English folk songs - Chukovsky K.I. Translations K
The Crooked Man
There was a crooked man,
And he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence
Against a crooked style;
He bought a crooked cat,
Which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together
In a little crooked house.
Once upon a time there lived a crooked man on a bridge.
He once walked a crooked mile.
And suddenly on the way between the pavement stones
I found a tarnished fifty-kopeck note that was crooked.
He bought a crooked cat for fifty dollars,
And the cat found him a crooked mouse.
And so the three of them lived little by little,
Until their crooked house collapsed.
Translation by S. Marshak
There lived a man
twisted legs,
And he walked for a whole century
Along a crooked path.
And beyond the crooked river
In a crooked house
Lived in summer and winter
Crooked mice.
And they stood at the gate
Twisted Christmas trees,
We walked there without worries
Crooked wolves.
And they had one
Crooked cat
And she meowed
Sitting by the window.
Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall;
All the King's horses and all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty
Sat on the wall.
Humpty Dumpty
Fell in his sleep.
All the royal cavalry
All the king's men
Can't
Humpty,
Can't
Chatting,
Humpty Dumpty,
Dumpty-Humpty,
Collect Humpty Dumpty.
Translation by S. Marshak
If all the seas were one sea,
What a great sea that would be!
If all the trees were one tree,
What a great tree that would be!
And if all the axes were one axe,
What a great achievement that would be!
And if all the men were one man,
What a great man that would be!
And if the great man took the great axe,
And cut down the great tree,
And let it fall into the great sea,
What a splish-splash that would be!
Kaba rivers and lakes
I would pour one into the lake,
And of all the trees of the boron
Make one tree
Axes would melt everything
And cast one ax,
And from all the people make
A man higher than the mountains
If only, having taken the mighty axe,
This formidable giant
This trunk fell from a cliff
In this sea-ocean, -
That would be a loud crash,
That would be a noisy splash.
Translation by S. Marshak
Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain;
He stepped in a puddle,
Right up to his middle,
And never went there again.
DOCTOR FOSTER
Doctor Foster
Went to Gloucester.
It rained all day long.
He fell into a puddle,
Got even worse wet
And he never went there again.
Translation by S. Marshak
Robin the Bobbin
Robin the Bobbin, the big-bellied Ben,
He ate more meat than fourscore men;
He's a cow, he's a calf,
He ate a butcher and a half,
He ate a church, he ate a steeple,
He ate a priest and all the people!
A cow and a calf,
An ox and a half,
A church and a steeple,
And all good people,
And yet he complained that his stomach wasn't full
ROBIN-BOBBIN
Rubbin-Bobbin
Somehow
Refreshed
On an empty stomach:
Ate a calf
Early in the morning
Two sheep
And a ram
Ate a cow
Entirely
And the counter
With the butcher
A hundred larks in dough
And horse and cart together,
Five churches and bell towers -
And I’m still dissatisfied!
Translation by S. Marshak
Barabek
Robin Bobin Barabek
Ate forty people
And a cow and a bull,
And the crooked butcher,
And the cart and the arc,
And a broom and a poker,
I ate the church, I ate the house,
And a forge with a blacksmith,
And then he says:
“My stomach hurts!”
K. Chukovsky
The Old Woman in a Shoe
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,
She had so many children she didn’t know what to do;
She gave them some broth without any bread;
She whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
TALE ABOUT THE OLD WOMAN
Once upon a time there lived an old woman with a hole in her shoe.
And she had guys like minnows in the river!
She flogged them all, cooked jelly for them
And, having fed them jelly, she ordered them to go to bed.
Translation by S. Marshak
As I was walking in a field of wheat,
I picked up something good to eat;
Neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor bone,
I kept it till it ran alone.
MYSTERY
In an open field on the go
I found myself food -
Not meat, not fish,
Not bread or lard.
But soon the food ran away from me.
(Egg - chicken)
Translation by S. Marshak
***********************************
Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy and Bess,
They all went together to seek a bird"s nest;
They found a bird's nest with five eggs in,
They all took one, and left four in.
MYSTERY
Elizabeth, Lizzie, Betsy and Bass
In spring with a basket
We went to the forest.
In a nest on a birch tree,
Where there were no birds
They found five pinkish eggs.
All four of them
Got it in the testicles
And yet four
Left in place.
SOLUTION
At least different
Names are named here
(Elizabeth, Lizzie, Betsy and Bass),
But that's what it was called
The girl is alone.
She went
With a basket into the forest.
Translation by S. Marshak
Little mouse, little mouse,
Where is your house?
Little cat, little cat,
I have no flat.
I am a poor mouse,
I have no house.
Little mouse, little mouse,
Come to my house.
Little cat, little cat,
I cannot do that.
You want to eat me.
Once upon a time there was a mouse Mousey
And I met Kotausi.
Kotaushi has evil eyes,
And the evil, despicable Zubausi.
Kotausi ran up to Mausi
And she waved her boast.
Ah Mausi, Mausi, Mausi
Come to me dear Mausi,
I'll sing you a song, Mausi,
A wonderful song by Mausi.
But smart Mausi answered:
You won't fool me, Kotaushi!
I see your evil eyes,
And the evil, despicable Zubausi,
So answered the smart Mausi
And quickly run away from Kotausi.
K. Chukovsky
Hector – Protector
Was dressed in green;
Hector – Protector
Was sent to the queen.
The Queen did not like him,
No more did the King;
So Hector – Protector
Was sent back again.
Hector – Protector
Everything was green.
Hector – Protector
Appeared before the throne.
Alas for the king
He didn't like it
And Hector - Protector
Headed out.
S. Marshak
Three Little Kittens
Three little kittens,
They lost their mittens
And they began to cry,
Oh, Mother dear,
We greatly fear
Our mittens we have lost.
Lost your mittens,
You naughty kittens!
Then you shall have no pie.
Miew, miew, miew,
No, you shall have no pie.
Three little kittens,
They found their mittens,
And they began to cry,
Oh, Mother dear,
See here, see here,
Our mittens we have found.
Found your mittens, you clever kittens,
Then you shall have some pie.
Purr, purr, purr,
Oh, let us have some pie.
Gloves
Lost kittens
Gloves on the road
And they ran home in tears:
- Mom, mom, I'm sorry,
We can't find
We can't find
Gloves!
- Lost your gloves?
Those are bad kittens!
I won't give you any pie today.
Meow-meow, I won’t give it to you
Meow-meow, I won’t give it to you
I won't give you any pie today!
The kittens ran and found the gloves
And, laughing, they ran home:
- Mom, mom, don't be angry,
Because they were found
Because they were found
Gloves!
- Did you find the gloves?
Thank you, kittens!
I'll give you some pie for that.
Mur-mur-mur, pie,
Mur-mur-mur, pie,
I'll give you some pie for that!
The House That Jack Built.
