I promised translations - and rhyming ones - and these are underway, but it turns out that when I’m not frantically writing my VL piece in a big rush of guilt and adrenalin it is a far longer, slower process. So while I slog and sweat and haver in the hopes of sounding even vaguely like Lermontov while preserving his rhyme scheme, here are some I prepared earlier. Not rhyming translations, but at least written with an eye to conveying the feeling of the piece as well as the meaning. Pablo Neruda on the Spanish conquest of Cuba, Marti’s emblematic Guantanamera and Gabriela Mistral on fear and loss, below:

Pablo Neruda

NOW IT IS CUBA

And then there was blood and ashes.

And then only the palm trees remained.

Cuba, my love, they tied you to the rack,
they slashed your face,
they parted your pale gold legs
tore your pomegranate cunt,
pierced you with knives,
divided you, burnt you.

The murderers came down
through the sweet soft valleys
and in the high mountains the crests
of your sons were lost in the clouds,
but there they were caught
one by one, until they died
torn to pieces, in torment
without the warm flowered earth
that fled beneath their feet.

Cuba my love, what horror
shook the foam from your surf
until you became purity,
solitude, silence, density,
and the crayfish fought
over the bones of your sons.

Jose Marti

GUAJIRA GUANTANAMERA (Guajira = Cuban folk song)

Guantanamera, guajira
Guantanamera,
Guantanamera, guajira
Guantanamera.

I am a truthful man
from the place where the palm trees grow
and before I die, I want to
pour out the verses from my soul.

I come from everywhere
and everywhere is where I go;
among the arts, I am art
and among the mountains, I am a mountain.
Do not make me die in the dark
like a traitor;
I am a good man and as a good man
I will die with my face to the sun.

On the dark, dry mountain,
the leopard has its coat;
I have more than the leopard
because I have a good friend.

Gabriela Mistral

SLEEPLESS

Once a beggar, now a queen, I
live in constant fear of your leaving;
pale, I ask you every hour of the day:
“Are you still with me? Oh, please don’t go!”

I would so like to walk with a smile,
confidently, now you are here;
but even until sleep I remain afraid;
between dreams I ask you: “are you still here?”

BALLAD

He was walking with another;
I saw him pass by.
The wind was sweet as ever
and the path was quiet.
And these miserable eyes
saw him pass by!

Loving another, he walks
on the earth in flower.
The thorn is flowering;
a song floats past.
Loving another, he walks
on the earth in flower!

He was kissing another
on the shores of the sea;
the lemon-blossom moon
rose and fell on the waves.
My blood could not cover
the breadth of the sea!

He will walk with another
for eternity now.
He will have heaven’s sweetness.
(O God, be silent.)
He will walk with another
for eternity now!

I did this translation of one of my favourite Mayakovsky poems a long time ago now, so thought I would resurrect it. I may look at this poem on Tuesday along with maybe one or two other of his short verse. My intention to focus on his children’s poetry has fallen by the wayside because those charming poems are so full of internal rhyme and assonance and playfulness that I could not possibly produce any kind of translation that would do them justice, even if I had years to play with rather than a short four days of which at least two are taken up with less scintillating, but paid translation work.

So in the meantime, here it is:

THE SLIGHTLY NERVOUS VIOLIN

The pleading violin broke down
and suddenly cried out
so childishly
that the drum butted in:
“It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK!”
Then, becoming tired,
he left in the middle of the violin’s speech
slunk out onto bustling Kuznetskii
and went.
Wondering, the orchestra watched as
the violin wept
without words
without rhythm;
only somewhere
a stupid cymbal
clanged out:
“What now?”
“How so?”
And when the French horn,
bronze-curved
fat
yelled out:
“Dumbo!
Crybaby!
Get out!”
I stood
and climbed stumbling over the stands
cowering in terror at the pulpit
and somehow shouted:
“My God!”
I threw my arms around the wooden neck:
“You know, violin, we are awfully alike:
see, I also
yell -
and I can’t prove a thing!”
The musicians guffawed:
“Haha!
He’s taken a wooden bride,
dunderhead!”
But I don’t give a damn!
I’m a good guy.
“Know what, violin?
Come on -
we’ll live together!
Eh?”

