When ПушкинComes to Shove

[Judson Rosengrant]

About retaining the rhyme and meter in verse translation: it can be done in
English and has been done by modern poets, just as modern poets in both
Britain and America have continued to avail themselves of the resource (for
that's what it is), whatever the academic currency about what may or may not
be acceptable practice.  While vers libre may have its even dominant place,
rumors of its universal triumph are greatly exaggerated.

In any case, rhyme is rhyme and a fairly straightforward thing, although
there may certainly be degrees of quality that depend on its originality,
subtlety, and resonance or dissonance (the interplay of meaning within the
poem's larger structure), but meter is another thing entirely, being merely
the formal underpinning of the much more important values of rhythm and
intonation.

A nice case in point is the following well-known lyric, where Pushkin
readily departs from the iambic paradigm when he needs to for semantic and
tonal emphasis (and of course to avoid the rude sing-song monotony of the
ditty), by exploiting the less obvious qualities of length and bolstering
that with alliteration and assonance: e.g., 'то робостью, то ревностью
томим', where there are only three clear stresses in the  pentameter line
but the other elements hold it firmly together.

    Я вас любил: любовь еще, быть может,
    В душе моей угасла не совсем;
    Но пусть она вас больше не тревожит;
    Я не хочу печалить вас ничем.

    Я вас любил безмолвно, безнадежно,
    То робостью, то ревностью томим;
    Я вас любил так искренно, так нежно,
    Как дай вам бог любимой быть другим.

An English version with an equivalent rhyme scheme and metrical structure
might read:

    I loved you, and it may be that love's ember
    Still smolders in my heart to flame again;
    Yet that love is nothing you need remember,
    For I've no wish at all to cause you pain.

    I loved you with words unspoken, hopelessly,
    By diffidence, then jealousy oppressed;
    I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly--
    May God grant you another's love as blessed.

I myself very rarely translate verse, not because I can't or don't know how,
but because I sense, as others do, something intellectually dishonest about
it.  And of course it's almost always conspicuously inferior to the
original, even when the translator is as gifted as, say, a Marshak.

More often than not, you get a technically brilliant version of гладкопись
(Marshak's rendering of Shakespeare's sonnets) that may have little of the
original's distinctive qualities.  But readers suppose, nonetheless, that
they're actually reading whatever poet has been translated.  They're not,
and that's the dishonesty of it.  Hence, perhaps, the proliferation of
unrhymed versions that may sometimes read like подстрочники (or worse:
Nabokov's Onegin), but that at least accurately represent the so-called
'cognitive' level of the poem (as my rhymed version does not and simply
cannot) and, if they are sensitively and skillfully done, its essential
intonation and voice, as well.  For many people, that vers libre procedure
will be less a matter of fashion or of the perceived influence of popular
culture on the imagined reader's ear, as one of ethics, of allegiance to the
intricate integrity of the original work.

So we'll call such rhymed English versions not translations but adaptations
or imitations (Dryden's excellent category and term) and regard them, at
least in the present case, as а form of etude or exercise for the pleasure
(or irritation) of people like ourselves with the two languages more or less
at our command. . .


Judson Rosengrant
PO Box 551 
Portland, OR 97207

503.880.9521 mobile
jrosengrant at earthlink.net

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