In case you missed it, 'Eugene Onegin', the great Russian novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin, is now available in audio book format. Stephen Fry (the voice of Harry Potter) reads it in James Falen's translation (1995). To download the full audio book go to Fry Reads Onegin. Here is sonnet (stanza) 6 from Chapter 1 of 'Eugene Onegin': 6.
Cardinal Points Journal is holding their Arseny Tarkovsky translations awards ceremony and readings in New York this Saturday (Poets House, at 4 pm.). Cardinal Points has had Russian poetry translation contests for several years now, each devoted to one particular poet. Last year's contest was dedicated to Arseny Tarkovsky, father of the film director Andrey. (wikipedia about Arseny and a portrait gallery of him.)
Winning translations will appear on the Cardinal Points website and in the 5th volume of the almanac scheduled to come out in a few months.
Cardinal Points website is here and direct link to Tarkovsky contest page is here, for additional information mail Compass (compass at StoSvet dot net) or go to their facebook page.
This translation by Laurence Bogoslaw (USA) won the first prize.
In autumn’s final weeks, on the decline
Of bitter life,
Filled to the brim with wistfulness, I walked
Into a leafless, nameless wood.
It was engulfed from edge to edge in milk-
White fog like frosted glass. Its hoary branches
Dripped tears distilled like those
That only trees weep on the eve
Of winter that drains everything of color.
And then a miracle occurred: at sunset
Out of a raincloud peeked a gleam of blue,
A ray of light broke through, as bright as June,
A weightless spear of birdsong cast
From future days back to my past.
And now the trees stood weeping on the eve
Of noble works and festive offerings
Of cheerful whirlwinds luffing in the azure;
And bluebirds started dancing in a ring
Like hands upon a keyboard, rising measures
From earth to the highest notes the air can sing.
In the first video, Arseny Tarkovsky reads First Encounters ("Первые свидания") in Andrey Tarkovsky's The Mirror. It is this poem that ends with the haunting lines: 'When fate was stalking us like madman, with razor blade in hand.' In the second video Arseny Tarkovsky reads 'Blurring Sight' ("Меркнет зрение"):
Bard (бард) is the Russian term for singer-songwriter, a folk singer who writes their own lyrics and sings, usually to acoustic guitar. I understand that the English word bard is now archaic and never used to describe a modern singer or poet. In Russian it is still in circulation. (Wikipedia on bardy, with a list of the best known names.)
The term appeared in late 1950s - 1960s at the same time as Russian poetry was having a phenomenal renaissance that coincided with the folk-song revival in the US. Another Russian name for this genre is author's song (авторская песня).
Bards (барды) often performed on stage alongside 'proper' poets to packed audiences, including full stadiums. They sometimes became well-known and had their songs sung all over the Soviet Union, in tiny kitchens and by the bon-fires, well before their songs were broadcast, released on records or published.
The new striking feature of the bards' output was the Bob Dylan-like blend of the deeply personal with that of 'great social and political import.' Some of them were fiercely patriotic, others were anti-regime dissidents.
One poet singer stands out in that great generation — Novella Matveyeva (Новелла Матвеева, wiki about her), whose piercing romanticism and inimitable child-like voice I can only roughly compare to Kate Bush. She started writing and singing in the 50s and her songs were all over the country with people not even knowing who the author was. Her first LP record only came out in 1966. She now has dozens of records and poetry collections behind her.
Matveyeva, who will be eighty next year, is still working. It is reported that she is preparing her version of Shakespeare's sonnets in Russian.
One of her best known songs is the ballad 'A Girl from the Tavern' ("Девушка из таверны"), better known for its opening line "Любви моей ты боялся зря" ('You shouldn't have been scared of my love' .) The music is a slightly changed Greensleeves tune. The first stanza practically goes as a quote from Greensleeves but on the second the melody scatters and stumbles in a typically 1960s folk-song manner. И если ты уходил к другой, she starts, and then continues или просто был неизвестно где as though it is one extended line that disregards the rhythm.
The lyrics is a reverse version of Greensleeves, it's not a song of a man's longing but a young girl's bitter but contented lament about the man who she loved and who apparently ignored her.
'And when you left to see someone else, or simply were no one knows where,
For me, it was enough that your raincoat hang on the nail.'