This is the house that Jack built.
This is the corn
This is the rat,
That's the corn
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cat,
That killed the rat,
That's the corn
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the dog,
That's worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That's the corn
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog
That's worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That's the corn
That lay in the house that Jack built.
The House That Jack Built
Here's the house
Which Jack built.
And this is wheat
In the house,
Which Jack built.
And this is a cheerful tit bird,
Which cleverly steals wheat,
Which is stored in a dark closet
In the house,
Which Jack built.
Here's a cat
Which cleverly steals wheat,
Which is stored in a dark closet
In the house,
Which Jack built.
Here's a dog without a tail
Which scares and catches the tit,
Which cleverly steals wheat,
Which is stored in a dark closet
In the house,
Which Jack built.
And this is a hornless cow,
Kicked an old dog without a tail,
Who pulls the cat by the collar,
Which scares and catches the tit,
Which cleverly steals wheat,
Which is stored in a dark closet
In the house,
Which Jack built.
S. Marshak
Pussy-cat, pussy-cat,
Where have you been?
I've been to London
To look at the Queen.
Pussy-cat, pussy-cat,
What did you do there?
I frightened a little mouse
Under her chair.
Visiting the Queen
Where were you today, pussy?
- The Queen of England.
- What did you see at court?
- I saw a mouse on the carpet.
S. Marshak
What Are Little Boys Made of?
What are little boys made of, made of?
What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails
And puppy-dogs` tails,
That's what little boys are made of.
What are little girls made of, made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And all things nice,
That's what little girls are made of.
Boys and girls
What are boys made of?
From thorns, shells and green frogs -
This is what boys are made of.
What are girls made of?
From sweets, and cakes, and all kinds of sweets -
This is what girls are made of.
Dame Trot and her cat
Sat down for a chat;
The Dame sat on this side
And puss sat on that.
“Puss,” says the Dame,
“Can you catch a rat,
Or a mouse in the dark?”
“Purr,” says the cat.
Talk
Aunt Trot and the cat
Sat by the window
Sat next to each other in the evening
Chat a little.
Trot asked: - Kitty-kitty-kitty,
Can you catch rats?
“Purr!..” said the cat,
After being silent for a while.
S. Marshak
This is the key of the kingdom:
In that kingdom there is a city.
In that city there is a town.
In that town there is a street.
In that street there is a lane.
In that lane there is a yard.
In that yard there is a house.
In that house there is a room.
In that room there is a bed.
On that bed there is a basket.
In that basket there are some flowers.
Flowers in a basket.
Basket on the bed.
Bed in the room.
Room in the house.
House in the yard.
Yard in the lane.
Lane in the street.
Street in the town.
Town in the city.
City in the kingdom.
Of the kingdom this is the key.
Here is the key to the kingdom.
In the kingdom there is a city,
And in the city there is a street,
And there is a yard outside.
There is a tall house in the yard.
This house has a bedroom.
There is a cradle in the bedroom.
In the cradle - lilies of the valley
Full cart.
Lilies of the valley, lilies of the valley
Full cart!
Lilies of the valley - in a basket,
The basket is in the cradle.
The cradle is in the bedroom.
And the bedroom is in the house.
The house stands in the middle of a courtyard.
The yard faces the street.
And the street is in the city,
The city is in the kingdom.
Here is the key to the kingdom,
Key to the kingdom.
S. Marshak
The Wise Men of Gotham
Three wise men of Gotham
Went to a sea in a bowl;
If the bowl had been stronger,
My song would have been longer.
Three wise men
Three wise men in one basin
Set off across the sea in a thunderstorm,
Be stronger
Old basin,
Longer
It would be my story.
S. Marshak
Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir
Three bags full;
One for my master,
And one for the lady,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.
Tell me, our little lamb,
How much wool will you give us?
- Don't cut my hair yet.
I'll give you three bags of wool:
One bag -
To the owner,
Another bag -
To the hostess,
And the third is for small children
On to warm sweatshirts!
S. Marshak
Gilly Silly Jarter
She lost her garter*,
In a shower of rain.
The miller found it,
The miller ground it,
And the miller gave it to Silly again.
*garter - garter
Jenny lost her shoe
I cried and searched for a long time.
The miller found a shoe
And ground it at the mill.
Translation by K. Chukovsky
Two legs sat upon three legs
With one leg in his lap;
In comes four legs
And runs away with one leg;
Up jumps two legs,
Catches up three legs,
Throws it after four legs,
And makes him bring back one leg.
Two legs on three legs
And the fourth is in the teeth.
Suddenly four came running
And they ran away with one.
Two legs jumped up
Three legs grabbed
They shouted to the whole house -
Yes, three times four!
But four screamed
And they ran away with one.
Translation by K. Chukovsky
Funny English songs translated by Chukovsky. These rhymes are easy to remember and children really like them. Read Poems about Barabek, Kotausi and Mausi, Chicken and others on our website.
Brave men
Our tailors
What brave ones:
“We are not afraid of animals,
No wolves, no bears!”
How did you get out the gate?
Yes, we saw a snail -
We got scared
Run away!
Here they are
Brave tailors! 
(Illustration by V.Suteeva)
Crooked Song
There lived a man
twisted legs,
And he walked for a whole century
Along a crooked path.
And beyond the crooked river
In a crooked house
Lived in summer and winter
Crooked mice.
And they stood at the gate
Twisted Christmas trees,
We walked there without worries
Crooked wolves.
And they had one
Crooked cat
And she meowed
Sitting by the window.
And beyond the crooked bridge
Crooked woman
Through the swamp barefoot
Jumped like a toad.
And it was in her hand
twisted stick,
And flew after her
Twisted jackdaw.
(Illustration by V. Suteeva)
Barabek
(How to tease a glutton)
Robin Bobin Barabek
Ate forty people
And a cow and a bull,
And the crooked butcher,
And the cart and the arc,
And a broom and a poker,
I ate the church, I ate the house,
And a forge with a blacksmith,
And then he says:
“My stomach hurts!”
(Illustration by V.Suteeva)
Kotausi and Mausi
Once upon a time there was a mouse Mousey
And suddenly I saw Kotausi.
Kotaushi has evil eyes
And the evil, despicable Zubausi.
Kotausi ran up to Mausi
And she waved her tail:
"Oh, Mausi, Mausi, Mausi,
Come to me, dear Mausi,
I'll sing you a song, Mausi,
A wonderful song, Mausi!
But smart Mausi answered:
“You will not deceive me, Kotaushi!
I see your evil eyes
And the evil, despicable Zubausi!”
This is how smart Mausi answered:
And quickly run away from Kotausi.
(Illustration by V.Suteeva)
Chicken
I had a beautiful hen.
Oh, what a smart chicken she was!
She sewed caftans for me, sewed boots,
She baked sweet, rosy pies for me.