I was going to write whole eulogies to Mayakovsky’s voice, but there’s nothing I can say that will adequately describe it.  Here it is, thanks to the nice people at From the Ends to the Beginning (who also provide a very nice translation):

Mayakovsky’s voice

Tuesday’s piece for Vulpes is going to be on Mayakovsky; you may have guessed.  The plan is either to pick out one good substantial poem (and provide a literal translation, perhaps even hosting a rhyming one here if my skillz are up to it) or look at his verse for children.  Notes and ramblings here, shortly.

Life keeps conspiring to keep me away from WordPress.  But I’m determined to start rambling again very soon, and possibly trying out some of my sillier rhyming poetry translations.  You have been warned.

“I spy with my little eye something beginning with B R.”

“Is it something rock?”

“Maybe…”

“You mean yes.  Big rock?”

“Yep.  Your turn.”

“OK.  I spy with my little eye something beginning with… [frantically searches landscape] S!”

“Is it alive or not alive?”

“Alive.”

“Well, that narrows it down.  Scrub?”

“Yes.”

“I spy with my little eye something beginning with… S R.”

“Is it something rock again?”

“Wow, how did you know?”

Variations on Andean I-Spy include I-Spy (Another Word for Mountaintop), I Don’t Spy, I Thought I Spied for a Moment There (a llama), Oh Wait Actually I Did Spy (a llama), Conceptual I-Spy and my personal favourite, Implied I-Spy.

My research requires I learn Yiddish.  No, make that: I deliberately morphed my research topic into something that would give me the excuse to learn Yiddish and call it work.

I’m in a weird situation because I understand Yiddish rather well - having German and Russian means I can work out a good portion of it that way - but only now am I learning the alphabet.  I am neither very visually oriented nor very organised, so this is the hard part for me.  After a good while of listening to Debbie Friedman’s Alef Bet song over and over and over (here) and looking at charts until my eyes boggled, I finally got up the courage today to pick up my copy of Uriel Weinreich’s Yiddish dictionary (which has been looking pretty on my coffee table) and attack the Foreword.  And it worked!  I was actually able to read Yiddish without relying on transliteration… very very slowly and painstakingly.  I don’t remember the Cyrillic alphabet being so hard, but then I learned Cyrillic nine years ago.  Suddenly I am feeling very old, but still very proud  of myself.

I’m also reading The New Joys of Yiddish, the updated version of Leo Rosten’s original.  I highly recommend it, especially to people who want to learn about the Yiddish influence on English (and it’s in transliteration so you can read it without knowing your alef bet).  It’s an education.  I knew mishegos, schmeggegge and schlemiel were Yiddish words but I had no idea about cockamamie, a-ha and maven.  Neither did I know the difference between Yinglish and Ameridish.  Oy!

Writing the piece on Lermontov left me on the horns of a big fat angry dilemma.  I’m going to try working some of it out here, and I would love for my fellow Foxes and anyone who happens to be passing to give me some feedback.

Here’s the thing.  I’m a historian of a certain school.  If ever you really want to see me flip out, casually drop into conversation something like:

“Yeah, I hear that Stalin’s rise can be pretty much explained by the trauma sustained when he fell down as a small child”

or

“Do you think Trotsky was compensating for something with that great big armoured train?”

So yeah, I’m not what you’d call sympathetic to psycho-history.  By the same token, I have a pretty strong reaction to literary analyses that assume author and narrator are one and the same, or that every action of the characters must represent some subconscious urge on the part of the creator.  Sure, you have authors who deliberately merge life and art; I’ve gone on enough about Tolstoy and his didactic ways on Vulpes in tha past.  But even then I believe you have to be careful, and bear in mind that you’re still hearing a narrative voice.  No reader will ever know exactly what the author intended, what he or she added in or filtered out, or exactly how this was informed by past or present experience.  You can’t see into someone’s head.

When it comes to academic writing, I’m a stickler.  I operate by a very strict set of guidelines.  My sticklerhood probably has something to do with the fact that my subject attracts a great deal of emotive response, and most of the existing literature is heavily underpinned with value judgments and political statements.

Writing for Vulpes, though, I decided to cast off the shackles of po-faced academic thinking and just say what I feel.  Easy, right?  Actually, no.  For one thing, the writing process is kind of marred by the annoying little voice nagging in my ear.  Did you just say Lermontov disliked women?  Where are your citations for that?  You do realise there’s very little concrete evidence about the duel?  You know, you should be stricter with your terminology.  Define your terms, woman, define your terms!

