On Zhukovsky’s Translations, by S.S. Averintsev

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Notes

1. 1.Here is a word-for-word rendition: At night, near twelve o’clock, The drummer leaves his grave, Making his round with a drum in his hands, Walking back and forth, drumming. With the hands left by all flesh, He moves his drum-sticks Beating a nice roll over and over, The reveille and the retreat.The sound of the drum is strange, It resonates so loudly. See Ohne Herausgeber: Gedichte (Stuttgart und Tübingen: J. G. Gotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1832), 16. —Trans. If not indicated otherwise, all translations from Russian and German are mine.—Trans. Dol’nik is a Russian poetic meter. It has a perceptible internal rhythm created by the alternation of strong and weak syllables. The strong syllables usually correspond to stressed syllables and the weak, to unstressed. The length of the intervals between strong syllables may vary.

2. 2.See his letter to Sergei Uvarov, dated September 12, 1847, in V. A. Zhukovsky, Sochineniia v 3 tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1980), 3: 535–6.

3. 3.Cf. A. N. Egunov, Gomer v russkikh perevodakh XVIII–XIX vekov (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), 369.

4. 4.Ibid.

5. 5.Here is Hélène Cixous’s helpful explanation of Kleist’s famous quote: “‘But Paradise is locked and the cherubim behind us; we have to travel around the world to see if it is perhaps open again somewhere at the back.’ Kleist insists on a place we have left and that has been locked behind us. We have arrived at a point where we can understand that it has been a question of grace throughout. We are now going in the direction in which we should go to find ourselves again in paradise. But since this side is locked, we have to approach it from the other side.” See her Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva, trans. and ed. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 37. —Trans.

6. 6.Nikolai Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1937–1952), 8: 236–44. Also characteristic is the following statement by Gogol: “In The Odyssey, our nineteenth century will hear never-ending reproaches … .What unites its [the epic’s] old patriarchal world with Russia will spread all over Russian land.” ibid., 243–4. The hope that Russian society will be transformed by The Odyssey is, of course, naïve and is easy to criticize. Yet, it is marked by a perception of the ancient epic not as the past but as the finally arriving future. The same unsophisticated sentiments also inspired artist Alexander Ivanov, who saw in the ancient times an energy-filled newness. In this regard, see M. G. Nekhludova, “Bibleiskie eskizy A. A. Ivanova (k istorii sozdaniia i zamysla; k voprosu o stile)” in Russkoe iskusstvo XVIII–pervoi poloviny XIX veka: materialy i issledovaniia (Moscow, 1971), 48–115.

7. 7.Cf. A. N. Egunov, Gomer v russkikh perevodakh XVIII–XIX vekov, 353–57.

8. 8.Nikolai Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8: 377.

9. 9.G. I. Ratgauz, introduction to Zolotoe pero: Nemetskaia, avstriiskaia i shveitsarskaia poeziia v russkom perevode, 1812–1970 (Moscow: Progress, 1974), 14–5.

10. 10.From Zhukovsky’s 1818 “Gornaia doroga,” the translation of Schiller’s 1804 poem “Berglied.” See Sobraniie sochinenii v 4 tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1959), 1: 305. —Trans.

11. 11.These lines are from Schiller’s original poem variously translated into English as “Song of the Alps,” or “Song of the Mountain.” See full text in Friedrich Schiller Archiv (blog), September 29, 2015, http://www.friendrich-schiller-archiv.de/gedichte-schillers/lange-gedichte/berglied. —Trans.

12. 12.V. E. Cheshkhin, Zhukovsky kak perevodchik Shillera (Riga: Serensen, 1895), 171.

