Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age

Anatoly Liberman

Description

The first nearly complete metrical and rhymed translation of Evgeny Boratynsky's lyrics

Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age is the first metrical and rhymed translation of nearly all the lyrics by Evgeny Boratynsky (1800–1844), one of the greatest poets of the Golden Age of Russian poetry. Also included is the translation of two narrative poems (Banqueting and Eda) and the most characteristic passages from The Gypsy and The Ball. Each work is followed by a full annotation, in which, in addition to the background necessary for the understanding of the work, one finds an analysis of its form. In many cases, the poems on similar themes by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Yazykov and some later poets are included. In its entirety, the commentary provides a glimpse into Boratynsky’s literary epoch, his ties with his environment (Russian, French and German) and the influence he exercised on later poets. A special feature of Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age is the translator’s strict adherence to the form of the original. In all cases, Anatoly Liberman attempts to reproduce not only the rhyming and the metrical scheme of the poems but also the sound effects and some of the special features of Boratynsky’s vocabulary, while remaining as close to the poet’s wording as possible. A long introduction provides the expected biographical information and acquaints the reader with the poetic climate of the Golden Age and with the history of translating Boratynsky into English.

Acknowledgements and a Few Editorial Remarks; 1. Introduction; 2. Poems; Part One, 3. Embarrassed to Be Merry; Part Two, 4. My Gift Is Faint; Part Three, 5. Poetry’s Mysterious Grief; 6. Commentary; Titles and the First Lines in English Transliteration; The First Lines in Russian; The Principal Themes and Motifs of Boratynsky’s Poetry; Name Index; Subject Index.

Sujets

• Literary criticism

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 07 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785271380
• Langue: English

Extrait

Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age
Figure 1 Evgeny Boratynsky in the 1830s
Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age
Unstudied Words that Wove and Wavered
Translated from the Russian, with an Introduction and Commentary by Anatoly Liberman
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Anatoly Liberman 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-136-6 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-136-9 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
On the cover:
Mikalojus K Čiorlionis “Serenity” (1904)
A mortal genius lives in rapt anticipation
Foreseeing the applause of future generations.
CONTENTS
Your anguish smiles at your deluded senses
Acknowledgments and A Few Editorial Remarks
TO THE READER: WHY BORATYNSKY?
INTRODUCTION
1. Boratynsky: An Outline of His Life and Work.
a. The early years. The catastrophe. Military Service. Contacts with Delvig and Pushkin’s circle. Rise to fame, oblivion and partial resurrection in the Silver Age and at present.
b. Finland. Infatuation with Ponomareva. Ponomareva’s salon . Symptoms of a literary rift among her admirers. Her early death.
c. Boratynsky’s marriage. Boratynsky in relation to his poetic persona. His wife’s personality.
d. Boratynsky’s achievement during the last years in Finland. Retirement from the military service. From the erotic genre to eschatological poems. The old rift between the Classicists and the Romantics becomes a war.
e. Boratynsky and “the lovers of wisdom.” Boratynsky and Schelling. Boratynsky and philosophy. The commonplace of Boratynsky criticism: “Boratynsky thinks.” The connotations of the Russian verb for think .
f. The eclipse of Boratynsky’s popularity. Boratynsky’s narrative poems. Boratynsky versus Pushkin. His complex relationship with the Romantic school. An alleged rapprochement between Boratynsky and realism.
g. The last years. “Twilight.” Boratynsky’s unexpected death at the age of 44.
2. The Poetic World of Evgeny Boratynsky.
a. Boratynsky’s view of his Muse and his gift. His desire to lend the harmony of poetry to life. Boratynsky’s elegies. The inseparability of joy and sorrow in his lyrics. The theme of disease as a dominating theme of his lyrics.
b. Death, progress and the eclipse of civilization in Boratynsky’s poetry.
c. Epistles and odes in Boratynsky’s days. Boratynsky as a dark poet. His orientation toward the past and emphasis on rejection. The literary war. Boratynsky’s epigrams.
d. Boratynsky’s hope for a peaceful future. His death.
3. A Summary of Boratynsky’s Poetic Persona. Some Thoughts on His Language and on Translating Him into English.
a. A condensed view of Boratynsky’s poetic persona. His alter ego as the precursor of “the superfluous people” of Russian literature.
b. The poetic means for expressing estrangement and rejection. Retardation and archaic vocabulary; dense syntax (inversion).
c. Boratynsky’s euphony (alliteration and other phonetic devices).
d. Boratynsky’s meter and rhythm. Lines of varying length.
4. Boratynsky in English.
5. A Note on the Bibliography
POEMS
Part One
Embarrassed to Be Merry
Part Two
My Gift Is Faint
Part Three
Poetry’s Mysterious Grief
Commentary
Indexes
General Index
The Boratynsky Index
Index of Titles and First Lines in English
Index of Titles and First lines in Russian
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND A FEW EDITORIAL REMARKS
It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to several organizations and people whose help made the appearance of this book possible. For years, the Imagine Fund at the University of Minnesota supported my research in the field of Russian philology. The assistance of my old friends Sigrid and David Coats was invaluable at every stage of work on the manuscript. My thanks are also due to Cathy Parlin who helped me process the illustrations.
I am grateful to Anthem Press for accepting the book. Six specialists read the manuscript and quite a few of their remarks left a trace in the final version. In some cases, I preferred to keep my variants and am alone responsible for their drawbacks.
The traditional spelling of the poet’s name is Baratynsky. At the end of his life, he changed it to Boratynsky, and all the recent editions use this spelling, but those who will decide to search for his works and the literature about him in catalogs and databases should begin by using the old, more familiar variant. My own spelling of English follows the American standard, but when I quote British authorities, I reproduce the original in every detail. Finally, it should be remembered that the Russian alphabet lacks diacritics, and the accent marks over vowels, used sporadically in the introduction and commentary and consistently in the name index, have been added for the convenience of those who do not know Russian. Each piece has two dates: the first points to the date of the poem’s composition, the second to the date of the published version used as the basis of my translation.
April 2019
Minneapolis, Minnesota
TO THE READER: WHY BORATYNSKY?

