Translating Russian’s Poetic Energies: Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Kutik

 

In the poems that follow, we endeavor to make use of the Russian poetics of the original poems by using analogous techniques in the translations. Very little reproduction of such techniques is possible, but we find it somewhat possible to use English in ways that do not betray the poetic possibilities of English usage and syntax, and do reproduce at least obliquely some of the Russian poetics of the original poems. Because rhyme is so important in most Russian poetry, and with a different and deeper (without being obscure) etymological richness that English cannot easily produce—and that English-language readers may not notice—we have mostly used “half-“ or “slant” rhymes in our translations. We have followed Russian subtleties and surprises of meaning as well as English can do but have foregone metrical lines in our translations. In other words, our translations mostly try to preserve the original spirit (including the poetics), not the letter (that is, not a word–for–word translation based on words as signs, but rather words as tiny engines of meaning-making).

It’s appropriate to consider Boris Pasternak’s own theory and practice of translating; he translated from English all the major dramas of Shakespeare and also key poems by Shelley and Byron. His greatest contribution to Russian poetic language from German texts were Goethe’s Faust, major dramas by Kleist, and key poems by Rilke (in addition to his wondrous translations from French and Spanish). Pasternak held that the ideal translation must give an impression of the literature that remains alive today (“living literature,” he called it), not of a dead artifact (i.e., literature of the past that remains in the past).

Marina Tsvetaeva’s practice of poetry translation was identical to Pasternak’s approach. (She translated much of Pushkin and her own poems into French, and into Russian she translated poems of Baudelaire and Lorca, Yiddish poets, and English ballads). Both Pasternak and Tsvetaeva worked to resurrect old texts from their centurial dust and bring them to readers in a modern articulation that their target language allows—bringing what was old into newness.

When translating Russian poems into English, we have attempted to adopt Tsvetaeva’s, Pasternak’s, and Kutik’s understanding of how Russian poetry should be represented in English-language codes and linguistic capacities of the present day, we have also attempted to create in English the linguistic and poetic energies of all three poets.    

~  ~  ~

Marina Tsvetaeva

In 1922, Tsvetaeva began to write in a new style, influenced by the new linguistic energies she encountered in the poems of Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Like Pasternak, she began to write with an ear for surprising morphological and phonetic effects—in the morphemes in one word, she would discover through phonetic and linguistic analogies another word with analogous resources of meaning-making. Above all, her method was for the purpose of generating and discovering strong metaphorical energy. Tsvetaeva would choose to discover a metaphor by means of the resources of Russian word-formation. This poetic method made it possible for her to emphasize her inventive esthetic and ethical maximalism—statements of utmost fierceness (as in the poem below, “I love the filthy rich!”). In Paris, where “In Praise of the Rich” was written, Tsvetaeva, her husband and her two children were penniless. Her stance toward the wealthy was less a political position and more an articulation of her own penury.

In Praise of the Rich     [30 September 1922]

… and that’s why I'm saying—I'm in the stretch
Now, and you're behind me by versts!...
And I consider myself an indigent wretch
And am absolutely upstanding in this world—

I'm saying… that under the wheels of extreme luxury
Is the table of cripples, hunchbacks, and the freakish…
And that’s why, from the roof of a belfry
I'm announcing: I love the filthy rich!—

For in each, their loose, rotten taproot
Already growing its own gangrenous rot in a bassinet;
For their pathetic habit
Of reaching into pocket after pocket;
For the almost soundless plea from their lips,
Performed as a harsh loud cry;
And for how they won’t be allowed to slip
Into heaven, and for not looking anyone in the eye;

For their secrets—always conveyed by couriers!
For their passions—which some bellboy always delivers!
For nights to which they must assent for better or worse—
When they kiss and drink by sheer force!

And for how amidst accounts and gilding and being bored,
Yawning and patting themselves, they're thinking hard,
"People don’t get me—I'm the insolent son-of-a-bitch…"
Let me confirm: I love the filthy rich!

