4. See After Lermontov: Translations for the Bicentenary, ed. Peter France and Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014), 128–41.
7. TO ITALY
1. “Your value increases when people listen to you.”
2. “And that’s how they write history.”
3. “Do you know the land where the lemon trees flower?”—the first line of Mignon’s song in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.
4. Ilya Serman notes: “Later, critics came to consider these ‘anthological’ verses of Batyushkov’s his highest achievement. Belinsky [the major Russian critic of the nineteenth century] thought them ‘the best product of his muse.’ ” According to Belinsky, these poems are distinguished by “simplicity, unity of thought capable of expression in a small space, directness and loftiness of tone, plasticity and grace of form.” See Ilya Sermain, Konstantin Batyushkov (New York: Twayne, 1974), 142.
5. For instance, D. S. Mirsky writes: “For strange beauty and haunting emotional intensity they are unique in Russian poetry. They are a rare instance of the creative influence of mental illness on poetry.” A History of Russian Literature, ed. and abr. Francis J. Whitfield (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 78.
8. INTO THE DARK
1. On this allusion see Nabokov’s comments in Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated from the Russian with a commentary by Vladimir Nabokov, revised edition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), vol. 3, 74.
2. P. A. Vyazemsky, Selected Works (Izbrannye sochineniya), ed. V. S. Nechaeva (Moscow/Leningrad: Academia, 1935), 267–68.
3. Osip Mandelstam, The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 166, 179.
4. Translated into English under the same title by Elena Dimov (Tilburg, Netherlands: Glagoslav, 2015).
5. See Gennady Aygi, Selected Poems, 1954–1994, bilingual edition, trans. Peter France (London: Angel Books, 1997), 64–65. A slightly earlier poem, “Ever more often—Batyushkov,” is included in Aygi’s Winter Revels, trans. Peter France (San Francisco: Rumor Books, 2009), 28.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
This volume contains, in whole or in part, rather more than half of Batyushkov’s poetic output. These translated poems are at the heart of this book, so I should say a few words here about what Walter Benjamin called the “task of the translator.” The translation of poetry has called forth many dogmatic pronouncements (including those of Benjamin). Many of the arguments concern questions of prosody, which are posed in a particularly acute way by Russian poetry. Batyushkov, like his contemporaries and many of his successors, placed great value on form. His work explores the possibilities of metre and rhyme in many different genres, ranging from the familiar verse letter to the formal elegy. All of his poems use rhyme, generally with an alternation of masculine and feminine endings, and sometimes in quite complicated stanzas, and he was renowned among contemporaries for the sonorous beauty of his language. Clearly it is impossible to reproduce all this directly in a translation, but one can seek to create English poems that point to specific qualities of the Russian originals. In a word, these are not free versions inspired in some way by the Russian poems, but close translations. I generally translate line for line (though with some transpositions), and I try not to omit or replace what I see as the essential elements of meaning. The Russian metres are sometimes modified: for instance, lines of twelve syllables may be replaced by lines of ten, since Russian words tend to have more syllables than English ones. Almost always, however, I attempt to suggest the rhythms of the Russian poems, including in many cases the masculine and feminine endings. Rhyme is particularly tricky; like most English-language translators, I avoid the full rhyming that characterizes most Russian poetry, but generally try to preserve the rhyming principle with a variety of slant rhymes, alliterations, assonances, and the like. I hope enough of Batyushkov’s voice (or rather his many voices) will come across for the reader to see why I have taken on this daunting but (for me) irresistible task.
INDEX OF TEXTS BY BATYUSHKOV CITED OR DISCUSSED
Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.
