Donetsk airport before the fighting. Photo: Michael1238
The other day I was looking at pictures from Donetsk, in Eastern Ukraine, a city ravaged by the on-going conflict. Some of the fiercest fighting has been around the international airport in Donetsk.
The airport is named after Sergei Prokofiev, the great composer, one of the finest melodists ever, the author of many of the top 100 world favourites and some of the most recognisable Russian patriotic tunes, including the theme for Eisenstein's 'Alexander Nevsky' 'Arise, you Russian people.'
Why is Donetsk airport named after Prokofiev? After all, it's mostly known as the industrial heart of Ukraine with its many mines and steel mills. It turns out that Prokofiev was born in the Donbass region (Donetsk and the surrounding mining villages). The village where he was born was called Sontsovka at the time (Sunnyville), now Krasnoye. It used to be in Yekaterinoslav guberniya (governorate), but is now in Donetsk oblast (region).
Here is the Dance of the Knights (Montague and Capulets) from Prokofiev's balet 'Romeo and Juliet'.
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.
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.