And when he manages, he sits at the gate -
He will tell a fairy tale, sing a song.
(ed. Planet of Childhood)
Jenny
Jenny lost her shoe
I cried and searched for a long time.
The miller found a shoe
And ground it at the mill.
(Published by Planet of Childhood)
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Critic, poet, translator, literary historian, linguist.
The future writer was born in Moscow. Chukovsky was expelled from the fifth grade of the gymnasium and studied self-taught for the rest of his life. In 1901, he published his first article in Odessa News; in 1903, he was sent as a correspondent from this newspaper to London, where he continued his self-education at the British Museum Library, studied English and became forever interested in English literature. Before the revolution, Chukovsky published critical articles about modern literature in newspapers and magazines, and also published several critical collections: “From Chekhov to the Present Day,” “Critical Stories,” “Book about Modern Writers,” “Faces and Masks,” and the books: “ Leonid Andreev big and small”, “Nat Pinkerton and modern literature”.
In 1916, he wrote his first fairy tale for children, “The Crocodile.”
Chukovsky was fascinated by the poetry of the American poet Walt Whitman and, starting in 1907, he published several collections of translations of his poems. In 1909, he translated R. Kipling's fairy tales.
After the revolution, the direction of Chukovsky's literary activity began to change. At the turn of the 20s, together with E. Zamyatin, he headed the Anglo-American department at the Gorky Collegium “World Literature”. Translations of English authors occupied a prominent place in his work. He translated Mark Twain (“Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”), Chesterton, O. Henry (“Kings and Cabbages,” stories), retold for children “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” by E. Raspe, “Robinson Crusoe” by D. Defoe . Chukovsky acted not only as a translator, but also as a theorist of literary translation (the book “High Art”, which went through several editions).
Chukovsky - historian and researcher of the work of N.A. Nekrasova. He owns the books “Stories about Nekrasov” (1930) and “The Mastery of Nekrasov” (1952). He published dozens of articles about Nekrasov, and found hundreds of Nekrasov’s lines banned by censorship. Articles are devoted to the era of Nekrasov - about Vasily Sleptsov, Nikolai Uspensky, Avdotya Panayeva, A. Druzhinin.
In his critical works, Chukovsky always started from thinking about the writer’s language. In the late 1950s, he took part in discussions about language and wrote the book Live as Life (1962), in which he acted as a linguist. Defending the living language from the dominance of bureaucratic figures of speech, he declared “clericalism” the main disease of the modern Russian language. With his light hand, this word entered the Russian language.
A large place in Chukovsky’s literary heritage is occupied by his memories of I. Repin, M. Gorky, V. Korolenko and other contemporaries, collected in his book “Contemporaries” (1962). The memoirs were written based on the diaries that Chukovsky kept throughout his life. “The Diary” was published posthumously (1901–1929. - M.: Soviet Writer, 1991; 1930–1969. - M.: Modern Writer, 1994). The handwritten almanac “Chukokkala”, which contains autographs, drawings, and jokes of writers and artists, was also a great help for memory. Chukokkala was also published posthumously (1979; 2nd ed. 2000).
Chukovsky gained greatest fame as a children's writer. His fairy tales “Tsokotukha Fly” (1924), “Cockroach” (1923), “Moidodyr” (1923), “Barmaley” (1925), “Confusion” (1926), “Telephone” (1926) and others are loved many generations of children. Chukovsky summarized his observations on the psyche of small children, on how they master their native language, in his famous book “From Two to Five,” which went through 21 editions during his lifetime.
Critics noted that at least six Chukovskys can be counted in literature. This is Chukovsky - critic, translator, children's poet, literary historian, linguist, memoirist. His books have been translated into many foreign languages from Japan to the USA.
In 1962, Oxford University awarded Korney Chukovsky the degree of Doctor of Literature Honoris causa, and in the same year he was awarded the Lenin Prize.
The translator differs from the creator only in name.
Vasily Trediakovsky
The fact of the matter is that from a literary translation we demand that it reproduce before us not only the images and thoughts of the translated author, not only his plot schemes, but also his literary manner, his creative personality, his style. If this task is not completed, the translation is no good. This is slander against the writer, which is all the more disgusting because the author almost never has the opportunity to refute it.
This slander is very diverse. Most often, it consists in the fact that instead of the author’s true personality, another appears before the reader, not only unlike her, but clearly hostile to her.
When Simon Chikovani, the famous Georgian poet, saw his poem translated into Russian, he turned to the translators with a request: “I ask that they not translate me at all.”
That is: I don’t want to appear before Russian readers in the fantastic form that my translators give me. If they are unable to reproduce my true creative personality in translation, then let them leave my works alone.
For the grief is not that a bad translator will distort this or that line of Chikovani, but that he will distort Chikovani himself, giving him a different face.
“I,” says the poet, “spoke against exoticism, against the saccharification of Georgian literature, against kebabs and daggers.” And the translation “turned out to be kebabs, wines, wineskins, which I didn’t have and couldn’t have, because, firstly, the material didn’t require it, and secondly, kebabs and wineskins are not my thing” 1 .
It turns out that instead of the real Chikovani, we were shown someone else who not only does not look like him, but is deeply hated by him - the dagger figure of a Caucasian who only wants to dance the lezginka on the stage. Meanwhile, it was precisely this barbecue interpretation of the Caucasus that Chikovani fought in his poems.
So the translator in this case acted as an enemy of the translated author and forced him to embody in his work tendencies, ideas and images that he hated.
This is the main danger of bad translations: they distort not only individual words or phrases, but also the very essence of the translated author. This happens much more often than people think. The translator, so to speak, puts a homemade mask on the author and passes off this mask as his living face.
As far as style is concerned, every creation of an artist is, in essence, his self-portrait, for, willingly or unwillingly, the artist reflects himself in his style.
Trediakovsky also expressed this:
Walt Whitman said the same thing:
“Understand that there cannot be a single feature in your writings that is not in you. If you are vulgar or angry, it will not hide from them. If you like to have a footman at your chair during dinner, this will also be reflected in your writings. If you are a grouch or an envious person, or don’t believe in an afterlife, or have a lowly view of women, this will be reflected even in your omissions, even in what you don’t write. There is no such trick, no such technique, no such recipe to hide at least one of your flaws from your writings” 2.
The reflection of the writer’s personality in the language of his works is called his individual style, inherent to him alone. That's why I say that if we distort his style, we thereby distort his face. If, through our translation, we impose our own style on him, we will turn his self-portrait into a self-portrait of the translator.
Therefore, it is in vain that reviewers, when criticizing this or that translation, note only dictionary errors in it.
It is much more important to catch malicious deviations from the original, which are organically connected with the personality of the translator and in their mass reflect it, overshadowing the translated author. It is much more important to find that dominant deviation from the original, with the help of which the translator imposes his literary self on the reader.