13. 13.See I. M. Semenko, Zhizn’ i poeziia Zhukovskogo (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), 159. To appreciate Zhukovsky’s sensitivities as a translator more fully, we will contrast them with those of Del’vig. Consider Del’vig’s 1814 translation of “Phidile” by M. Claudius, whose poetry places him within German and English (Sterne’s) Sentimentalism. Here, unlike in the Russian sentimentalist tradition, the peasant girl is simultaneously innocent and sensitive, her innocence rendered ridiculous by her sensitivity, and her sensitivity diminished by her innocence. She describes her beloved in the following way: “Beautiful, long hair curls along his neck. I have never before seen a neck like his.” Del’vig’s girl puts it differently: “His curly hair / Twined around his neck / Like a poppy covered with dew / It shined, falling on his shoulders.” Here is another example. In Claudius, we read: “What he was saying was also very good, but I did not understand a word of it.” Del’vig translates the phase this way: “We have not uttered a word, / But we knew what each other was thinking notwithstanding.” It is difficult to call this translation. But we will continue. Claudius’s peasant notes with embarrassment, “My eyes looked down at my breast.” Del’vig’s girl, on the other hand, “casts her eyes upon her fingers.” The words are almost the same, but the mood is entirely different: instead of an awkward little German, we have in Del’vig an Arcadian shepherdess. In other words, the discoveries of sentimentalism are supplanted in his version by commonalities à la rococo. To complete the picture, Del’vig’s heroine is “blushing and trembling.” In the original, she is much calmer and far less passionate: her innate peasant common sense, as well as perhaps healthy fear of her parent’s rod and her pastor’s commandment, prevents her from losing her mind. Thus, the atmosphere of the original does not simply change (it changes in Zhukovsky as well); it is completely destroyed. Nothing is left of Matthias Claudius, neither his humor, nor his precision, nor his German national character, nor his individuality. Gone is the sentimental but sober singer of common people and everyday life. One can write the way Del’vig wrote without knowing German, without even reading Claudius. We do not find in his version anything but what the original points him to. Zhukovsky, on the other hand, manages to find in the English and German authors something missing from and needed by Russian literature, something that its former mentors, the French, could not offer. As a result, he explores the potential of the Russian language fully realizing that any translation is necessarily connected with the source language. We have already given a vivid example of such explorations: “Царица сидит высоко и светло” [“The Tsarina is sitting highly and glowingly”]. Here our language habits interfere with an appreciation of Zhukovsky’s aesthetic diplomacy as well as the daring nature of his experiment (the trick is that the word “высоко” [“highly”] connects beautifully with both the preceding and the following word, but “сидит светло” [“sitting glowingly”] is an impossible juxtaposition). In this case, German norms serve as a model for the poet: in German, such adjectives placed after a noun have the meanings of an epithet and an adverb (there is nothing peculiar in the German phrase sitzt klar). If in the German phrase, the adjectives shine, so to speak, through the adverb, in the Russian, the opposite happens. If the German variant is absolutely appropriate, the Russian is absolutely not. Yet there is in it no violence done to the Russian language, whose potential, on the contrary, becomes enlarged. (This case is probably even more interesting than the other semantic experiment of Zhukovsky’s that caught Tynyanov’s attention. I mean the famous “раздается … там, в блаженствах безответных” [“resonates … there, in the silent bliss”] a daring combination not connected with peculiarities of either German or Russian and resulting simply from the word-for-word rendition of the original. Uhland’s Durch die öden Seligkeiten is equally unusual, although not as carefully prepared, lexically and phonetically, as its Russian version.)

14. 14.“Personal reflexivity” means that this reflexivity is different from the kind I described elsewhere. See S. S. Averintsev, “Ritorika kak podkhod k obobshcheniiu deistvitel’nosti” in Poetika drevnegrecheskoi literatury (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 15–46.

15. 15.Arguably the greatest Russian poet before Alexander Pushkin. —Trans.

16. 16.It is well known that Derzhavin’s self-evaluation is remarkably inadequate. He compared himself with Horace, who is probably most dissimilar to Derzhavin among all ancient poets, suggesting that his [Derzhavin’s] Anacreontic verses are soft because of the absence of the letter “p” in them. Even when he claims to have written in what he calls an “amusing Russian style,” his self-appraisal, which might seem daring and realistic in the context of classical rhetoric, becomes only an illustration of generalities, i.e., the rhetorical system here dissolves the poet’s personality somewhere within its rules.