And for more: for how, despite being beautifully shaved,
Sated, filled to bursting ("I buy in a heartbeat!"),
Suddenly they're feeling a smidgen of guilt,
Suddenly they show how badly they've behaved,

It's in their doggy alibi eyes…"How many zeros would
Go after my flagpole? Did you maybe put the wrong weights
In the gold-balance?") And for how, among all outcasts,
There is no other such… orphanhood in the world!

An ominous fable tells that some camels
Did crawl through the needle’s eye.
And how the rich can be so amazed that they too die!
And can feel as guilty for being ill with their ills

As though they were bankrupt… “I'd lend you something… rather
Gladly, but…” And for what they blather from their mouths of zilch:
“I counted the carats—I care about you, brother!”…
By my sworn oath, I say: I love the filthy rich!

~      ~      ~
Tsvetaeva was a Russian Orthodox Christian believer but not a church-goer. In the Russian Orthodox faith, God is regarded as utterly unknowable, and thus cannot be given any possible definition or qualities or aspects. That is, no qualities known to human beings can be attributed to God. This is called apophaticism (which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “applied to knowledge of God obtained by way of negation”—that is, by what cannot be known about God). Tsvetaeva pursues an articulation of apophaticism in the following poem, especially: God’s elusiveness and inconceivable aspects cannot be comprehended. Hence in this poem, Tsvetaeva energetically rejects the idea that God belongs to any worldly existing matter or establishment or practice of faith.

God                         

1          [1 October 1922]
Face without a face.
Inexorability. Grace.
All who divided up Your robe
Became in You one chorus.

Branches tangled and fouled,
Gravel roads puddled with mud,
All who have cried and cried out…
Inside Thee: pacified.

Triumph over corrosive rust—
Steel—blood.
All who were crushed
into groveling… In Thee, up they stood.

2      [4 October 1922]
The cooing solitude
Of the gray poor and doves.
Trees, groves,
Forests—chasing after
His high-flying

White robes?

He gave the holy books, the temples,
Back to mankind, and away He soared.
All those hardwood beings are running—
Each secretly His bodyguard:

“We’ll hide Him—we won’t let Him go!”

The feet of geese in the snow
Make the sign of His cross
When Earth goes to bed. Even the Judas  
Tree runs after Him—and despite
His Son’s death, He forgave it!

The poor were singing—
“Dark is this forest! Such murk!”
These paupers sang, “Hark!—
The last cross—abandoned!

God has risen—soaring
Away from every church!”    

3      [5 October 1922]         
O you won’t tie Him
Down to omens or dumbbells!
Through the tiniest of keyholes
He’ll slip away—a gymnast—so slim!

Like drawbridges divorcing,
Like birds emigrating,
Like sound through wires:
God… departs.

O you cannot lock Him inside
Your life, your fate!
In the mud season of our moods,
God is white-headed river ice—going out!

O Him you won’t domesticate!
In a saucered flowerpot
Like some slow-growing pet
Begonia in a window… God thrives not!

From under our roof dome,
We awaited the Architect and the Voice,
The poet and the pilot, high in the cosmos,
Despaired of ever finding Him.

He is runningness—He Gods away.
The little book
Of the stars, from A to Z,
Is only dust from His cloak.

~   ~   ~

Boris Pasternak

Pasternak’s poetics were related to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s innovations of broadening the practice of rhyme. Like Tsvetaeva, Pasternak had a unique ear for the sounds of a poem, but used the parts or segments of words in a manner different from Tsvetaeva. Tsvetaeva used the morphemes of words by repeating some of them in another word, thus creating an uncanny resemblance that produces an uncanny difference. For example, if in English a poet listened to an English word in the way Tsvetaeva listened to a Russian word, then, for example, the (Latinate) English word metamorphosis might suggest any number of other words containing the syllable “mor,” and the Russian poet might think, or rather listen to words in this way: “Morpheus,” “amorphous,” “amorous,” “morose,” “morphine,” etc. The Russian poet’s ear can hunt not only for repeated phonemes but also for morphemic and phonetic meaning, and this acute listening to language provides Russian poets like Pasternak, Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky (and Kutik) with not only a rich provision of poetic possibilities of meaning-making but also an often startling yet entirely persuasive movement of thought and perception.