This is the fatal role of translators: the poets they translate often become their doubles. The ancient translations of Homer are indicative in this regard. In England, the Iliad was translated by such great poets as Chapman, Pope and Cowper, but you read these translations and see that there are as many Homers as there are translators. Chapman's Homer is florid, like Chapman, Pope's is pompous, like Pope's, Cowper's is dry and laconic, like Cowper's.
The same thing happened with the poems of the great English lyricist Percy Bysshe Shelley in the translation by Konstantin Balmont: the personality of the translator was too sharply imprinted on the texts of the translation he produced.
It is not individual errors (very numerous) that are striking in this translation, but rather a whole system of errors, a whole system of gags, which in their totality change Shelley’s very physiognomy beyond recognition.
All of Balmont’s adjectives are united into a kind of harmonious whole, they all have the same haberdashery, romance style, and this causes the author a thousand times more damage than random vocabulary errors.
Shelley writes: lute, Balmont translates: the roar of the enchantress’s lute (619, 186) 3.
Shelley wrote: sleep, he translates: luxurious bliss (623, 194).
Shelley wrote: woman, he translates: woman-picture (500, 213).
Shelley wrote: petals, he translates: lush bouquets (507, 179).
Shelley wrote: sound, he translates: a living combination of consonances (505, 203).
So line by line Balmont changes all of Shelley’s poems, giving them the beauty of cheap romances.
And at the same time he attaches some kind of stereotyped epithet to almost every word.
Shelley has stars, Balmont has bright stars (532, 153).
Shelley has an eye, Balmont has a bright eye (532, 135).
Shelley has sadness, Balmont has agonizing torment (504, 191).
Thanks to such systematic changes to the text, Shelley becomes strangely similar to Balmont.
Balmontizing Shelley's poetry, Balmont gives the British poet his own sweeping gestures. Where Shelley has only one single winter twig, Balmont has the widest landscape:
Among the thickets (!) of firs (!) and birches (!),
All around (!), wherever (!) the eye (!) looks (!),
Cold (!) snow (!) fields (!) were covered (!).
I use exclamation marks in parentheses to mark words that Shelley does not have.
From one branch at Balmont a whole thicket grew; from one word winter, vast snowy (and Russian) plains unfolded.
There is such a generous sweep of gestures on literally every page.
Where Shelley has a sunset ray, Balmont has a whole glow: the sunset burns, sparkles with amber (440, 7).
Shelley, for example, says: “You are so kind,” and Balmont pours out a whole fountain of pleasantries:
You are close to me (!), like the night (!) to the radiance of the day (!),
Like a homeland (!) at the last (!) moment (!) of exile (!).
(627, 3)
Shelley glorifies, for example, the wedding night (“A Bridal Song”) - and this is enough for Balmont to create a whole bunch of well-worn cliches that accompany the image of the wedding night in the lusty philistine brains: “self-forgetfulness”, “merging of passion”, “headboard” , “luxurious bliss.”
Shelley mentioned the nightingale, and here we read from Balmont:
It’s as if he’s composing hymns (!) to the moon (!).
(101)
For what kind of nightingale is it if it does not praise the moon? As soon as Shelley uttered the word lightning, Balmont had a tercet ready:
...And lightning burning (!) light (!)
Cut a depth in the sky (!),
And her loud laughter, giving birth (!) to a wave (!) in the seas (!).
(532, 183)
Therefore, we are no longer surprised to find in him such beauties as the gentle purple of the day, the sigh of a dream, the sweet hour of happiness, the inexpressible delight of being, the foggy path of life, the secrets of fugitive dreams and similar romance rubbish.
Even in the poem, which was translated more or less accurately by Balmont, there is such a vulgar insertion:
Oh, why, my friend (!) adorable (!),
Shouldn't we merge with you?
(503, 86)
This is the huge imprint the translator’s personality leaves on the personality of the author he is translating. Not only did Balmont distort Shelley’s poems in his translations, he distorted Shelley’s very physiognomy, he gave his beautiful face features of his own personality.
It turned out to be a new face, half-Shelley, half-Balmont - a certain, I would say, Shelmont.
This often happens with poets: when translating them, translators stick out their ego too much, and the more expressive the personality of the translator himself, the more it obscures the translated author from us. Precisely because Balmont has his own literary personality so sharply expressed, he, with all his excellent talent, is not able to reflect the individuality of another poet in translations. And since his talent is foppish, Shelley also became foul with him.
Even more instructive are the translations of the poems of the American poet Walt Whitman, made by the same Balmont.
Even without knowing these translations, anyone could predict in advance that the creative face of Walt Whitman would be distorted in them in the most treacherous way, since, it seems, there was no other writer in the world more distant from him than Balmont.
After all, Walt Whitman, in his work, struggled all his life with frivolous rhetoric, with pompous “music of words,” with external beauty; long before the appearance of Balmont, he declared himself the blood enemy of those poetic qualities that form the basis of Balmontism.
It was this blood enemy that Balmont tried to make his brother in the lyre, and we can easily imagine how, after such balmontization, Walt Whitman’s face became distorted.
Translation turned into a struggle between the translator and the poet being translated, into an incessant polemic with him. It could not be otherwise, because, in essence, Balmont hates the American bard, does not allow him to be what he is, tries in every possible way to “correct” him, imposes on him his Balmontisms, his pretentious Art Nouveau style.
For example, Balmont does not allow Walt Whitman to speak in ordinary language and stubbornly replaces his simple words with archaic, Church Slavonic ones.
Whitman says, for example, breasts. Balmont transfers the womb.
Whitman says flag. Balmont transfers the banner.
Whitman says I raise. Balmont translates lifting 4.
Balmont seems ashamed that Whitman writes so unsightly and rudely. He strives to sweeten his poems with Slavicisms. On page 38 he even starts to get milky. And on the 43rd - daughters.
Read, for example, “Song of the Dawn Banner,” from which the examples I gave are taken. There are dozens of Balmontisms such as “music of kissing words” (138), “countless arable lands” (135), “countless carts” (135), there Whitman, who rejected rhyme, rhymes at Balmont’s whim:
We will spin with the winds,
Have fun with the endless wind.
(133)
Everything here, yes, everything I want,
I, a battle banner, look like a sword.
(137)
What Balmont especially hates is the realistic, business-like concreteness that Whitman strives for. And this is understandable, since Balmont generally cultivated vague, hazy images.
The original says definitely and precisely: my Mississippi, my fields in Illinois, my fields in Missouri. Smoothing out this geographical distinctness of words, deliberately veiling it, Balmont translates as follows:
And rivers, and fields, and valleys.
(136)
With such subtle techniques, the translator subordinates the translated author to his favorite style.
In a word, if Walt Whitman knew Russian and could get acquainted with Balmont’s translation, he would certainly address the translator with the request: “I ask that they not translate me at all,” since he would understand that his poems were in his hands the antipode, who, with the help of a whole system of adverbs, distorted his face in his own way.
