Wrestling with the near-impossible: is Pushkin's poetry untranslatable?

A seemingly untranslatable poem seems to have a strange allure. The more impossible the task, the more it attracts people. I am not sure why. Perhaps translators are hoping they will be able to possess the poem - like men hoping to possess an unattainable woman. Perhaps they are hoping to grasp the poem's innermost secret. Perhaps they just cannot bear to accept that languages can be deeply, and recalcitrantly, different from each other; that it is possible to do in one language something that can never be done in another. Or maybe one of them really will succeed, one day, in reproducing in another language all the life and beauty of the original...

The most famous short poem in the Russian language is probably an eight-line lyric by Alexander Pushkin that begins Ya vas lyubil ('I loved you'). I have probably tried forty or fifty times to translate it - and heaven knows how many other people have done the same. I have yet to see a translation that is even remotely successful. If accepting one's limitations is a sign of maturity, then I am now mature. In my Brief Life of Pushkin I settled for a combination of description and paraphrase

*

My first successful translation of Pushkin's poetry was born of ignorance and confusion. Alessandro Gallenzi, then chief editor of Hesperus, had asked me if I would like to translate Pushkin's unfinished novel, Dubrovsky (1832-3). We discussed his proposal in a pub, and I agreed. Almost as we were saying goodbye, Alessandro suggested that I also translate, for the same volume, an unfinished fragment called 'The Egyptian Nights'. Perhaps a little drunk, perhaps a little manic, perhaps stupidly ashamed of never having read this fragment, I agreed. The next day I discovered that a good half of 'The Egyptian Nights' is written in verse; six of the twelve pages are in rhyming tetrameters. Since the verse is spoken by an Italian poet with an extraordinary gift for improvisation, and since Pushkin allows no doubt about this improvvisatore's technical gifts, it was out of the question to translate his improvisations into anything other than strict metre and rhyme. 

Not wanting to translate the prose only to find myself defeated by the verse and therefore having to abandon the translation, I started work on the verse first. To my astonishment, I found myself translating the verse quickly and with confidence - and then struggling with the prose, endlessly hesitating between ever-so-slightly different variants. Translating the verse was like turning a key in a series of locks. Either the key turned or it did not turn. If it turned, there was no need to fiddle around. If it failed to turn, then I had to find a different key. The music of the prose passages seemed subtler. I had to keep listening, listening, and listening - to the Russian, to the English, then to the Russian again.   The slightest failure to reproduce the slightest shift of tone seemed hugely damaging.

The improvvisatore's last performance, in a Petersburg salon, is on the theme of Cleopatra. Near the beginning of this 74-line poem, Cleopatra addresses her assembled admirers in these words:

       'My love holds bliss, so I keep hearing.  

       If there is truth in what you claim,

       Blessed is he his whose love has daring

       Enough to pay the price I name.

       My contract binds all equally:

       He who would claim me as his wife,

       He who desires one night with me,

       Must for that night lay down his life.

       'Once I lie on the bed of pleasure --

       I swear by all the gods above --

       I'll bring delight beyond all measure

       Yet be the humblest slave of love.

       Hear me, O splendid Aphrodite,

       And you, dread God who reigns below,

       And you above, great Zeus almighty --

       I swear: until the dawn's first glow

       Brightens the sky, I shall divine

       Each hidden wish of my lord's heart;

       I'll set on fire, then soothe with wine;

       I'll bare the mysteries of love's art.

       But when the Eastern sky turns red,

       When my lord feels the morning's breath,

       Soldiers will lead him from my bed

       To meet the lasting kiss of death.'

*

Most of my translations of Pushkin's verse are of passages that are 'framed' within his prose fiction. Each chapter of The Captain's Daughter, for example, has a verse epigraph, and some chapters incorporate other poems as well. One chapter includes a somewhat old-fashioned (old-fashioned in Pushkin's time!) love poem written by the young hero, Pyotr Grinyov; another chapter includes a moving folk song, sung by the peasant rebels. Once again, I found these passages easier than I had expected. I once mentioned this to the poet and translator, Sasha Dugdale, and she replied that she too had often found that poems within a 'frame' were easier to translate than poems that stand on their own.

Why this should be is - again - not easy to say. It may be that the 'frame' allows one a greater clarity about the purpose the poem has to serve in the work as a whole. Pyotr Grinyov's love poem, for example, is clearly meant to  sound old-fashioned and conventional, and Shvabrin, his rival in love, at once criticizes it as such. This to some degree lets the translator off the hook. Too original, too fine, a poem would be inappropriate. Here is my version:

From lovely Masha I must flee,

       No thought of love dare I confess,

       For never may my heart be free

       While I look on her loveliness.