Then he leaves for good and
'I was just happy to see the nail in the wall where your raincoat used to hang.'
This is not the end,
'Something terrible happened at home, they pulled out that nail.
Well, I was just happy that from the nail a small mark was left there.'
These lines are simply heart-breaking. (My literal translation)
Full Russian and English texts of the song are here. I am publishing extracts below the video. It is not clear who translated the ballad into English. Matveyeva's lyrics are all over the internet but I am not sure about the copyright, so I put only two opening stanzas and the last one here.
In the first YouTube clip Matveyeva sings 'A Girl from the Tavern.' And in the next is a 1965 video of her singing another popular ballad 'Once There Was a Little Boat' ("Жил кораблик")
Organisers of the poetry translation contest in memory of the Soviet poet Maria Petrovykh have announced that submissions deadline is extended to 15 July 2013. Details of the contests (there is a fee) on the Compass Translation Award 2013 website. Read more about Petrovykh and the contest in this Tetradki article in Russian.
Jamie Olsen posted in The Flaxen Wave about Chukovsky’s children’s classic “Moydodyr” (had Chukovsky ever had anything non-classic?) with a parallel analysis of Timur Kibirov’s parody. It’s illuminating and fun, and I highly recommend the analysis.
Here, a small and — hopefully — amusing point on the meaning of the word мочалка (mochalka - a scrubber, a loofah or luffa, or a sponge). In Russian it has long had a slang meaning, i.e. a girl who wants fun and is not much interested in anything else.
Don’t ask me to explain the etymology. I’ll just say that a traditional Russian ‘mochalka’ is a mop of stringy thin strips of the underlay of lime-tree bark used to scrub yourself clean in a steam-house, a banya.
In Sergei Soloviev’s 1980s cult film “ASSA” there is a song “Mochalkin Blues”, which plays on exactly that meaning of the word.
The illustration above is a 'footnote' from "ASSA" explaining the meaning of 'mochalka'. Here’s a video from the film with Sergei 'Afrika' Bugayev singing:
Later on, the young ‘mochalka’ falls for the young singer nicknamed Afrika.
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.
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.
The first is a clip from the 1973 Soviet film 'He Who Shies Hardship Never Finds Happiness' ("Горя бояться - счастья не видать".) It is sung by the Belorussian folk-pop group Pesnyary ("Песняры") who were part of the Russian folk revival at the time. Lead vocal is by Leonid Bortkevich, musical version by O.Yanchenko, Burns' lyrics translated by Samuil Marshak.
In this second clip from 2009 Auld Lang Syne is sung by the chamber choir of the Mary Republic Technical University (Mary-El is an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation.) The singing starts at 1:45 minutes into the video. Apparently this is from the choir's tenth anniversary celebration ceremony.
Russian version of this post is here and see more clips in the 2012 post here.
Auld Lang Syne is well known in Russia – and throughout Russophonia – both as a melody and in Samuil Marshak's translation of Robert Burns' poem, though not necessarily as a New Year celebratory song. The Russian version is called Zastolnaya – Drinking Song. Can't limit this just to New Year, can we?
This is the 1973 song version by the Belorussian group the Pesnyary. The sound is not very good, but it gives an idea of their trademark folk-pop interpretation and a distinct Belorussian accent.
Music by O.Yanchenko, original lyrics by Robert Burns, translated by Samuil Marshak. Leonid Bortkevich, the group's lead singer, was married to Olga Korbut, the legendary Soviet gymnast, also a Belorussian. The photos in the clip are of them as a family couple.
And here is a humorous medley, that includes the Pesnyary version too:
Nobel Prize in literature went to Tomas Tranströmer of Sweden.
He is considered by Swedes as the national poet. They compare him in importance to Strindberg and Bergman. Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990 and has been unable to speak since, but has continued to write. Internationally he is one of the most widely translated contemporary poets, his work has appeared in over 60 languages.
In this audio he gives a master class in English and reads one of his most famous poems Shubertiana.
Alan Shaw, an American translator and publisher of the linguistic blog prosoidia.com, is about to publish a new translation of Alexander Pushkin's mini-plays collectively known as Little Tragedies.