Here I am not talking about random mistakes and blunders, of which Balmont has many.
Whitman admires lilacs, the image of which plays a significant role in his poetry. In English, lilac is lilac, but the translator mistook lilac for a lily and created a species unknown in botany: a lily growing as a wild bush.
Of course, occasional errors are hardly excusable, but still they do not determine the quality of a particular translation.
Here, I repeat, what is important is the system of deviations from the original text: not one error or two, but a whole group of errors that produce in the reader’s mind the same devastating effect: a distortion of the creative personality of the translated author. Random errors are mere nonsense compared to these subtle violations of the author's will, the author's style, which reflect the creative personality of the translator.
No matter how insignificant in itself each such violation of the author’s will may be, in their entirety they represent a colossal harmful force that can turn any original master into a wretched scribbler and generally distort his personality beyond recognition.
These bacilli act imperceptibly, but violently: in one line they will extinguish some burning epithet, in another they will destroy the living pulsation of the rhythm, in the third they will etch out some warm paint - and now there is nothing left of the original: all of it, from beginning to end, became different, as if it had been created by another person who had nothing in common with the author.
Meanwhile, the so-called ordinary people are extremely fond of such reviews, where only individual mistakes made by this or that translator are exposed. They are sure that these mistakes - more or less accidental - measure the entire value of the translation, whereas in fact (I repeat again and again!) the grief is not in individual errors, but in a whole complex of gags, which in their totality change the style of the original.
The translations of the greatest Russian translator, Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky, in most cases reproduce the original with amazing accuracy. His language is so strong and rich that it seems that there are no difficulties that he cannot cope with. Pushkin called Zhukovsky “the genius of translation.” “...In struggles with difficulty he is an extraordinary strongman!” - he said about Zhukovsky in a letter 5.
And yet, the system of deviations from the original that he allows also leads to the fact that the face of the translated author is sometimes replaced by the face of the translator.
When, for example, Zhukovsky, in his translation of Schiller’s tragedy “The Maid of Orleans,” made a “sorceress” out of the “devil,” and a “cunning renegade” out of the “devil wench,” this, of course, could seem like an accident. But, studying all his translations from page to page, we are convinced that this is his main tendency.
All the poems translated by him became, as it were, Zhukovsky’s own poems, because they reflected his quiet, pompous, magnificent, sentimental-melancholic Puritan personality.
His characteristic puritanism was reflected in his translations with extraordinary clarity. From “The Maid of Orleans” he even expels such an expression as “love for a man,” and instead of: “Do not deceive your heart with love for a man,” he writes with decorous vagueness:
Fear hopes, do not know earthly love.
The same puritanism does not allow him to give an accurate translation of that stanza of “The Triumph of the Victors”, where it is said that the hero Menelaus, “rejoicing at his newly conquered wife, wraps his hand in the highest bliss around the charm of her beautiful body.”
Avoiding reproducing such sinful gestures, Zhukovsky makes Menelaus stand decorously near Helen without any manifestations of marital passion:
And standing near Elena
Menelaus then said...
Tyutchev translates this stanza much more accurately:
And my wife, taken from battle,
Happy Atrid again,
Having wrapped his arm around his magnificent figure,
Your passionate gaze makes you happy!.. 6
Of course, all this is said in no way as a reproach to Zhukovsky, who, in his skill and in his inspiration, is one of the greatest translators the history of world literature has ever known. But precisely because his best translations are so accurate, those by no means random deviations from the original, which constitute the dominant feature of his literary style, are especially noticeable in them.
It seems to me that it is indicative of Zhukovsky’s translations that this small circumstance in itself is that in his magnificent version of the burgher’s “Lenora,” where the muscularity of his verse sometimes reaches Pushkin’s strength, he did not even allow himself to hint that lovers galloping in the night on a horse are attracted to yourself a “nuptial bed”, “nuptial bed”. Everywhere where Burger mentions a bed (Brautbett, Hochzeitbett), Zhukovsky chastely writes: lodging, corner, shelter...
The Soviet translator V. Levik, in his brilliant translation of “Lenora,” reproduced this reality of the original:
Hey, evil spirits! Hey! Follow me here!
Behind me and my wife
To great fun
Above the wedding bed.
Accept us, bridal bed! 7
Needless to say, those lines where Burger irreverently calls the priest a priest and compares the singing of the church clergy with “the croaking of frogs in a pond”, Zhukovsky completely excluded from his translation 8 .
As you know, all kinds of tombs and coffins occupy a large place in Zhukovsky’s symbolism. Therefore, it is by no means accidental that in some of his translations he implants these grave images more often than they are found in the original. Ludwig Uhland, for example, simply says chapel, but Zhukovsky’s translation reads:
Enters: in the chapel, he sees a tomb (!) standing;
Tremblingly, dimly, the lamp (!) burns above her.
("Knight Rollon")
In the corresponding lines of the original there is not a word about the tomb.
Zhukovsky also feels a great passion for lamps. Having read from Ludwig Uhland about the death of the young singer, he, again deviating from the original, compares his death to an extinguished lamp:
Like a sudden breath
The breeze extinguishes the lamp
So faded away in an instant
A young singer from the word.
The lamp was all the more dear to him because by this time it had already become a church word.
Zhukovsky’s craving for Christian symbolism was evident even in Byronov’s translation of “The Prisoner of Chillon,” where he twice calls the hero’s younger brother our angel, a humble angel, although in the original there is no talk of any celestial beings.
Even in Homer’s “Odyssey,” Zhukovsky, as its translator, caught the melancholy characteristic of him, which he spoke about in the preface to his translation 9 . Criticism, admiring the unsurpassed merits of this translation, still could not help but note its extreme subjectivity: Homer in this Russian version of the poem became surprisingly similar to Zhukovsky in many of his features. “Zhukovsky,” according to one learned critic, “introduced into the Odyssey a lot of morality, sentimentality, and some almost Christian concepts that were not at all familiar to the author of the pagan poem.” “In some places in the translated poem, the character of romantic reflection is noticeable, completely alien to the Odyssey 10.
Robert Southey in his famous ballad says about the monks that “they went overseas to the country of the Moors,” and Zhukovsky translates this phrase:
And they humbly carried it to Africa
Heavenly gift of the teachings of Christ.
("Queen of Uraka")
I repeat: these systematic, not at all random, deviations from the text in Zhukovsky are especially noticeable precisely because in all other respects his translations, with very few exceptions, perfectly convey the slightest tonality of the original. And at the same time, it should be noted that the vast majority of changes were made by Zhukovsky in the spirit of the translated author: even if Ludwig Uland does not have a tomb in these lines, let’s say, it could easily be there - in full accordance with his worldview and style.