But one important difference between Pasternak and Tsvetaeva is that she listens for a metaphor, while Pasternak listens for a rhyme word that produces an image—one that echoes some phonemes from an earlier rhyme word but imagistically contrasts strongly with the earlier rhyme word. Thus poetic discovery is a paramount goal, and in these two poets, especially, it provides the energy of the poem’s thinking, feeling, perception, and music.

Pasternak’s own stance regarding translation was that the strategy must be to translate the spirit but not the letter of the original poem (as we mentioned above, regarding his translations of works by Shakespeare and others). This method means not choosing words in the target language (for Pasternak, Russian) simply because they have the same meaning as the words in Shakespeare’s English, but rather conveying to the reader of the translation the imaginative energies, moods, and thoughts that create a similarity of the linguistic and poetic effects of the original text. The translator reproduces not what the poem says, word by word, but rather what the poem does with words (using sound and rhythms). Also, as we mentioned above, Pasternak’s translations were intended to create the impression of a “living literature,” even in the case of translating a much older source text written in a now antiquated style. Thus Pasternak’s own Russian poetics require translators to create at least some of his phonetic acuteness and the sheer surprise of his rhyme words, and also a rich phonetic texture within the poetic lines.

Pasternak’s first book, My Sister—Life (1922) opens with a prefatory poem, “To the Memory of the Demon,” which alludes to Mikhail Lermontov, and then presents the poem “About These Poems,” which in effect introduces the book as a whole. (After Lenin’s death in 1924, the fifth stanza of this poem was criticized from all sides in Soviet Russia, and made Pasternak’s reputation scandalous, because the stanza implies his doubt or indifference regarding historical time, of which the October Revolution was the emblem and the official centerpiece of Soviet propaganda.) “About These Poems” is one of the poems cited by Nikolai Bukharin when, at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, he praised, warned, and condemned Pasternak.  

About These Poems        [i.e., the poems of My Sister—Life]

On cobblestones I’ll pound and pound them—
Half with glass and half with sunlight; in winter
I’ll throw open my pages so the ceiling will read them,      
And let the damp corners, too, give them a ponder.

To the windows and to winter
The attic will recite them, and bow low;
To the roof-edge go vaulting frolics of snow,
Leapfrogging over heart scars and disaster.
    
A white-out, and not just for a month—a blizzard
Will snowbank all compass points, all beginnings, all time.  
Suddenly I’ll remember: the sun does exist.
I’ll check: already the world’s not the same.

Christmas like a jackdaw chick will peer in,
And the day, out for a walk and a look-see
When clear weather comes, will disclose everything
That was not known to my beloved or to me.

Wrapped in a scarf, shielding my face from the sun
With one palm, and leaning out at the small corner-pane,
I’ll shout to the children below in the yard,
“Little darlings, what millennium is it out there?”

Who made this narrow path to the door
Of my lair, deep-drifted with sugar?—
While with Byron I was having a smoke—
While having a drink with Poe—

While so often I’ve been going—as if only to visit
A friend—to darkest Daryál Gorge—Inferno, arsenal,   
Zeughaus—as I (my life: a shuddering Lermontov)  
Wet my poems like a mouth touching bitter vermouth.

~   ~   ~

For one semester in 1912, before returning to Moscow to dedicate himself to poetry, Pasternak studied philosophy in Marburg, in the noted neo-Kantian “Marburg School.”  He wrote poems while there; he also proposed marriage to Ida Vyssotzkaya, who rejected him. The young woman who then inspired My Sister—Life, Yelena Vinograd, he had known well, before he went to Marburg; and he returned to her after Vysotskaya had rejected him.  

The poem “Marburg” was written before the poems in My Sister—Life but this poem quickly made Pasternak one of the most noted of Russian poets. Mayakovsky praised it as one of the greatest poems in the Russian language, for the bold movement from image to image and sound to sound, especially in stanzas 9 and 11.  