POEMS
A Bard at the Circle of Lovers of the Russian Word 99–100
Advice to Friends 25–28
‘Am I condemned to hear just drums of war?’ 38
Answer to Gnedich 52–53
Apparition, The 75–76
Bacchante 32–33
‘Believe me, it’s not easy…’ 38–39
‘Blizzards and frosts have come and gone’ (Flowers for our Horace) 163
Convalescence 43, 137
Crossing of the Rhine—1814, The 106–111, 173
Dreaming 23, 47, 162, 185–86
Elegy (Memories: A Fragment) 138–42
Elegy from Tibullus 118–21
Elysium 80–82
Epistle from a Practical Sage to the Sage of Astafievo and the Pushkinistic Sage 166–67
Epistle to I. M. Muravyov-Apostol 18
Epistle to my Poems 24
Epistle to Turgenev 163–65
‘Eternal youth is his’ 166
‘Flatterer of my lazy muse’ 60–61
For N’s Birthday 80
‘For them love pours out’ (On the Women of Paris) 112–13
Friendship 30, 80
From the Greek Anthology 195–202
‘I honestly don’t know the date’ 165
‘I’m in the land of mists and rains’ 125–26
‘I’m very strangely made’ 224–25
Imitation of Horace 220–22
Imitations of the Ancients 201, 210–13, 218, 221
Inscription for a Shepherdess’s Tombstone 75
Inscription for the Tomb of Malisheva’s daughter 209–10
Last Spring, The 133–35
Madagascar Songs 51–52
Muses’ Arbor, The 19, 181–82
My Guardian Spirit 137
My Penates 3–4, 84–89, 172
‘Now I can break the chain of silence’ 44–46
On the Death of Pnin 33–34
On the Death of the Wife of F. F. Kokoshkin 78–79 152
On the Ruins of a Castle in Sweden 121–25, 162
‘Pamphilus is merry at table’ 162
Parting (‘In vain I left behind my father’s country’) 137–38
Parting (‘Propped on his sabre…’) 100–102
Prisoner, The 113–14
‘Reader, have you not heard’ 217–18
Remembering (Memories of 1807) 39–42, 199
Return of Odysseus, The 127
Rivalry of Hesiod and Homer, The 172–73
Russian Troops Crossing the Neman on the First of January 1813 102–103
‘Sails on the water…’ 161–62
Shade of a Friend vii, 105, 115–18, 171
Tasso Dying 106, 171–81
Tauris 142
‘The Grey-Beard who is always flying’ 72–73
‘There is delight too in the forests’ wildness’ 208–209
To a Friend 152–55
To Dashkov 95–98, 171
To Gnedich 31–32
To my Friends 10–11, 147, 149, 178
To Nikita 182–85
To Petin 42, 82–84
To Tasso 48–50
To the Author of the History of the Russian State 202–203
To Zhukovsky 91–94
Torrent, The 76–78
Traveller and the Stay-at-Home, The 18, 128–31, 172
True Patriot, The 37
Vision on the Banks of Lethe
Waking 144–46
‘Who is this with the knotted brows?’ (Inscription for a Portrait of Vyazemsky) 67
‘You are Sappho…’ 54
‘You wake, o Baiae, from the tomb’ 23, 207
‘Zhukovsky, time swallows everything’ 215
PROSE (NOT INCLUDING PRIVATE LETTERS)
A Journey to the Château de
Cirey 111–12
An Evening at Kantemir’s 14, 160–61 192
Ariosto and Tasso 22
A Walk to the Academy of Fine Art 131–32
Extracts from the Letters of a Russian Officer in Finland 47–48, 121
Griselda. A Tale from Boccaccio 171
Letter to I. M. Muravyov-Apostol: On the Writings of M. Muravyov 131
Memories of Petin 37–38, 82, 98–99, 104, 147–48
Memory of Places, Battles and Travels 104, 146
Notebook of 1810 70–71
Notebook of 1817 (‘Other People’s Stuff is my Treasure’) 5–7, 36, 38, 189–95
On the Character of Lomonosov 15, 148
Some Thoughts on Morality, founded on Philosophy and Religion 150–51
Some Thoughts on the Poet and Poetry 17–18, 148–49
Speech on the Influence of Light Verse on the Language 159–60
Strolls through Moscow 64–66
Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry Page 21