Sometimes the falsification of the original is carried out under the influence of the political and party preferences of one or another translator. In extreme cases, it comes to deliberate distortion of texts.
In 1934, in Paris, the Comédie Française staged Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus in a new translation by the French nationalist René-Louis Piachot. The translator, with the help of numerous deviations from the English text, gave Coriolanus the features of an ideal reactionary dictator, tragically dying in an unequal struggle with democracy.
Thanks to this translation, the old English play became the battle banner of French reaction.
Those dreams of firm dictatorial power and the crushing of the revolutionary plebs, which are cherished by the French rentier, intimidated by the “Red Peril,” found their full expression in this modernized translation of Shakespeare.
The audience deciphered the play as a pamphlet about the modern political situation in France, and after the first performance in the theater, two violently warring camps formed.
While Coriolanus's curses against the mob evoked warm applause from the stalls, the gallery whistled furiously for him.
I learned about this from an article by L. Borovoy, published at the same time in Literaturnaya Gazeta 11. Borovoy quite rightly blames everything on the translator, who distorted Shakespeare’s play for a specific political purpose. The distortion was made deliberately, which was not hidden by the translator, who entitled his version as follows: “The Tragedy of Coriolanus, freely translated from Shakespeare’s English text and adapted to the conditions of the French stage.”
But let’s imagine that the same translator would decide to convey the same play word for word, without any deviations from the original. And in this case, it may sometimes turn out that his ideological position, in addition to his consciousness and will, will be reflected in his translation.
And for this it is not at all necessary that he set himself the indispensable goal of falsifying the original.
The Russian translator of the same “Coriolanus” A.V. Druzhinin was conscientious and strove for maximum accuracy in his translation.
In no case would he deliberately mutilate Shakespeare's text by adapting it to his political views.
And yet his “Coriolanus” is not far from the one that so admires the French enemies of democracy. Because in his translation he, Druzhinin, unconsciously did the same thing that René-Louis Piachot consciously did. For all its accuracy, his translation played the same reactionary role.
He translated Coriolanus in 1858. That was the time of the struggle between the liberal nobles and the revolutionary commoners, the “nihilists” of the sixties. Therefore, the feuds of Coriolanus with the rebellious mob were understood by the readers of that time in relation to Russian events, and all the curses that Coriolanus uttered against the Roman plebs were felt as an indictment of the Russian young democracy.
With the help of Shakespeare's tragedy, Druzhinin settled party scores with Chernyshevsky and his supporters, and Turgenev and Vasily Botkin welcomed this translation as a political performance.
“Your wonderful idea is to translate Coriolanus,” Turgenev wrote to Druzhinin in October 1856. “You will like him - oh, dearest of conservatives!” 12
Vasily Botkin, who was then moving into the fold of reaction, spoke even more frankly:
“Thank you for choosing Coriolanus: there is the highest modernity in this play” 13.
Thus, what happened with the translation of Coriolanus in the winter of 1934 in the French theater was, in essence, a repetition of what happened in Russia in the late fifties with the Russian translation of the same play.
Both here and there, these translations of Coriolanus were propaganda of the reactionary ideas professed by its translators, and both translators tried to impose an anti-democratic meaning on the play, regardless of whether they sought to accurately reproduce the original or deliberately distorted it.
Here it would be useful to return to Zhukovsky: with the help of other people's melodies, plots and images, he, as we saw, projected his own self into literature, beyond the narrow limits of which even Byron could not take the poet.
It seemed that the translation of the Odyssey, undertaken by him in his old age, was completely far from any political storms and tornadoes. In the preface to his translation, Zhukovsky indicates from the very beginning that “The Odyssey” for him is a quiet haven where he found the longed-for peace: “I wanted to amuse the soul with primitive poetry, which is so bright and quiet, so life-giving and calming.”
And yet, when Zhukovsky’s translation appeared in print, readers of that time saw in it not a rejection of modernity, but a struggle with modernity. They assessed this seemingly academic work as a kind of hostile act against the Russian reality of that time, which Zhukovsky hated.
The Russian reality of that time seemed terrible to Zhukovsky - and his entire circle. It was the very height of the plebeian forties, when for the first time the foundations of his beloved feudal-patriarchal Russia were so clearly shaken. New, assertive people, petty bourgeois, commoners, have penetrated into science, literature, and all areas of public life.
The voice of Nekrasov had already been heard, Belinsky, whose influence had become enormous by that time, had nurtured the young “natural school”, and all this was felt by Zhukovsky and his co-religionists as a catastrophic collapse of Russian culture. “The age of commercialism, railways and shipping” seemed to Pletnev, Shevyrev, Pogodin “a depressing timelessness.”
In defiance of this hostile era, in contrast to its “realism”, “materialism”, its “mercantilism”, Zhukovsky published his “Odyssey”. Everyone understood the publication of this poem in 1848-1849 - as a current polemic with the new era.
One thousand eight hundred and forty-eight was the year of European revolutions. Reactionary journalists used the Odyssey to shame the “pernicious turmoil” of the West. Senkovsky (Baron Brambeus) wrote this in his “Library for Reading”:
“Leaving the West, covered with black clouds of disaster, Zhukovsky with his bright word, with his captivating Russian verse, Zhukovsky, a poet now more than ever, a poet when everyone has ceased to be poets, Zhukovsky, the last of the poets, takes the hand of himself the first poet, the blind singer, this decrepit but once “divine” Homer, whom everyone there forgot among the deplorable stupidities of time, and, appearing with him before his compatriots, solemnly invites us to a feast of beauty.”
The critic contrasts Zhukovsky’s “Odyssey” with the revolutions taking place in the West, or, as he puts it, “the machinations of the spirit of evil and grief”, “material extravagances”, “anxieties of material false teachings”, “a stream of nonsense” 14.
Here Senkovsky follows in the footsteps of his antagonist Gogol: every time Gogol, already an ardent obscurantist, writes about this new work of Zhukovsky, he persistently contrasts it with the “vague and difficult phenomena” of the modern era. For Gogol, the Odyssey, as translated by Zhukovsky, is a weapon of political struggle. This is what he says in a letter to Pletnev:
“This is sheer grace and a gift to all those in whose souls the sacred fire has not been extinguished and whose hearts are saddened by the turmoil and difficult phenomena of modern times. Nothing could be more comforting for them. We should look at this phenomenon as a sign of God’s mercy towards us, bringing encouragement and refreshment to our souls.”
Glorifying precisely the “clarity,” “balanced calm,” and “quietness” of Homer’s epic translated by Zhukovsky, Gogol declares it the best medicine against the then embitterment and spiritual “turmoil.”
