаса,

И гарнцы черного овса

Жуют, похрустывая, кони;

Скрипят ворота на заре,

И запрягают на дворе;

Теплеют медленно ладони.

Холщовый сумрак поредел.

С водою разведенный мел,

Хоть даром, скука разливает,

И сквозь прозрачное рядно

Молочный день глядит в окно

И золотушный грач мелькает.

1925

  

Maugham on Tolstoy: what to do with unwanted chapters

War and Peace ( War and Peace (Vintage Classics)) is, probably, a Russian classic with the highest world-wide reference ratio. Not just because it is a great read, but also because it has become a metaphor for 'difficult' literature - too long, too serious, too many characters, too many historical or philosophical digressions.

Languagehat, the brilliant American blogger, reports that he has just finished reading War and Peace (over a year since he'd started) - and grumbles that philosophical chapters are amateurish, unnecessary and spoil the novel.

Many desperate readers agree. Here is what Andy K from Australia writes in an Amazon.com review of War and Peace:

I have tried War and Peace several times since I was a teenager, and each time I have enjoyed it UNTIL I get to the same bit. This is the bit where Tolstoy decides it's time to give us all a little lecture (say, a mere hundred and fifty pages) on his theory of history. I think this is in an inexcusable flaw in a story, book, or epic. Worst of all, it makes poor Leo Nicholayevich into precisely the pretentious git which he didn't want to be remembered as. Because of the pretentious and boring quality of the classic War and Peace, I quit reading this book. But I felt like I had failed when I was a teenager. Now I am a mature adult and I know better: Tolstoy was being a pretentious bore.


Well, ask Tolstoy's good friend and follower Gandhi, he would agree - Tolstoy is some work. But that work helped Gandhi change himself - and the world.

A lot of writers can't help but moralize. Few are ready to admit that it may be boring for the reader. In fact, I only know one, W.Somerset Maugham, a younger contemporary of Tolstoy, who honestly advised his readers to skip the next chapter, where he was going to philosophise, if they wanted just the story. Here is what he writes in the first paragraph of Part VI of The Razor's Edge:

I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worth while to write this book.

I suspect Maugham envied Chekhov for his ability to construct a gripping story without a real plot - and diguised it as a critique of Russian 'verbosity' in general. Even though compactness is one of the most striking features of Chekhov's style. Maugham digresses into a whole chapter of criticising Chekhov for his lack of narrative in 'Ashenden', supposedly a spy thriller based on Maugham's own experience on Her (sorry - His) Majesty's secret service while trying to stop the bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917. In another chapter Maugham implies that the revolution only happened because the people who could have stopped it spent too much time talking.

I think Tolstoy also envied Chekhov for the same reason - and also criticised him. But Tolstoy hated his own 'verbosity' and worked hard to make his language compact. I agree, we Russians are famous for our 'verbosity', but, in fact, we generally hate it too. We have a huge thesaurus of hate phrases for it, including many expletives.

And Maugham is one of our favourite English writers.


A note: if you think it's not fair to pay for a book which contains hundreds of pages you know you won't read, get ECCO Press 2007 version of War and Peace translated by Andrew Bromfield (War and Peace: Original Version) - it's Tolstoy's own abridged 'hollywood' version of the epic novel, half the size and with a different, happy ending. Read comments on Amazon.com here.

Please read a small review
of the two new (2007) translations
of War and Peace on the Normandy Review of Books.