       But the eyes that first enchanted

       Shine before me night and day.

       By those lights this heart is haunted;

       All sleep, all peace, they drive away.

       Now that I have told my anguish,

       Dearest Masha, show compassion;

       Or forever must I languish

       In the grip of hopeless passion.

The Captain's Daughter is about giving and forgiving. It would be graceless not to acknowledge not only the help I received from friends and colleagues but also the giving and forgiving qualities of language itself. We talk only too readily of 'what is lost in translation'.  What is no less remarkable is how much - sometimes - can be gained, how welcoming one's mother tongue can be. The following pastiche song poem, used by Pushkin as an epigraph to the chapter in which Pyotr marries the now-orphaned captain's daughter, slipped into English as if of itself:

       Our lovely apple tree

Has no young shoots and no fine crown;

Our lovely bride

Has no dear father and no dear mother.

No one to dress her

In a wedding gown,

No one to bless her.

It was as if English were a perfectly fitting garment waiting to welcome this poem. The line 'In a wedding gown' is not there in the original, but it begged to be added; our version seemed incomplete without it - and Pushkin, in any case, uses a rather high-flown word for 'to dress'. Russian trees have peaks rather than crowns, and so the pun on 'crown of a tree' and 'wedding crown' is also - surprisingly - not there in the original.

*

One of the main sources for my Brief Life of Pushkin was a long, detailed, scholarly biography by Timothy Binyon. I could not have done without the information Binyon provides, but this volume also furnished me with a clear example of what I wanted to avoid. In the name of consistency, Binyon uses only his own translations, and he consciously limits himself to conveying the barest, most literal meaning of the passages he quotes. He makes no attempt at all to reproduce Pushkin's music; he does nothing to evoke in the reader the sense that these are great poems.

I myself decided not to quote any passage of Pushkin unless I thought it worked as poetry. Fortunately we live in a golden age of Pushkin translation. Stanley Mitchell's recent version of Eugene Onegin for Penguin Classics is the greatest English translation of any long poem from Russian. Mitchell generously allowed me to quote as much of his work as I wished. This was a great help to me. How better, for example, could I have begun my chapter about Pushkin's exile to his family's estate in northern Russia than with these autobiographical lines from Onegin?

A book, sound sleep, a fine excursion,

The purl of streams, the woodland shade,

A fresh, young kiss for his diversion

From dark-eyed, fair-complexioned maid,

A fiery steed with trusty bridle,

A fancy meal at which to idle,

A bottle of resplendent wine,

Seclusion, quiet - thus, in fine,

The life Onegin lived was sainted... 

*

Antony Wood, has done excellent translations of a number of Pushkin's finest narrative poems. He has done equally good translations of a few of his most famous short poems, such as 'The Prophet'. Often, however, Wood has been especially successful with Pushkin's lesser known, more off-beat poems. I first read this poem about Petersburg in Antony's translation - and was immediately enchanted.

       City of splendour, city of poor,

Spirit of grace and servitude,

Heaven's vault of palest lime,

Boredom, granite, bitter cold -

Still I miss you rather, for

Down your streets from time to time

One may spy a tiny foot,

One may glimpse a lock of gold.

It would be hard to say more about the city - and Pushkin's feelings about it - in eight lines. Like the lines from Onegin quoted above, it gave me precisely the beginning I needed for one of my chapters. 

*              

Wood, however, has translated only a small number of Pushkin's lyrics, and I had to translate other short poems, or extracts from them, myself. The fact that they were intended for a biography gave me various unexpected freedoms. Sometimes I found myself able to translate short passages from poems that I could never have translated as a whole. The following quotation is from a somewhat despairing poem that Pushkin wrote about two years before his death. The lines are effective on their own, and the assonance between 'peace' and 'being' gives the passage a certain shape, without creating a misleading impression of finality:

       Enough, my friend, it's time. The heart asks peace;

Day after day flies past, and every hour

Makes off with some small particle of being.

*

All of my translations in this Brief Life are, in a sense, 'framed' by my own prose. Sometimes I was able to provide an explanatory context that to some degree substituted for parts of a poem I felt unable to translate. Here, for example, I managed to translate the last four lines - and only the last four lines - of one of Pushkin's most famous love poems. On their own, these lines would have seemed slight. My prose introduction allows them a greater depth of meaning:

Amalia Riznich, the wife of an Odessa shipping merchant, was a tall, graceful woman; she is described as having fiery eyes, an unusually white neck and a plait of black hair nearly five feet long. She was pregnant when Pushkin first met her, and in early 1824 she gave birth to a son. Pushkin's affair with her was brief; she had many admirers and she evoked intense jealousy in Pushkin. In May 1824 she left Odessa, and a year later she died in Italy, probably of consumption. One of Pushkin's most famous poems evokes both their parting in Odessa and her subsequent death beneath 'an eternally blue sky'. The poem ends with moving simplicity; the speaker seems unable to comprehend the finality of death: 

Your sufferings, your beauty

Are now just ash and dust;

But the sweet kiss of our next tryst -

Where is it now? You owe it me.