As a result, I end up arguing with myself.  I don’t like Tolstoy because of his personality.  Well, I mean his narrative voice really.  But I don’t think the author’s personal life should have any bearing on how you assess a given work.  That’s my inner (or outer) historian speaking though.  As a reader, I just don’t like the man.  But does that mean I can just go ahead and say so on the interwebs?  Well, this is an informal piece, so why not.  Except that I’m not very anonymous and I really ought to be consistent with my academic writing.  Argh.  But it would be boring for everyone if I wrote a scholarly essay every two weeks.  That’s not what Vulpes is for.  And I really do feel this strongly about Tolstoy.  Hell, I should be able to express that, right, if I’m clear about what I’m doing?  Right?  Wait…

In a way, this discussion is kind of unnecessary because I am very clear about what the Russian series is for.  It’s meant to be fun and to engage people and make them want to read an author they might not have encountered before.  (This is why I won’t be touching War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina and so on.)  Some details are still to be ironed out - will I stick with one piece per author or spread the more prolific ones over several, for instance - but the overarching purpose of the series is clear.  It turns out though that letting your hair down isn’t as easy as it seems.  Either I’m going to have to go for it and not give a damn, or find a way that sits better with my poor little indoctrinated brain.  Ideas on a postcard please…

http://www.pushkinworkingnotebooks.com/publication.html

*cries with longing*

Well, I set out to re-read A Hero of our Time (in Russian, thanks to Maksim Moshkov’s online library) and for some reason, I just could not keep my eyes on the page. Not that it isn’t a beautiful piece of writing. I was thinking about the wonder of the description of Gud-Mountain, with its smoke forming a black blot on the sky, even as I looked at the clock for the umpteenth time and wondered if I could justify another tea break. But something wasn’t working.

Even after several years away from the text, I know Hero inside out. I read it in Nabokov’s translation as a first year undergrad, I read it for a paper in second year, I read it on my year abroad just for fun, I read it to get through exam stress during finals. (I’ll come back to the Nabokov translation one of these days, when Vulpes is in a hatchety mood again). This time round, though, I thought about everything that was waiting for me - the irony, the fatalism, the moody episodes, the failed romances, the deaths - and felt, well, blah. The thrill and the joy of rediscovering Lermontov’s familiar language still couldn’t overcome the feeling of blah. I went to play on Google instead, checking up some biographical details with every intention of coming back to Hero when the blah wore off.

That’s when the plan changed. I came across an online poetry anthology, and Death of a Poet. Suddenly, I was back in love with Lermontov. I got carried away and read the poem out loud to myself and the cats (and presumably the neighbours); I even discovered iMovie and made a recording of myself reading it, since all the recordings online were the typical ponderous declamatory things that happen when a classical Russian actor gets hold of a poem. Then I realised that quite apart from shamelessly copying Rosy and Lisa, and with much less pizazz, posting such a video on Vulpes would immediately bring on one of my fits of internet anonymity paranoia. Anyway, Tuesday’s post will be all about poetry. In the meantime, here is an excellent translation of Death of a Poet (with original facing) courtesy of From the Ends to the Beginning. Enjoy!

Writing the Russian literature series over at Vulpes means I end up going back to a lot of texts I last read as an enthusiastic undergraduate, when I had the time and energy (and the encouragement).  Technically I have all those things now, with the PhD starting this year, but four years in the “real world” doing filing and translating bad screenplays has made me tired and lazy.  I need a serious kick in the pants to opt for reading Pushkin (yes, even Pushkin) in my free time over, say, watching bad American formula sitcoms.  This is partly why I volunteered to write the Russian series in the first place, and it’s working… to such an extent that I need my own blog for all the overspill.

Well, this week it’s Lermontov and A Hero of our Time, and with my classic lack of organisation I’m starting on my reading today for a piece on Tuesday.  I like to call this an intensive writing experience.  I remember loving Lermontov as an undergraduate, to the extent that I carried a little volume of his poetry about in my bag for easy reference.  This makes me rather anxious, because I know what a pretentious, emo little prig I was back then, and I am quite certain that Lermontov outdid even me.  Will I still love him enough to overlook it all?  Updates here soon, possibly even today.