“It is precisely at the present time,” he writes to the militant reactionary poet Yazykov, “when... a painful murmur of dissatisfaction began to be heard everywhere, the voice of human displeasure for everything in the world: for the order of things, for time, for oneself; ...when, through the absurd cries and reckless preaching of new, still darkly heard ideas, one can hear some kind of universal desire to become closer to some desired middle, to find the real law of action, both in the masses and in individual individuals - in a word, this is exactly The time of “Odyssey” will amaze you with the majestic patriarchy of ancient life, the simple simplicity of social springs, the freshness of life, the undulled, infantile clarity of man.”
Gogol most clearly expressed the political tendencies of Zhukovsky’s Odyssey, putting forward in it as especially valuable such features that were the cornerstone of the Nikolaev autocratic system:
“This is strict reverence for customs, this reverent respect for authority and superiors... this is respect and almost reverence for man as a representative of the image of God, this is the belief that not a single good thought arises in his head without the supreme will of our highest being” - that’s what “ It seemed to the then Gogol, Gogol's "Correspondence with Friends", the most attractive in the new translation of Zhukovsky 15.
The translator's social views are sometimes reflected in unexpected ways in the smallest and seemingly random details.
When Druzhinin translated King Lear, he was especially successful in the scenes where Kent, the king’s faithful servant, appears. About this Kent, Druzhinin exclaimed with emotion:
“Never, through thousands of generations yet unborn, will the poetic image of Shakespeare’s Kent, the shining image of a devoted servant, a great loyal subject, die.”
This tenderness could not help but be reflected in his translation. And such an insightful person as Turgenev very clearly formulated the political meaning of the squad’s predilection for Kent.
“I must confess,” Turgenev wrote to Druzhinin, “that if you had not been a conservative, you would never have been able to appreciate Kent, the “great loyal subject,” who shed tears (...) over him” 17.
That is, Kent’s slavish commitment to the monarch, put forward with particular energy in Druzhinin’s translation of “Lear” in his comments on this tragedy, was perceived by Turgenev precisely in terms of social struggle.
It is curious that the first stage production of “King Lear” in Russia, half a century before Druzhinin’s translation, all from beginning to end, had as its sole purpose to strengthen and glorify loyal feelings towards the autocratic kings. The poet N. I. Gnedich eliminated even his madness from his version of “Lear,” whom he called “Lear,” in order to increase the audience’s sympathy for the monarch’s struggle for his “rightful throne.”
And these are the tirades that Shakespeare’s Edmund utters in Gnedich:
“To die for your compatriot is commendable, but for a good sovereign - ah! you have to have another life to feel the sweetness of such a death!”
Gnedich’s “Lear,” says one of the newest researchers, “in the context of the events that Russia was experiencing at the time of this tragedy, completely reflected the mood of the minds of the nobility and had an undoubted propaganda value in the interests of this class. The tragedy of an elderly father, persecuted by ungrateful daughters, ultimately reduced by Gnedich to the struggle for the throne, for the “legitimate” rights of the “legitimate” sovereign, at the time of the production of “Leara” was supposed to remind the audience of another “illegal” seizure of the throne (though without voluntary his refusal), which took place in living reality; wasn’t the Duke of Cornvalley personified in the minds of the audience with a living “usurper” who shook the foundations of the peaceful well-being of Europe and involved Russia in the pan-European chaos - with Napoleon Bonaparte, the ungrateful daughters of Lehar - with republican France, which overthrew its king, and Lehar himself - with “ the legitimate" head of the French throne - the future Louis XVIII?
The purpose of "Lear" was to raise the patriotic feeling of Russian citizens, necessary to fight this terrible threat for the restoration of law and order in Europe and - ultimately - for the preservation of the entire feudal-serf system in Russia. Gnedich’s “Lear”... could not help but reflect the patriotic sentiments of the author, who expressed and shared the views of the Russian nobility...
Thus, Shakespeare’s tragedy was turned into a means of propaganda influence in the interests of the ruling class” 18.
Even Hamlet, when it first appeared on the St. Petersburg stage, was imbued with the Russian patriotic spirit. According to P. Viskovatov’s version, King Hamlet exclaims:
Fatherland! I will sacrifice myself for you!
The main purpose of this version of Hamlet was to serve “the purposes of rallying Russian society around the throne and the tsar to fight the approaching Napoleonic hordes” 19.
Of course, the creators of such “Lears” and “Hamlets” did not even strive to become closer to Shakespeare.
But it often happens that the only thing a translator cares about is how to more accurately, truthfully convey in his native language the works of this or that writer, whom he even (in his own way!) loves, but the abyss that lies between their aesthetic and moral views, fatally forces the translator, contrary to his subjective intentions, to deviate far from the original text.
This can be easily seen in those pre-Soviet translations of the poems of the great Armenian poet Avetik Isahakyan, which were performed by Iv. Belousov and E. Nechaev. According to critic Levon Mkrtchyan, most of the deviations they made from the original are explained by the fact that both translators at that time were partially influenced by some populist ideas. “They,” said Levoy Mkrtchyan, “subordinated Isahakyan’s imagery to the imagery of Russian populist lyricism - its Nadsonian branch” 20.
As for those distortions of the original text that later translators introduced into their translations of Isahakyan’s poems, the critic explains these distortions by the fact that the translators “tried to fit Isahakyan to the poetics of Russian symbolism.” In the then translations from Isahakyan, he says, “the images and intonations characteristic of the Symbolists appeared” 21.
And when the People’s Volunteer poet P. F. Yakubovich, known under the pseudonym P. Ya., took on the translation of “The Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire, he imposed on him a mournful Nekrasov rhythm and a well-worn Nadsonian vocabulary, so that he got a very original Baudelaire - Baudelaire in the Narodnaya Volya style. The author of “Flowers of Evil” would undoubtedly have protested against the removal of those ad libs with which P. Ya. equipped his poems, forcing him to exclaim:
They bring freedom
And Sunday's news
Tired people.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The soul beats helplessly.
It's sad and hurts
And he strives for freedom.
These asides not only distorted Baudelaire's spiritual physiognomy, they sweetened it.
Baudelaire has a poem that begins like this:
One night, lying next to the terrible Jewish woman,
Like a corpse next to a corpse...
P. Ya. reinterpreted this poem in his own way:
With a terrible Jew, beautiful as dead
Sculpted marble, I spent the whole night 22.
He couldn't allow Baudelaire to feel like he and his mistress were corpses. It would have been much more pleasant for him, the translator, if Baudelaire had not had such monstrous feelings - if the woman had seemed to him not a disgusting corpse, but, on the contrary, a most beautiful statue, “sculpted in marble,” almost the Venus de Milo. This way, in his opinion, it will be much more “beautiful.” True, with such a translation there will be nothing left of Baudelaire and it will even turn out to be an anti-Baudelaire, but the translator is not at all embarrassed by this: he is happy to replace the “decadent” Baudelaire with himself, since he places his morality and his aesthetics much higher than Baudelaire’s. Perhaps he is right, but in this case there is no need to take on Baudelaire’s translations, and one can imagine how the author of “The Flowers of Evil” would hate his translator if by some miracle he could get acquainted with his translations.