*

Timothy Binyon sacrificed the life-blood of Pushkin's poetry for the sake of consistency. To me it seemed important to avoid consistency, to stay open to the many different possibilities that might work for any particular poem. One of the most famous lyrics of Pushkin's last years is a poem of eighty-nine lines called 'Autumn'. He wrote it during one of two extraordinarily creative periods that he spent on his estate in south-eastern Russia, and the poem is clearly autobiographical. There are good verse translations by both Edwin Morgan and Antony Wood, and I wondered for a long time whether or not I should use one of them. The poem, however, is dense with vivid realistic detail and both Morgan and Wood blur some of this detail in order to keep to the rhyme scheme. I knew I could not do better than they had done in verse, but I decided that, in this case, it would be a mistake to sacrifice any of this detail. And so I translated the last four stanzas into prose:

*

Different poems demand to be translated with varying degrees of formality. One of the first poems I translated for this volume was the song that Pushkin added to A Feast in Time of Plague, his adaptation of a play by a forgotten English writer by the name of John Wilson. Here is my version of it:

There is joy in battle,

Poised on a chasm's edge,

And in black ocean's rage -

That whirl of darkening wind and wave -

In an Arabian sandstorm,

And in a breath of plague.

Within each breath of death

Lives joy, lives secret joy

For mortal hearts, a pledge,

Perhaps, of immortality,

And blessed is he who, storm-tossed,

Can see and seize this joy.

This exemplifies the clarity with which Pushkin can write about even the darkest aspects of human nature. The original is very poised, very measured - and it seemed essential to reproduce this poise. I found myself unable, however, to preserve Pushkin's regular metre and rhyme without seriously distorting his thought. In the end, it seemed best to hint at the tight form of the original - not to attempt to reproduce it exactly.

      *

The more thought, the more imagery, the more humour and - above all - the more narrative a poem contains, the easier it is to translate. What makes many of Pushkin's most famous love poems - like Ya vas lyubil - so resistant to translation is that they depend almost entirely on their verbal music, on a perfect correspondence between sound and meaning. One short poem that proved oddly easy to translate is addressed to Pushkin's school friend, Ivan Pushchin. It is not a narrative poem in itself, but a great deal of historical and political narrative lies behind it. 

One of the defining events of Pushkin's life was the failed coup known as the Decembrist rebellion. Many of Pushkin's friends took part in this rebellion. Some were exiled to Siberia; others were hanged. Pushkin himself nearly participated in the rebellion and only narrowly escaped exile himself. In January 1826 he entrusted two poems to Alexandra Muravyova, the wife of one of the rebels, who was about to set out on the long and difficult journey to join her husband in Siberia. One of these poems, 'Deep in Siberian mines', is addressed to the exiled Decembrists as a group. A gesture of solidarity, it ends:

Your heavy fetters will fall off;

Your prisons crumble - bolt and ward.

Freedom will greet you by the door

And brothers give you back your sword.

The other, less-known poem is addressed to Ivan Pushchin. It begins with Pushkin's recollection of Pushchin being the first of his friends to visit him when he himself was in exile, in January 1825. It ends with a prayer:

First friend, friend beyond price,

One morning I blessed fate

When sleigh bells, your sleigh bells

Sang out and filled my lonely home

Lost in its drifts of snow.

May my voice now, please God,

Gladden your soul

In that same way

And lighten your exile

With light from our Lycée's clear day.

*

The Imperial Lyceum that Pushkin refers to was a remarkable institution, the most progressive of its day. Pushkin and Pushchin were both part of its first intake, in October 1811. This period was a brief golden age for St Petersburg. After the defeat of Napoleon, Russia had, at last, become a major European power. There seemed no reason to doubt that the westernising project begun by Peter the Great would continue, but Russian writers no longer felt that they need remain forever in the shadow of French, German and English writers. The Imperial Lycée, western-orientated in many ways, but with Russian as its main language of instruction, seemed destined to play a crucial role in this new Russia, and the boys who formed its first intake seem to have felt chosen by fate. 

