Searching for origin of Pleshcheyev's Legenda

[ROBERT A ROTHSTEIN]

The English original of the Pleshcheev poem "Legenda" that was
set to music by Tchaikovsky was by Richard Henry Stoddard (1825-
1903).  An American poet and literary critic, Stoddard was a
protege of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  His poem "Roses and Thorns,"
later reprinted as "Legend," was published in his second
collection, _Songs of Summer_ (1856), about which a New York
critic wrote in 1871:  "... at this day there is no single volume
of American poetry to which, as a whole, we recur more often or
with more pleasure."
    Various English versions of the Tchaikovsky song have been
published, including the one in _The Oxford Book of Carols_, which
are in effect translations back into English of Pleshcheev's
translation from English.  Among the translators was Nathan
Haskell Dole, who also published translations of Tolstoy,
Chernyshevskii as well as other Russian authors.  His version of
the Tchaikovsky song was included in _The Home and Community Song
Book_ (Boston, 1937).
        The Stoddard poem begins, "The young child Jesus had a
garden," which Pleshcheev translated as "Byl u Khrista-mladentsa
sad."  Both texts (and the Tchaikovsky) song tell about Jewish
children stripping the rose garden bare and making a crown of
thorns for Jesus.  Some of the English translations refer simply
to "children," not "Jewish children."  An even more revisionist
version of the text was sung in Yiddish in pre-war Poland and
was in the repertoire of a chorus from the Yiddish teachers
seminar in Wilno.  The Yiddish text, beginning with the words
"A yingl hot gehat a sod" ("A boy had a garden"), was submitted
by a reader and published on January 26, 1990 by Eleanor and
Joseph Mlotek in their column "Perl fun der yidisher poezye"
("Pearls of Yiddish Poetry") in the New York weekly _Forverts_.
Joseph Mlotek recalled hearing the song sung in Warsaw by the
Wilno chorus and remarked that despite the Yiddish text, the
motif always seemed to him to be more Christian than Jewish.
His suspicions were confirmed when Eleanor Mlotek discovered the
1937 English version with its references to Jesus.
        I was intrigued by the story and, with the help of an early
edition of Bartlett, was able to track down the original.

                                Robert A. Rothstein
                                University of Massachusetts, Amherst