Olga Berggolts

[Alexandra Smith]

Dear Robert,

I'm puzzled by your text quoted below. Who would be the executors in  
Berggolts's eyes in 1952? According to your version suggested below,  
she had in mind some executors. I see this poem much more complex that  
the rendering you suggest. To my mind, she tries to reconcile her  
different selves in this text. It's a lyric poem that deals with  
individual emotions. Berggolts called to the return of this type of  
poetry after Stalin's death in 1953.

She was awarded the Stalin prize in 1950 (for her 1949 poem  
"Pervorossiisk". And in 1952 she was an established Soviet poet.  
Albeit she was arrested in 1938 and expelled from the Communist Party  
that year, she was released from prison in July 1939 and she was  
reinstated in the Party in  1940.
As Katharine Hodgson (Berggolts's biographer and scholar) rightly  
notes, Berggolts had a complex interrelationship between her private  
and public selves. She writes: "Western scholars have tended either to  
celebrate Berggolts as a dissenting voice, or to dismiss her as a  
Soviet conformist writer. To assume the two views are incompatible is,  
however, to ignore the complex relationship." She also notes that in  
the late Stalin period Berggolts's private and public lives remained  
separate. While she spoke privately about political terror and  
hypocrisy, she did write conformist poetry. In 1952 Berggolts visited  
the Volga-Don canal and, needless to say, it probed to think about the  
labour camp's origins of the canal.
It appears that the 1952 your quoted earlier in Markov's translation  
does reflect her ambiguous outlook: it reveals several conflicting  
elements of her life.The poem is laced with important allusions and,  
if anything, it points to Berggolts's search for a whole that could  
reconcile her conflicting tendencies and enable her to have an  
authentic voice.

All best,
Sasha



Quoting Robert Chandler <kcf19 at DIAL.PIPEX.COM> on Sun, 20 Jan 2013  
19:26:04 +0000:

> Thank you, Sasha.  Nevertheless, I prefer this reading,  which was  
> sent to me off list:
>
>> это прекрасный образец классической риторической фигуры, называемой  
>> "климаксом":
>>
>> я не боюсь
>> я не собираюсь кончать собой от страха
>> я встаю над страхом
>> я знаю, я помню, я могу,
>> я сама буду источником страха для моих палачей!
>
> All the best,
>
> Robert
>
> On 20 Jan 2013, at 11:31, Alexandra Smith <Alexandra.Smith at ED.AC.UK> wrote:
>
>> Dear Robert,
>>
>> In my opinion, Vladimir Markov (sadly, he passed away recently) was  
>> right because he takes the subtext into consideration. The crucial  
>> word in the last line is the word "too" (tozhe). Your rendering  
>> destroys the allusion embedded in the poem. The intelligent reader  
>> of this poem in 1952 would have picked the subtext of the poem  
>> straight away.
>> It is related to the notion of poetic destiny. Markov is correct.  
>> In this poem
>> Berrgolts is inscribing herself into the tradition of subversive  
>> poets opposed to the regime.
>>
>> All best,
>> Sasha
>>
>>
>>
>> Quoting Robert Chandler <kcf19 at DIAL.PIPEX.COM> on Sun, 20 Jan 2013  
>> 10:47:58 +0000:
>>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> I'm not confident that I understand the last line of this short poem:
>>>
>>> Обещание («Я недругов смертью своей, не утешу...»)
>>>
>>> ...Я недругов смертью своей не утешу,
>>> чтоб в лживых слезах захлебнуться могли.
>>> Не вбит еще крюк, на котором повешусь.
>>> Не скован.  Не вырыт рудой из земли.
>>> Я встану над жизнью бездонной своею,
>>> над страхом ее, над железной тоскою...
>>> Я знаю о многом. Я помню. Я смею.
>>> Я тоже чего-нибудь страшного стою...
>>>
>>> 1952
>>>
>>> Vladimir Markov, who is usually reliable, translates the last line as
>>> "I deserve some terrible destiny too."
>>>
>>> This is wrong, isn't it?  Isn't it more like
>>> "I'm worth something terrible…" (i.e. I am worth a great deal)
>>> ?
>>>
>>> R.
>>>
>>> Robert Chandler, 42 Milson Road, London, W14 OLD
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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>
>
>
> Robert Chandler, 42 Milson Road, London, W14 OLD
>
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