The book includes all four dramatic works of the Little Tragedies canon which are The Miserly Knight, Mozart and Salieri, The Stone Guest (Don Juan) and Feast in the Time of Plague (Feast During the Plague).
I read an advance copy of the book and I must say I was impressed with the quality of both, the poetry and the translation. It is not a rendition of the original work, but an accurate translation. A poetic translation that is as close to the music and rhythm of the great original as seems to be possible. A remarkable work.
In Russia and Russian-speaking countries Little Tragedies have long been regarded as a classic and remain popular. Though less known in the West than Pushkin's other poetic works, including his full scale historical drama Boris Godunov, and his novellas. Many lines from the plays have entered the language as proverbs and idioms. For example, 'proved harmony with algebra' from Salieri's monologue quoted below is used to describe a cold, calculating approach to somoething that needs passion and emotion. The plays have had numerous stage and screen versions, as well as operatic interpretations by the likes of Rimsky-Korsakov (Mozart and Salieri) and Rachmaninov (The Miserly Knight).
Here is what Alan Shaw writes about Little Tragedies:
In the autumn of 1830, with his impending wedding to Natalya
Goncharova in Moscow postponed due to the death of his uncle,
Alexander Pushkin set out for his remote family estate in Boldino,
intending to use the delay to get some writing done. When he
got there, travel restrictions were put into effect due to a cholera
epidemic in the region, and it was three months before he was able
to return to the capital. These months were the most poetically
fruitful in his short life, and probably in all of Russian literature.
A "Boldino autumn," in Russian literary parlance, has subsequently
come to mean any extraordinary burst of creative accomplishment.
Among the flood of masterpieces that emerged from this brief
period were the four playlets in verse known as the Little Tragedies.
(Pushkin never used this title, though it is derived from references
he made to them in letters). The genre of short plays or "dramatic
scenes" in verse had a brief vogue in the early 19th century, notably
in England, and Pushkin represented two of his own plays as adaptations from English originals. But in his hands they were something
entirely new, highly concentrated studies of human obsession, tragedies of psychological epiphany more than of action. As poetry,
their reputation has long been high. As drama, or more precisely as
works for the stage, they have only gradually begun to come into
their own.
There have been previous translations of Little Tragedies, notably by Nabokov. What makes Alan Shaw's translation stand out is that he did it with a view of actually performing them on stage. Mozart and Salieri, which he translated first nearly thirty yeas ago, in 1983, has since been performed in several countries and was used for subtitles for Rimsky-Korsakov's opera. In 1984 Shaw directed a stage reading of the mini-play at Ann Arbor.
Here is Salieri, Mozart's contemporary and himself a good composer, getting desperately envious at Mozart's light genius:
...A pedestal
To art I made out of facility, And facile I became: my fingers gained A dry obedient dexterity, My ear reliability. I deadened The sounds, dissected music like a corpse, Proved harmony by algebra. And then, Then only did I dare, with all my lore, Yield to the bliss of my creative fancy.
One of the most difficult parts in the mini-plays is Mary's Song in the Feast During the Plague. Here are two opening quatrains of the song:
Time was, in our flourishing, When peace and plenty were abroad, Sunday would be sure to bring A full crowd to the house of God. Schoolyards echoed with the clash The voices of our children made, And the bright field saw the flash Of sickle and the scythe's quick blade.
Little Tragedies are published as an e-book, not a print edition. For details see Alan Shaw's web-site prosoidia.com/blog.
Update: the e-book is now available for purchase from Alan Shaw's site.
This is my translation into English of the song ‘Quand ils est mort, le poète’ by Gilbert Becaud (lyrics by Louis Amade, see text and video below) which I dedicate to today’s anniversary of D-Day, the Allied landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944. The day is now celebrated in France as Fête de la Normandie.
I first of all wanted to capture the phonetics of the original, deciding that this is what should dictate the choice of words.
That’s why these semantically different, but phonetically close pairs are employed:
Come - quand
Lament - le monde
Only his star - on enterra
The fourth stanza is of particular challenge because it’s where the clue to the anti-war message finally appears – in the last word. Les bleuets are cornflowers in French and have long been the symbol of Remembrance for the war dead. The tradition isn’t widely known outside of France, that is why just translating the word didn’t seem to me like it could work. Replacing cornflowers with red poppies (les coquelicots) would mean a departure from the original.
