When ПушкинComes to Shove

[Stephanie Briggs]

In the book "Ice Bound"  by Dr Jerri Nielsen, a doctor serving at the South
Pole Station who diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer, she talks
about a poetry recital the group had weekly. A Ukrainian-Canadian scientist
recited Pushkin in Russian.

He started trying to translate it, but gave up and said, "Just listen to the
sound." And the impression she got is the same one I have of Pushkin - he
makes Russian language sound like music.

Isn't that the goal of poetry, no matter what the language?

Stephanie

*****************************
~Stephanie D. (Sures) Briggs
http://sdsures.blogspot.com/

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On 31 July 2010 16:08, Alex Shafarenko <a.shafarenko at herts.ac.uk> wrote:

> Just a little extra point to what I have already said. One should ask
> oneself who the judge of translated poetry should be.
> There is a tacit acceptance of the fact that it is always the
> target-language audience. At first glance that is how
> it should be, since it is their language after all; they are supposed to
> know what is beautiful in it and what is not.
> But in reality beauty comes from the original, and the target language is
> only the prism through which the original
> is supposed to shine. I believe that makes it important that a good
> translation is seen as such by bilinguals.
>
> "Ambidextrous" bilinguals were exceedingly rare in the old days of the Iron
> Curtain (the emigrée community did not
> on the whole have a strong interest in Anglo-Saxon culture, despite some
> notable exceptions), while nowadays
> I think there is a small army of Russians who grew up in an
> English-speaking country, many of them having
> a strong interest in their ancestral culture and fluency in its language.
> There is also a large number
> of cultured Russian speakers who speak excellent English and are
> well-versed in English poetry, both classical
> and modern.
>
> My point is, I have struggled to find a single bilingual of this kind who
> would approve of forensic translations
> of Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Mandelstam, Paternak, Brodsky, etc. Raised
> eyebrows and a polite smile is all you get.
> They hate inept/loose conformal translations even more, true, as they feel
> that those misrepresent the original. Give
> them a good one, like Wilbur's masterful rendering of Brodsky's "Six Years
> Later" and watch them touched, amazed,
> elated and asking tons of questions (the first one would be "where can I
> buy a book of this kind of translations
> for my Anglophone friend, partner, kids, etc..."). Nobody complains about
> getting inexact information content. Nobody
> says it is only an imitation (the original poet, who had the habit of
> scrutinising all translations of his work into
> English, did neither -- surprise!).
>
> The proof of the pudding is in the eating. People who can read the
> originals, who love the originals and feel protective
> of them also love some of my translations. Whatever a purist might think
> about possibility/impossibility,
> I hope I may be forgiven if I say these people know better. Usually their
> criteria are "do I hear the voice of
> the original poet? does the poem send shivers down my spine?", not just "do
> I recognise the poem and not feel
> offended by the translator's liberties".
>
> Needless to say that I strongly agree with Inna and look forward to her
> forthcoming paper
> on the subject when it is published.
>
> Alex
>
>
>
>
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