Olga Berggolts
Alexander Etkind
ae264 at CAM.AC.UK
Mon Jan 21 11:40:51 UTC 2013
Dear Robert,
I agree with your reading and also with the rendering of the poem that you
sent us. Berggolts suffering, her mourning for her child that she lost in
prison (miscarriage under torture), and reverberations of memory that were
typical for the Stalinism's survivors, are clear from her writings (e.g. her,
Zapretnyi dnevnik St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2010). In 1952, she was an
established poet; in 1956, Khrushchev was also quite established. Poetry is
complex, but this is not a reason to diminish its historical relevance.
Best,
Alexander
On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Alexandra Smith
<Alexandra.Smith at ed.ac.uk>wrote:
> 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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>
> --
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>
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--
Alexander Etkind
Professor in Russian Literature and Cultural History
Cambridge University
Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, CB21ST
Principal Investigator, "Memory at War"
www.memoryatwar.org
My latest book, Internal Colonization, is now available from Polity:
http://www.politybooks.com/book.asp?ref=0745651291
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