And all your harmony, o lyre!
To life I wanted to impart.
Evgeny Boratynsky […] The name on the cover will say little or, more likely, nothing to an English speaker who has not studied Russian literature. And yet Boratynsky (1800–1844) was one of the greatest and most original lyric poets in nineteenth-century Europe, an author equal in stature to such giants as Keats and Leopardi.
Translated poetry enjoys little prestige in the English-speaking world—in contrast to the situation in Russia, where Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Heine and Rilke, to mention just a few illustrious names, have merged with national tradition and become part of Russian literature. Hundreds of people have memorized passages from Byron’s Don Juan and Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha in Russian.
I have translated and annotated all of Boratynsky’s important lyrics, in the hope that my book will not end up among the non-required “materials” for a few graduate courses but will open to English lovers of poetry works they will read and reread, as people listen again and again to their favorite music. Some of Boratynsky’s lyrics need more concentration than the others. This is the order of reading I can recommend: Nos. 8, 19, 21, 28, 47, 53, 56b, 57, 69, 78, 87, 90, 103, 109, 127, 157 and 158. After this, start leafing through the book from the end, backward, while paying special attention to Nos. 132, 129, 126, 119, 91, 83 and 80. Now it may be useful to turn to the introductory article and read the volume from beginning to end. Even though my translation is at best a faithful echo of the original, some, I hope, may be singed by the sparks of Boratynsky’s fire.
INTRODUCTION

Many are countries in which I have traveled;
Many are triumphs in which I have reveled—
Triumphs were false, but evils were true.
1. Boratynsky: An Outline of His Life and Work
a. The early years. The catastrophe. Military Service. Contacts with Delvig and Pushkin’s circle. Rise to fame, oblivion and partial resurrection in the Silver Age and at present
Unlike some of his contemporaries, Evgeny Abramovich Boratynsky (February 19, 1800–June 29, 1844) was not killed in a duel and did not die of tuberculosis. The family owned an estate in the steppe region in south-central Russia not far from the town of Tambov, and Boratynsky cherished the memory of his early years until his last day. His parents were well-to-do rather than affluent; however, for some time, they could hire tutors to give their children a good education, with the emphasis laid on the perfect mastery of French.
While reading the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev and Boratynsky, one wonders not at how they managed to learn near-native (practically, native) French, while living so far from France, but where they obtained their splendid Russian, for many of their contemporaries did not. Working on German is mentioned in one of Boratynsky’s letters, but in later life he complained that he did not know that language, and it is unlikely that he knew any English, though Germanophiles and Anglophiles were all around him. His correspondence with his mother, his wife and his wife’s relatives is all in French.
The first blow that determined Boratynsky’s fate was the early death of his father (the boy had just turned 10), whom he remembered dimly, as he confessed in “Desolation” (No. 127), but, fortunately, he was and stayed to the