To Russians, Pushkin still embodies this 'light from our Lycée's clear day'. Twice exiled himself, he has 'lightened' the exiles of countless other Russians, under both Tsarist and Soviet regimes. One of the most moving tributes to him was that paid by the poet Vladislav Khodasevich in 1921. In a speech at the Petrograd House of Writers, on the eighty-fourth anniversary of Pushkin's death, Khodasevich (who was soon to emigrate) talked of how the 'Pushkinian sun' would soon be eclipsed. He ended: 'our desire to make the day of Pushkin's death a day of universal remembrance is, I think, partly prompted by this same premonition: we are coming to an agreement about how to call out to one another, by what name to hail one another in the impending darkness.'

*

Michael Glover, who commissioned this article, has just sent me his responses to my first draft. Amongst other things, he asks me when I first felt a yearning to translate Pushkin, what drew me to him, and at what age. This makes me realize that I have failed to convey quite how central Pushkin is to Russian culture, to Russian identity. Nikolay Sollohub, the Russian émigré with whom I first began to study Russian at the age of fifteen, made us all learn 'Ya vas lyubil' by heart after we had been learning Russian for only a few weeks. British conscripts who learned Russian in the 1950s as a part of their military service often had to learn this poem during their very first lesson. When I asked Sasha Dugdale what made her study Russian (in spite of her Russian-sounding name, she has no Russian blood), she told me that her school German teacher had once volunteered to give her a one-off Russian lesson. During this hour Sasha had learned this same poem by heart, with understanding. This had been enough to inspire her to study Russian at university. It is not really a matter of being drawn to Pushkin. If you study Russian, he is simply there in front of you, an unavoidable presence. All I can add is that translating Alexander Pushkin always leaves me feeling clearer-headed, refreshed. After translating Dubrovsky and 'The Egyptian Nights', I resolved never to turn down any opportunity that might come to way to translate more of his work.

The first translations of Onegin are painful to read and fully deserving of the scorn poured on them by Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov's own translation, however, hardly deserves to be called a translation at all. Its precise reproduction of literal meaning makes it an invaluable resource for scholars, but Nabokov consciously avoids any attempt to reproduce Pushkin's grace, wit and fluency - the very qualities that make this 'novel in verse' most remarkable. The first readable translation is Charles Johnston's (1977). Johnston captures much of Pushkin's energy and humour, but he does not achieve Pushkin's clarity, and it is sometimes all too obvious that he is struggling to find a rhyme. Here are the first lines of the description of Onegin at the opera:

       The house is packed out; scintillating,

       the boxes; boiling, pits and stalls;

       the gallery claps - it's bored with waiting -

       and up the rustling curtain crawls.

If they are sufficiently involved in the story, readers may be able to take this in their stride. The first two lines, however, are obscure. The commas after 'scintillating' and 'boiling' are being asked to do too much work; on first reading, the syntax is confusing. Just what Johnson means by 'scintillating' is also momentarily unclear; no doubt he means that the box is glittering from the ladies' jewellery and the men's medals, but it is wrong, at this moment, to be asking the reader to stop to puzzle things out. The fourth line is still more unfortunate; the over-literary inversion - 'up (…) the curtain crawls' - can be read in any number of distracting ways.

James Falen's translation, (Oxford World Classics, 1995) is simpler, cleaner and wittier:

       The theatre's full, the boxes glitter;

       The restless gallery claps and roars;

       The stalls and pit are all ajitter;

       The curtain rustles as it soars.

 *

The word 'untranslatable' is probably best avoided. We only have the right to say that a particular work of literature has not yet been well translated, and that we ourselves cannot imagine a good translation of it. For nearly 150 years Eugene Onegin seemed untranslatable. Now both James Falen and Antony Wood have revealed that it is entirely possible to translate it well. An outstanding French translation, by André Markowicz, was also published only a few years ago, in 2005. There is no such thing as progress in the arts as a whole - Dante is not a greater poet than Homer, nor are Tsvetaeva, Yeats, Montale or Rilke greater than Dante - but it seems that there can, sometimes, be progress in some particular small region of the arts, like translations of Onegin.

Pushkin's finest love lyrics, however, have still not been adequately translated, and it is tempting to say that they truly are untranslatable. But then, until Pushkin wrote them, no one could have imagined that such poems were writable. Translation is no different. Until some extraordinarily gifted translator appears, it is, by definition, impossible to believe that the poems are translatable.

Robert Chandler's Brief Life of Pushkin, and his translations of Dubrovsky and The Captain's Daughter are published by Hesperus. His co-translation of Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades' is included in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics). Stanley Mitchell's translation of Eugene Onegin is also published by Penguin Classics. Antony Wood's selection of Pushkin's narrative poems, The Gypsies and Other Narrative Poems, is published by Angel Books.