“Nightingale” is a masculine noun in Russian. Pasternak uses a masculine synonym for the chess queen: fyerz’. In our translation we want to show that in the contest between the poet and Night, Night’s queen—the most powerful of all chess pieces—is ambiguously gendered. We could translate more literally “The nightingale’s Night’s male Queen,” but this is cumbersome, not energetic. For the sake of the poem’s narrative, we settled reluctantly for the chess piece called in English the “bishop,” which in both Russian grammatical gender and in its presumed characterological gender as a chess piece, has always been identified as male. The poet’s king is a poplar, which is grammatically gendered male in Russian. The Dawn is probably the poet’s ally in the game of chess: it is pale, and presumably Night’s pieces are black, so the poet is playing with white. Yet Night wins the game by keeping the poet awake all night till dawn. In stanza 9, line 2, Pasternak develops the proper noun “Marburg” into the image of the midday “unblinking” as it pours its hot gaze down on the city rooftops. Russian "ne smargivaya … v Marburg" is Pasternak’s way of developing the visual image of the gaze of midday from within the name of the city. Note the English words that contain “–ar” or “–mar” or similar phonemes in our translated stanza.

Pasternak said that the first part of this poem is emotional and that what were originally the first three stanzas of the second part were “dry as a travel diary,” but in fact only the first of these three (“That’s where Martin Luther lived…”) is preserved in most published editions. The French word arbalète in the poem means a crossbow.

Marburg   [1916, 1928]

Trembling, I flared and guttered.
Shaking, I’d proposed to her.
Too late.  I gave up.  Then came her Never!
I pity her tears.  I’m blessed to be martyred.

I found myself in the square.  To others, I would
Have seemed not a wreck but a man reconceived, 
As each little thing I passed swelled
Into a valedictory meaning, it seemed.    

From under the feverish forehead
Of the steep street, cobblestones sick with flu peered
At the firmament, and the oarsman wind rowed
Over the lindens, but everything, everything—an unreal fraud.

The eyes of all things, I avoided.  
I did not bow to their how-are-you’s—I wished
For no riches of any kind, I tore
At all the cobwebs to keep from crying even one tear.

My inborn instinct—my agèd daimon, my toady-twin—
I despised.  Crawling beside me,
He was thinking, “Infantile infatuation!  He’ll tweeze  
This splinter, but I’ll have to keep my eye on him!”

“One step at a time!” he had to insist.
Guiding me—this wise logic-master—
Through impassible virginal thickets
Of sweet-scented hedges in heat, dark lilacs, lust.

“Go step by step—later you’ll even leap,”
He kept repeating. And from its zenith
The sun stared down at this native of earth
Led by instinct to tread his new path.

Looking at the sun can blind the eyes,   
But already those who stare at rejection are blind.
Speckled chicks were pecking under lilacs.
Like a woman’s Cartier, crickets ticked, and dragonflies.

Ruddy roof-tiles were shimmering as midday stared
At Marburg far below—and a youth marveled
At his home-made arbalète, and the market
Was readying its wares for the Pentecost fair.

Devouring white clouds, the dust turned yellow.
As the storm came near, the eyebrows of prickly
Shrubs arched in the wind, then fell.
The lowering sky clotted on blood-stanching arnica.

Daylong, I recited all of you by heart, dear one.
The way a small-town tragedian knows
Everything Shakespearean, line by line,
I knew all of you—from hair-combs to toes.

When I’d fallen to my knees before you and enacted
My embrace of fog, of ice, of your surface (Oh your splendid
Loveliness!)—a suffocating whirlwind…
But what am I saying? Wake up! I’m lost! Rejected!

~
That’s where Martin Luther lived. And there—the Brothers Grimm.
The roofpeaks—each a claw—the trees, the grave grimstones:
Everything remembers them, encompasses them.
Everything is alive. Yet only mere likenesses.

No, I won’t go back there tomorrow. Your “Never”
Was no goodbye, yet was final. It’s all clear. We’re done.
For us, no more happy hubbub at the station.
You ancient cobblestones—what’s my future?

Bed linens of fog will spread everywhere; the moon—
Doubled—not glass, in the windows. Sadness—a woman—
Will roam my shelves, then sit on the ottoman
With her chosen book, like a frequent traveler by train.

Why am I such a coward?—I know like grammar
My insomnia—we’re allies. Why such a scare
From my racing thoughts, as if they were
Looming out of the night—a sleepwalker?

