When ПушкинComes to Shove

[Alex Shafarenko]

All that was said below and in the previous post by Judson may look completely unimpeachable but it is not. It is in fact a fallacy based on a few common misconceptions.

> In response to Inna Caron: you miss the point.  The dishonestly lies in
> pretending that the rhymed verse translation is a translation in the same
> sense that a rendering of literary prose is a translation: that the offered
> text represents in some full sense the meaning of the original.

I don't know who pretends that a poetry translation is the same as a rendering of literary prose, but certainly no good translator would do, and only a very naive reader could expect it. Indeed one has to be completely
unfamiliar with the very nature of poetry to have this extraordinary view.

Nor is all prose translatable in the forensic sense. The target language has a different cultural context, different cadence of speech, stylistic palette -- hardly anything is the same!.. Translating Isaac Babel's muscular Russian prose (which is condensed to the extreme, full of stylistic colour, trops, as well as controlled pace and rhythm) by just rendering "the meaning of the original"?! I bet in translating "Odessa stories" the exact meaning would have to be modified somewhat (by finding an apt English analogue of a Russian idiom, a paraphrase that better conveys the original stylistic twist, etc.).

A prose translation can even be "better" than the original. Some bilinguals
find Right-Kovaleva's translation of Vonnegut more convincing than its English source, and I for one personally prefer to read Tolstoy in English as I am too sensitive to the grandmaster's sloppiness with the Russian tongue. 
 
> The rhymed
> verse translation rarely does any such thing--as you yourself unconsciously
> acknowledged when you said, "leaving the reader haunted by a line or an
> image, which is hopefully [!] (though not always [!]) most representative
> [?] of the translated poet's intention [?!]."

Did Pushkin write his famous 8-liner merely to tell the reader 
that he had loved someone, still loved her but did not want to disturb her peace; that he had loved her hopelessly and without uttering a word, very sincerely and very tenderly but now wished her to be thus loved by another? If so, that in itself is an excellent translation. It does convey all the information, does it not? Why then does it leave people cold, Anglophones and English-speaking Russophones alike? What does it tell the monolingual reader? Perhaps that Pushkin was no poet, only a jaded lover. 

That, in my view, is a much bigger fraud. The original lines have touched generations of Russian readers, but a prose translation kills off the original art. I frankly prefer Judson's own attempt at a form-preserving rendering, at least I can recognise some Pushkin in it, 
more than I can do in (the pinnacle of literalism!) Nabokov's well known stillborn version with all its terrible imitative anastrophes, a version which Arndt characterised as “sad ritual murder performed for the purposes of an ever more insatiable lexical necrophilia”. 

> My point isn't that the pretended translation can't be a good poem in its
> own right (it can), but that that's what it is--another poem, and not what
> it seems to claim to be, the thought and art of someone else.  

OK, you think by translating word-for-word, you are making sure that, in the words of Nabokov, "the most exact information possible" will not mislead the reader. But it will! The poet chose words to appear in rhymed positions for a reason: think, for example, of "томим/другим" and all the implications thereof. There is a scaffold of sorts embedded in the poem in order to maintain the form. It is clearly marked by the form, and any reader of the original gets the full package. The reader of the literal translation is mislead into believing that all the words in the poem are equally significant. This totally misrepresents the impact. Quoting Arndt again,
literal translation is "a message in garbled prose, with subsequent assurances by way of stylistic and other commentary that the corpse in its lifetime was poetry."

If I am allowed to use an analogy, it is as if a pianist performing Chopin
decided to do away with the timing of the notes. After all, that timing 
cannot be played precisely but the pitch can. So let's play the pitches
and forget the rhythm. The most exact information possible without a doubt. 
The only trouble is: it's not Chopin -- not by a long shot.  


> Marshak's
> versions of the sonnets may be good poems in Russian, but they are not
> Shakespeare, and anyone who relies on them will have an inadequate
> sense of the originals, to say the least.

That's the best they can hope for today. Poetry translation is not 
an act, it is a journey. In the fullness of time better results will appear. 

Of course the debate about poetry translation is not new, yet it is not very old in the Russian-to-English domain either, and, more importantly, it is still ongoing. The position of "congruent translation", which I personally support, was presented and extensively argued for by Dr Slava Muchnick in the introduction of the anthology "Salt Crystals on an Axe" published by Ancient Purple Translations last year. It is well worth the read.

Alex 


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