Mistaken Identity

What is translation? On a platter


A poet's pale and glaring head,


A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter


And profanation of the dead.


- Vladimir Nabokov


In her introduction to After Pushkin, a slim volume of English "versions" of Alexander Pushkin's selected verses, Elaine Feinstein writes: "My editorial problem was to see that, even as I urged poets to write poems almost as if they were writing their own, Pushkin was not altogether lost in the process."


But given that almost all of the contributors, culled from the great and the good of British and American letters, knew neither Russian nor the history and culture of the Pushkin period, it could easily have been predicted that they would fail signally to acomplish this task. How could they be expected to understand, from the English "literals" of Pushkin's poems, what made Pushkin what he was? Or to have an appreciation of the very essence of Pushkin, his "ability to extract meaningful music from the most trivial words," and of the "acoustical paradise of Pushkin's iambics," to quote Nabokov?


Translate Pushkin into a podstrochnik, an interlinear gloss, and he vanishes into thin air, leaving lines that could have been written by any doggerel scribbler of any age. No amount of genius will help a poet to produce anything that would warrant an association with the great bard unless he or she makes a conscious and inspired effort to study Pushkin in his native setting and then out-Pushkin him.


Ironically, this inherent danger of podstrochnik-induced superficiality is evident even in the most Pushkin-like efforts in the collection, such as Feinstein's own translation (and this one is a translation, not a "version") of "I Erected a Monument to Myself, Not Made by Hand." It is a fact of literary history that Pushkin wrote his poem mostly as a parody of Derzhavin's translation of Horace, and if it weren't for Feinstein closely following the wording of Pushkin's verse, it would be hard to say which of the three authors served as her inspiration - the message is much the same in, say, both Derzhavin and Pushkin, while the difference between Derzhavin's pompous, halting tread and Pushkin's easy flight of genius disappears in the translation without a trace.


Unfortunately, most of the contributors eagerly made use of the editor's encouragement to write poems "almost as if their own," totally forgetting the other part of her injunction and sometimes producing lines that would be accounted garbage in any language, cf. "Style," by Carol Ann Duffy, allegedly based on the exquisite, aristocratic bagatelle "Net ni v chyom vam blagodati:" "Grace in anything eludes you./ Style and you are worlds apart./ When you're clever, thought deludes you./ When you're beautiful, you fart."


Admittedly, this is about as low as the collection falls. At the other end of the spectrum we find Seamus Heaney's version of "Arion" - the story of an ancient Greek poet who alone survives a shipwreck in which all his mates perish. Heaney's nice poem stays true to the interlinear gloss he was provided with, avoiding any "farts" toward the end. But in the last two lines he kills any claim to the spirit in which Pushkin's poem was written: "And safe and sound beneath a rock shelf/ Have spread my wet clothes in the sun." Any school kid in Russia could tell Heaney that Pushkin wrote the poem as an allegory of his own position after the December 1825 uprising, when his closest friends were hanged and he, the survivor, felt anything but "safe and sound."


The editor makes a curious claim a propos of "Arion:" "Seamus Heaney managed to remain entirely colloquial in his lovely version of 'Arion' while keeping a sense of Pushkin's shape." How Heaney could be said to have kept "a sense of Pushkin's shape" while rejecting its metrical scheme, the use of rhyme, assonance, intonation and its stylistic tone, is more than I can understand. It is precisely the absence of this "sense of shape" that disqualifies the vast majority of "After Pushkin" from any association with that name: All of Pushkin is "singable" and indeed is sung, in operas by Glinka, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky, among others. A few versions of the longer poems in "After Pushkin" go some way to achieving this ideal, notably John Fuller's "The Gypsies." Others, like Jo Shapcott's limping outpouring "Aleko," complete with Pushkinesque lines like "Passion had made a trampoline of his soul," left me unable to identify the original.


Now to Pushkin's shorter poems. In terms of singability, they constitute a big slice of the vast stratum of the traditional Russian cultural phenomenon known as romansy - songs usually for one voice performed to guitar or piano accompaniment. Many of these poems found their way into this collection, but a lover of Pushkin will simply shrug his shoulders or grimace at the ugliness of lines like "Then deep in your mind/ You sort out stuff/ About men who have been unkind/ While I huff and puff." In writing this, Christopher Reid is supposed to have been inspired by one of Pushkin's purest poems, "When Into My Embraces." No doubt Pushkin was pretty physical, but vulgar? Not even in his underground "Tsar Nikita and His Daughters," let alone in lyrics that became a standby in musical salons.


The "Tsar Nikita" jingles are, by the way, very ably translated here by Ranjit Bolt, and they may be said to figure most prominently in the reviewed collection - unlike their true position in Pushkin's oeuvre. Although a dedicated student of Pushkin for decades, I, like most Russian readers, have never even seen them in print, only had them recited to me by a connoisseur of obscene poetry.


All in all, "After Pushkin" may be said to be a very back-handed compliment to the poet on the occasion of his bicentennial. Which reminds me. Last year, when all you had to do to hear or see some Pushkin was just listen and look, I hit on a huge billboard with four lines of poetry beginning "Sred' shumnogo bala, sluchayno" or "Amidst a Noisy Ball, Quite by Chance" signed "A.S. Pushkin." It's a beautiful poem, made even more beautiful by Tchaikovsky's music in the ever-popular romance - only it was written not by Pushkin but by Alexei K. Tolstoy, one of the bunch of Tolstoy counts endowed with literary genius, some 14 years after Pushkin's death. Like the authors of "After Pushkin," the guys who put up that billboard must have meant well, only they didn't quite know what they were about, and the result was much the same in both cases - not Pushkin.


"After Pushkin: Versions of the Poems of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin," edited by Elaine Feinstein. Paperback. 96 pp. Carcanet. pounds 7.95. Also published by The Folio Society. Hardback. pounds 22.50.