The Night—she’ll still sit down with me to play a game
Of chess on the moonlit, moon-dark parquet.
The perfume of acacia. All the windows wide open.
And in a corner, passion—she’s my witness—goes gray.

The poplar tree’s my King. Against Insomnia, I play.
The nightingale’s her Bishop. I reach for that nightingale—
But Night is winning—all the pieces give way.
And now by his pallid face I recognize the Dawn.    

~   ~   ~

Ilya Kutik
Ilya Kutik’s poetics arise from the innovations of the Metarealist school of Russian poets (1980s), of which he was one of the founders. While his ear in Russian is wittily inventive, his conceptual expansions of thought and image are a strong mark of the Metarealist aesthetic—to imagine what cannot quite exist, to depict what cannot be imagined, to articulate a depiction of what is counter to reality, all the while combining the real and the unreal. Metarealism can be deciphered in a double way: as a realism either metaphysical or metaphorical. Its major artistic thrust is to discover realities that exist but are obscured from us. Thus, for example, we know that any tree lives an inner life that is intense, but we know nothing about the poetic details of that existence. In the same way, we know that the microbes wage wars that might be like that of ancient Troy, but we, again, know nothing regarding their experience. These examples are simple, while metaphor (in Metarealism) is not simply a poetic device but rather a kind of search engine that discovers realities that open to us only through language.  

Mollusk  

In its cheek, the sea savors a candy mint.
And when waves pound against a pier and drown
out everyone and everything—from just the scent
of the mint, grass sprouts and a faraway forest turns green.

Meanwhile, the length of life shines a vector-beam
at such an emptiness!—from which… is it the hand of someone unseen
that reaches toward us?—so that this someone can deep-
polish his guidance into us like fluoride into teeth?

But could I swallow my main course without first feasting
on starters, without cursing mere sea-splashes?... while
the water keeps awarding me its shoreline Hollywood smile.
And what do I reply, how can I give anything less than a yes?

How can I do any less than my yes? With pressed German "Danke"
or rumpled English "thanks much," I—immersed in word-bouillabaisse
and a clacking of bones, like some speckled domino-fish
or underwater guest—will enter the realm at the bottom of the sea.

And let it typhoon up there, let others climb up the ladders and out
so they can survive the spinning of the world. Let them float—
I, on the other foot, live hand to mouth
and I smile at my dreams and in my sleep I grow green.

~  ~  ~

Description of an Old Photo
            ~ An unknown woman
 
The room's upholstered with white pillows. The one
and only chair—occupied. On it sits—
not in a straitjacket, and with rouge still on each cheekbone—
a woman in a black evening gown. Her look—decisive.

She's smoking a cigarette in a wooden holder.
How did she get here? And why exactly here –
rather than a police station, where a few cell bars
can stun the arrogance out of ten crowding arms?

Who gave her the cigarettes? Who didn’t confiscate them?
Smoke hides her face, but her mouth with black lipstick
subtracts from the rest of her maquillage all effect.   
Grimacing “in” and “out,” this mouth smokes.

And this arrogance does not dissipate. The pillows—stuffed not
with feathers, but foam rubber. No matter what's in them,
no sound from this room could set teeth on edge outside it.
Now: stop smoking! Better: start speaking! At least start!

Why art thou here? (Nay, it’s better to say “you.”)
Why are you here?—dressed to the nines, like a glass
upside down (if you stand up). But in this strange room,
you're sitting so still… Maybe yours is a widow's dress?

And from the walls themselves, a CNN voice, a taunt:
“But in the last 48 hours, in the whole country, no one has died!
People are celebrating immortality!" And yet you so want—
inside your walls of smoke—a complete exit.

~      ~      ~

Hell & Paradise

Into this midnight, this dark moment,
we have been locked as if into a long
match-box. In us, Hell and Paradise mingle
like air and smoke in a smoker’s lungs.

Surely they are not opposite poles,
but placed, I guess, Hell next to Hell,
Paradise next to Paradise, in accordance
with hat match-box's principle and appearance.

But down into this world this darkness steps  
and gratuitously a Paradisal angel flies by
and suddenly scratches the sulfur of Hell
so that off its wing we can light our cigarettes.

~   ~   ~