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ABSTRACT
Like the energies that turn water into waves, it is the impulse (порывь) in the words and phrases which, according to Osip Mandelshtam, turns language into poetry. The impulse has no sound – it is silent – but without it, a poem would reduce to its paraphrase. And a poem in translation? Unless the impulse in the original finds its way into the translation, the translation will reduce to a paraphrase as well – a sure sign, Mandelshtam suggests, that the sheets have not been rumpled and poetry has not spent the night – but how to translate порывь? Working with Mandelshtam's poem “Tristia” – his variations on a passage from Ovid's Tristia – the article proposes a pragmatics for translating an “impulse”.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Tony Brinkley teaches English at the University of Maine, where he is also the senior faculty associate at the University's Franco-American Centre. His translations have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Four Centuries, The Hungarian Review, Metamorphoses, The New Review of Literature, Otoliths, Shofar and World Literature Today. Recent translations include poetry by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry, Rilke, Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak and Akhmatova.
James Brophy is a doctoral candidate in English and American Literature at Boston University, where he is researching a dissertation on aestheticism, individualism and modernist poetry. He has taught Latin language and literature at the University of Maine, and presented widely on issues of translation and lyric studies.
Notes
1. The translation of “Tristia” revises an early version by Tony Brinkley and Raina Kostova. We are particularly grateful to Joe Arsenault, Elena Glazov-Corrigan and Anne Steinbock for helping us as we revised. Without them, we would not have been able to find the words.
All translations of Mandelshtam's poetry are our own. They are based on the Russian texts published in Mandelshtam (Citation1995). For Mandelshtam's prose we have relied on Mandelshtam (Citation1979). Occasional modifications of these translations are based on: Osip Mandelshtam, Собрание Сочинений (4 vols.), edited by P. Nerler and A. Nikitaev (Moscow, 1993–94). Translations of Ovid and Tibullus are our own, and based on the Latin texts provided in the revised second edition of the Loeb Classical Library: Ovid (Citation1988) and Tibullus (Citation1988). Our translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is based on the translation by Babette Deutsch in Pushkin (Citation1964). Modifications are based on the text to be found at http://www.magister.msk.ru/library/pushkin/poetry/onegin.
2. Translations from the Latin are our own.
3. For instance, in an unpublished fragment from 1897, a sign “addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign” that “I call the interpretant of the first sign” (Citation1932, 135). And, in 1902, in the second volume of The Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, a sign is “anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which it refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum” (Citation1902, 527).
While for conventional signs a representational paradigm may be adequate, for existential signs a referential paradigm seems required. One of Peirce's insights, one which Umberto Eco, for example, discounts, is that all signs – however conventional – have an indexical quality and therefore work referentially. Eco resists this insight: it is a fallacy, he writes, to assume “that the ‘meaning’ of a sign-vehicle has something to do with its corresponding object” (Citation1979, 62). “[F]rom the point of view of the function of a code (or many codes), the referent must be excluded as an intrusive and jeopardizing presence which compromises the theory's theoretical purity. … [A]n expression does not, in principle, designate any object, but on the contrary conveys a cultural content” (ibid., 60–61). According to Eco's interpretation of Peirce, the reference keeps changing as interpretant replaces referent and in turn is replaced ad infinitum. This unbounded sequence of substitutions may well justify the conclusion in Eco that the notion of reference is a fallacy – to be replaced by the notion of a sign's content; that is, by interpretation as culturally determined. What Peirce says, however, is that the interpretant repeats the reference of the sign that has determined it (from this perspective, cultural determinations which deny earlier reference become legible precisely as negations).
“It would be difficult”, Peirce writes, “to find any sign absolutely devoid of the indexical quality” (Citation1932, 172). The referent of the conventional sign is general (the notion of a tree, rather than any specific tree), but this referent “has its being in the instances which it will determine” and by which it “will indirectly … be affected” (ibid., 143). The “tree” occurs in relation to specific trees, to specific uses of the word. Through use, both the word and the generality “will involve a sort of Index” (ibid., 144). The conventional sign, “once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows. You write down the word ‘star,’ but that does not make you the creator of the word, nor if you erase it have you destroyed the word. The word lives in the minds of those who use it. Even if they are all asleep, it exists in their memory” (ibid., 169).
4. We will not try to consider Icons, Peirce's third category of signs. For the sake of this discussion it will suffice to recall that they too require interpretants to be meaningful. In ambiguous cases, an icon becomes an icon when you recognize that it has an interpretant that it resembles.
5. For the full Russian text of “Tristia”, see note 10 below.
6. The phrase also recalls the title of Dante's lyric sequence for Beatrice Portinari, La Vita Nuova.
7. Tunc mihi, qualis eris longos turbata capillos,
obvia nudato, Delia, curre pede.
hoc precor, hunc illum nobis Aurora nitentem
Luciferum roseis candida portet equis.
8. Татьяна верила преданьям
Простонародной старины,
И снам, и карточным гаданьям,
И предсказаниям луны.
Ее тревожили приметы;
Таинственно ей все предметы
Провозглашали что-нибудь,
Предчувствия теснили грудь.
9. Что ж? Тайну прелесть находила / И в самом ужасе она …
10. Татьяна любопытным взором
На воск потопленный глядит:
Он чудно-вылитым узором
Ей что-то чудное гласит …
11. Я не искал в цветущие мгновенья
Твоих, Кассандра, губ, твоих, Кассандра, глаз,
Но в декабре – торжественное бденье –
Воспоминанье мучит нас! …
Касатка милая, Кассандра,
Ты стонешь, ты горищь – зачем
Сияло солнце Александра,
Сто лет назад, сияло всем?
Когда-нибудь в столнце шалой,
На скифском празднике, на берегу Невы,
При звуках омерзительного бала
Сорвут платок с прекрасной головы …
12. Я изучил науку рассесванья
В простоволосых жалобах ночных.
Жуют волы, и длится ожиданье,
Последний час вигилий городских.
И чгу обряд, той петушиной ночи,
Когда, подняв дорожной скорьи груз,
Глядели вдаль заплаканиые очи
И женский плач мешался с пеньем муа.
Кто может знать при слове – расставанье,
Какая нам разлука предстоит?
Что нам сулит петушье восклицанье,
Когда огонь в акрополе горит?
И на заре какой-то новой жнзни,
Когда в сенях лениво вол жует,
Зачем петух, глашатай новой жизни,
На городской стене крылами бьет?
И я люблю обыкновенье пряжи:
Снует челнок, веретено жужжит.
Смотри: навстречу, словно пух лебяжий,
Уже босая Делия летит!
О, нашей жизни скудная основа!
Куда как беден радости язык!
Всё было встарь. Всё повторится снова.
И сладок нам лишь узнаванья миг.
Да будет так: прозрачная фигурка
На чистом блюде глиняном лежит,
Как беличья распластанная шкурка,
Склонясь над воском, девушка глядит.
Не нам гадать о греческом Эребе,
Для женщин воск – что для мужчинь медь,
Нам только в битвах выпадает жребий,
А им дано гадая умереть.
13. With respect to Dante's Ulysses, Mandelshtam writes that “it is conceivable to read Dante's cantos without directing them toward contemporaneity. They were created for that purpose. … They demand commentary in the future. … His [Dante's] contemporaneity is continuous, incalculable and inexhaustible” (Citation1979, 268).