I tried ‘drops of blue’ as an allusion to ‘blue blood’ – noble blood, but that didn’t seem to be right too. Blue is sad, but it is also, to me, cold.
I showed the draft translation to my French friends and they immediately told me that red poppies are also recognised as a symbol of remembrance for the war dead, for the blood spilled for your country.
Which gave me the solution: drops of red. To an English ear that should evoke the red poppies ‘in Flanders fields’ of golden wheat — but to a French ear too. And without replacing one flower for another.
In this video Becaud performs Quand il est mort for a German audience. In Germany the cornflower, die Kornblume, is one of the national symbols. Difficult to say if anyone in the audience catches the ‘anti-war’ message, but they all definitely enjoy the performance and join in learning the lines and the tune.
Whatever difficulties united Europe is going through, Franco-German rapprochement has been one of its greatest achievements.
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.
The monetary prize is yet to be announced, but the panel and committee are quite impressive, and the prize itself (the compass) is good. Russian-English tandems are welcome and so are translations from literals.
This year marks 125 years since the birth of Nikolay Gumilyov, as well as the 90th anniversary of his execution by the bolsheviks in 1921. This year's contest is a part of the First International Gumilyov Festival.
The terms are as follows:
We would like to keep it simple: one poem only from each participant (participant's choice). The translation, along with the Russian original, should be sent via email both in the body of the message and as an attached Word file at the Compass Contest email address (compass@stosvet.net) with the words "Gumilyov Contest" in the subject line. Please write your name, mailing address, telephone number, and email address on all pages of the Word file. The contest entry fee is $15 securely paid online through the Cardinal Points donation page. If for any reason – political, geographical, or technical – you are not able to submit your entry fee, please send a request for a fee waiver to the same address.
The submission period starts on April 15th, 2011 (Gumilyov’s birthday) and ends on July 15th. The names of the winners will be announced at the end of August.
A Russian web-site dedicated to Gumilev with a huge collection of his poems is atgumilev.ru.
Read the Tetradki article 'All Creatures Great and Small' which includes Gumilev's rendering of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
This is a Russian students' course project (Winter semester 2005-06). The video is based on Shakespeare's Sonnet 66, my favourite.
Don't know what to make of it, but the acting and cinematography are beautiful.
66.
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
The translation used is by Samuil Marchak, 1948, Russian text here.
Boris Pasternak's 1938 version is here.
Some of the links here take you to Amazon.com. If you shop from France use the 'livres en Anglais' search box to save on delivery charges. Let me know if you are a publisher of a book-seller and have an affiliate programme.
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.
Russian version of this post is here. Amazon links
Dido's Lament (When I am laid in earth) is as popular in Russia as anywhere else. After a recent BBC Radio 4 programme on Purcell's masterpiece I was surpised not to be able to find a Russian performance of the aria in Russian. They all seem to be in English.
Luckily I have kept a vinyl disc of 'Dido and Aeneus' performed in the early 1970s in Leningrad to the poetic translation by Yuri Dimitrin. The performance is wonderful (Yevgenia Gorokhovskaya as Dido), though, again, I was mildly surprised that it is more restrained in emotion than many English versions.
Dimitrin did a very good job in rendering Nahum Tate's libretto. As it often happens with poetic translations, a few bits were left out. In English, the bosom/breast is prominent, while in Russian it is left out of the text. And 'remember me' is rendered as 'forget not my love'. 'Don't forget my love' may be equal to 'don't forget me'. But here I wanted to point out something else: a clever technique of translating affirmative English phrase as negative into Russian. Negative forms are often more natural in Russian speech and translators should always keep this in mind. Even the simple exchange 'How are you? – All right' translates as 'Как дела? – Ничего'. 'Nichevo' literally meaning 'nothing', as in 'nothing bad happened'.
Dido's Lament in English:
Recitative
Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me, On thy bosom let me rest, More I would, but Death invades me; Death is now a welcome guest.
Aria
When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs create No trouble, no trouble in, in thy breast. When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs create No trouble, no trouble in, in thy breast.
Remember me, remember me, but ah! Forget my fate. Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate. Remember me, remember me, but ah! Forget my fate. Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate.