17. 17.Derzhavin’s first wife who died in 1794. —Trans.

18. 18.Cf. Rudolph Buck, Rousseau und die deutsche Romantik (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1939), Wolfgang Ritzel, Rousseaus Selbsverständnis in den “Confessions” (Wilhelmshaven: Nordwestdeutsche Universitätsgesellschaft, 1958), and Ronald Grimsley, J. J. Rousseau: A Study in Self-Awareness (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1961).

19. 19.From Zhukovsky’s 1824 poem “Ia muzu iunuiu byvalo … ,” in Sobraniie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, 1:167. —Trans.

20. 20.Daughter of Zhukovsky’s stepsister, E. A. Protasova, Zhukovsky’s student and long-time passion. —Trans.

21. 21.V. G. Belinsky, Isbrannye sochineniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1949), 27.

22. 22.Cf. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Brentanos Poetik (München: C. Hanser, 1961), 88–95.

23. 23.Available in English as Introduction to the Dialogues of Plato, trans. William Dobson (Cambridge: J. & J. J. Deighton, 1836).

24. 24.Pavel Aleksandrovich Katenin was a Russian poet, playwright, poet, and literary critic. —Trans.

25. 25.Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag, 1903), 8: 132.

26. 26.In his letters to Adolph Friedrich Carl Streckfuss from January 27, 1827, for example, Goethe writes: “I am convinced that a world literature is in process of formation, that the nations are in favor of it and for this reason make friendly overtures.” Quoted in Fritz Strich Goethe and World Literature, trans. C. A. M. Sym (London: Routledge, 1949), 349. In a letter to Sulpiz Boisserée from October 12, 1827, Goethe explains: In the case of the translation of my latest botanical studies I have had the same experience as you. Some passages of capital importance, which my friend Soret could not understand in my German, I translated into my kind of French; he rewrote them in his own, and I am quite convinced that in that language they will be more generally understood than perhaps in German … . These are the immediate consequences of a general world literature; the nations will be quicker in benefiting by each other’s advantages.” Ibid., 351. —Trans.

27. 27.M. Iu. Lermontov, “Ballada,” in Sobraniie sochinenii v 4 tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979–81), 1: 521. —Trans.

28. 28.Viacheslav Ivanov, Sobraniie sochnenii v 4 tomakh (Brussels, 1979), 2: 227.

29. 29.The Russian word барон is stressed on the second syllable. —Trans.

30. 30.Cf. Scott’s own version: He came not from where Ancram Moor Ran red with English Blood; Where the Douglas true, and the bold Buccleuch, ’Gainst keen Lord Evers stood. See The poems and plays of Sir Walter Scott: in two volumes (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1911), https://archive.org/details/poemsplaysofsirw01scotuoft. —Trans.

31. 31.Strangely demonic Warwick instead of William, mysterious El’vina instead of the common Emma, Alonso instead of Duranda, Isolina instead of Blanca, and so on.

32. 32.I. U. Podgaetskaia, “O frantsuzskom classicheskom stile,” in Teoriia literaturnykh stilei: Tipologiia stilevogo razvitiia novogo vremeni (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 237.

33. 33.Zhukovsky supplies the notes taken from the original, but they only intensify the contrast between the outside world and the inner world of the poem.

34. 34.i.e., “Там не будет вечно здесь.” See his 1809 poem “Puteshestvennik,” a free rendition of Schiller’s 1803 “Der Pilgrim,” in Sobraniie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, 1:98–9. —Trans.

35. 35.Konstantin Dmitrievich Bal’mont was a Russian Symbolist poet and translator.

36. 36.i.e., “лишь страсти разряды, человечеким сердцем накопленной,” from his 1917 poem “Opredelenie tvorchestva.” See full text on Boris Pasternak (blog), September 29, 2015, http://www.b-pasternak.ru/vse-stixotvoreniya/opredelenie-tvorchestva. —Trans.

37. 37.Nikolai Ivanovich Gnedich was Zhukovsky’s contemporary. He is well known for his work as a poet and a translator. —Trans.

38. 38.Egunov, Gomer v russkikh perevodakh XVIII–XIX vekov, 359–74.

39. 39.i.e., Mikhail Vsevolodovich Lozinsky, one of the most accomplished Russian translators of the twentieth century. —Trans.

40. 40.Cf. this remark: “Nobody can make judgments about Shakespeare’s ideology from Zhukovsky’s translations that “supplement” the original with phrases like “Submit yourself to God’s will, mortal,” or “Oh mortal, submit to this oppressive force; endure it.” See Natalia Avtonomova and Mikhail Gasparov, “Sonety Shekspira – perevody Marshaka,” Voprosy Literatury, no. 2 (1969): 111.

41. 41.V. G. Belinsky, Isbrannyie sochineniia, 326.

42. 42.Friedrich Schiller, Schiller’s Ballads, ed. Henry Johnson (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1902), 14. —Trans.

43. 43.Vassily Zhukovsky, Sobraniie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, 2:137. —Trans.

44. 44.i.e., idealists living in conflict with the world. —Trans.

45. 45.A character from Schiller’s Don Carlos. —Trans.

46. 46.This is a paraphrase from Dostoevsky’s 1875 The Adolescent. Count Verzilov, its character, has become famous for the following lines: For a Russian, Europe is as precious as Russia; for him, every stone in it is dear and beloved. Europe was just as much our fatherland as Russia. Oh, even more! It’s impossible to love Russia more than I do, but I never reproached myself for the fact that Venice, Rome, Paris, the treasures of their science and art, their whole history—are dearer to me than Russia. Oh, Russian cherish those old foreign stones, those wonders of God’s old world, those fragments of holy wonders; and they’re even dearer to us than to them! They have other thoughts and other feelings now, and they’ve ceased to cherish the old stones … . Russia has lived decidedly not for herself but for Europe alone! Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Vintage Classics, 2004), 469. —Trans.

47. 47.Lermontov’s narrator confesses this partiality in his 1839 unfinished poem “Skazka dlia detei” [“A Fairytale for Children”]. Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, 2:425. —Trans.

48. 48.Friedrich Schiller, Schiller’s Ballads, 15. —Trans.

49. 49.Vassily Zhukovsky, Sobraniie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, 2:137. —Trans.

50. 50.Ibid. —Trans.

51. 51.Friedrich Schiller, Schiller’s Ballads, 17. —Trans.

52. 52.Ibid. —Trans.

53. 53.Ibid. —Trans.

54. 54.Vassily Zhukovsky, Sobraniie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, 2:138–39. —Trans.

55. 55.The Russian word юдоль is an archaic variant of dale. In more modern use, it is a poetic and religious symbol of one’s lot in life, with all its tabulations and hardships. Дольный, which means terrestrial, or belonging to earth, has the same root. —Trans.

56. 56.Friedrich Schiller, Schiller’s Ballads, 15. —Trans.

57. 57.Vassily Zhukovsky, Sobraniie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, 2:138. —Trans.

58. 58.Ibid. —Trans.

59. 59.Ibid. —Trans.

60. 60.Ibid., 2:139. —Trans.

61. 61.Its first stanzas entitled “Molitva russkogo naroda” [“A prayer of the Russian people”] were published in 1815 in Syn otechestva. Zhukovsky later re-wrote the poem that served as Russia’s official anthem from 1833 to 1917. —Trans.

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Olga Volkova

Olga Volkova heads the Russian program at Clemson University. Her work has appeared in Toronto Slavic Quarterly, Studies in Romanticism, Metamorphoses: A Journal of Literary Translation, and other journals.