In one of his youthful letters, Valery Bryusov clearly formulated the main reason for the translator’s failures.
“Yakubovich is a person of a completely different mindset than Baudelaire, and therefore often unintentionally distorts his original. This is the translation of “Like Sisyphus, be rich in patience,” where Mr. Yakubovich preaches something submissive...” in Baudelaire this is one of the most arrogant poems. There are hundreds of examples (literally)” 23.
In a word, it’s a disaster if the translator does not want or cannot renounce the most characteristic features of his personal style, does not want or cannot curb at every step his own tastes, techniques and skills, which are a living reflection of the ideological foundations of his personality.
The French scholar C. Corbet speaks well about this when analyzing Pushkin’s contemporary translation of “Ruslan and Lyudmila” into French: “... the translator dissolved the liveliness and ease of the original in the fog of elegant classical grandiloquence; From the foaming, sparkling wine of Pushkin, only insipid lemonade turned out” 24.
Much more often those translators achieve accuracy who have such sympathy for the authors they translate that they are, as it were, their doubles. They have no one to transform into: the object of their translation is almost adequate to the subject.
Hence, to a large extent, the success of Zhukovsky (translations of Uhland, Gebel, Southey), the success of Vasily Kurochkin, who gave unsurpassed translations of the poems of his relative Beranger. Hence the luck of Valery Bryusov (translations by Verhaeren), the luck of Bunin (translation of “Hiawatha” by Longfellow), the luck of Tvardovsky (translations of Shevchenko), the luck of Blaginina (translations of L. Kvitko).
Hence Mallarmé's luck (translations by Poe), Fitzgerald's luck (translations by Omar Khayyam), etc., etc., etc.
All this is true. This is an undeniable truth.
But doesn’t the history of literature know such translations that are distinguished by the greatest closeness to the original, although the spiritual appearance of the translator does not coincide in everything (and sometimes does not coincide at all) with the spiritual appearance of the translated author?
How many great writers there are in the world who delight us with their genius, but are infinitely far from both our psyche and our ideas! Are we really going to leave Xenophon, Thucydides, Petrarch, Apuleius, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Ben Jonson without translation just because their worldview is alien to us in many of its features - and even hostile?
Of course not. These translations are completely within our power, but they are incredibly difficult and require from the translator not only talent, not only instinct, but also the renunciation of his own intellectual and mental skills.
One of the most convincing examples of such renunciation: translations of the classics of Georgian poetry, performed by such a remarkable artist of words as Nikolai Zabolotsky.
It is unlikely that in the middle of the 20th century he felt like a like-minded person of the medieval poet Rustaveli, who created his immortal “Knight in the Tiger Skin” in the 12th century. And yet, it is impossible to imagine a better translation than Zabolotsky’s: amazingly clear diction, due to an almost magical power over syntax, free breathing of each stanza, for which four obligatory rhymes are not a burden, not a burden, as was often the case with other translators “ Knight”, and strong wings that give the verses of the translation the dynamics of the original:
The essence of love is always beautiful, incomprehensible and true
She is not equal to any fornication:
Fornication is one thing, love is another, a wall separates them,
It is not proper for a person to confuse these names.
And there are at least seven hundred such stanzas, and perhaps more, and all of them are translated masterfully.
In the same way, Zabolotsky did not need to feel like a fellow believer of the inspired Georgian singer David Guramishvili, who lived two hundred and fifty years ago, under Peter I, in order to recreate his pious call with such poetic force:
Listen, people who believe in God,
Those who keep the commandments strictly:
On the day when I appear before you dead,
Remember in peace the lifeless soul 25.
What kind of artistic imagination must one have in order to, having done away with religion long ago, still translate with such perfection the religious thoughts of an ancient author:
You alone save, God,
Lost on the way!
Without you the road is right
No one can get it.
Nikolai Zabolotsky always made the most severe demands on the skill of a translator.
“If,” he wrote, “a translation from a foreign language does not read like a good Russian work, it is either a mediocre or unsuccessful translation” 26.
He fulfilled his commandment brilliantly, making Russian the poems of the same brilliant Georgian David Guramishvili, whose poem “Merry Spring” is captivating with the sophistication of its verse design and the charming grace of form. The most seemingly rude images, very far from conventional decency, obeying the music of these poems, are perceived as a naive pastoral, as an idyll, imbued with a simple-minded and bright smile:
Feeling attracted to the bride,
The young man began to bend her over so that together
Lie down with them, but the girl,
Not daring to agree
She answered him:
Not until our wedding
Decide to commit sinful acts.
Alas, God forbid us
To desecrate the bed
Before marriage, you and I.
My beloved, as a guarantee of lasting love
Receive me, immaculate, into your home:
Let everyone who sees
It won't hurt in vain
Me with an evil reproach.
The young man in love did not heed the prayer,
He resorted to cunning, inflamed with passion,
Said: - In our estate
They don't think about the wedding
And I can't wait.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And the entire poem is translated in such transparent, truly crystal verse - hundreds and hundreds of stanzas, in each a rhymed couplet written in iambic pentameter, replaced by the same three-foot couplet, followed by a three-foot clause, not equipped with a rhyme.
Zabolotsky wonderfully conveyed the stylistic originality of “Merry Spring”, its bright, naive tonality.
With the same classically strict and clear verse, he introduced Vazha Pshavelu, Akaki Tsereteli, and Ilya Chavchavadze to his native literature, creating the monumental “Anthology of Georgian Poetry”. In general, it is difficult to imagine a poet whom he could not translate with the same perfection. The variety of styles did not bother him. Each style was equally close to him.
Such art is accessible only to great translation masters - those who have the precious ability to overcome their ego and artistically transform into the author being translated. This requires not only talent, but also special flexibility, plasticity, and “sociability” of the mind.
Pushkin possessed this sociability of mind to the greatest extent. When Dostoevsky, in his speech about him, glorified his marvelous ability to transform himself into “geniuses of foreign nations,” he meant not only Pushkin’s original works, but also his translations. “The greatest of European poets,” said Dostoevsky, “were never able to embody with such power the genius of a foreign... people, their spirit, all the hidden depth of this spirit” 27.
And Dostoevsky recalls, along with “The Miserly Knight” and “Egyptian Nights,” such poetic translations of Pushkin from English: the fourth scene from John Wilson’s comedy “City of the Plague” and the first pages of John Bunyan’s pious treatise “The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to the Next,” translated by Pushkin under the title "Wanderer":
Once wandering among the wild valley,
I was suddenly overcome with great sorrow
And crushed and bent with a heavy burden,
Like someone who is convicted of murder at trial.
I repeat: only mature masters, people of high culture and subtle, sophisticated taste can undertake translations of foreign-language writers who are alien to them in style, convictions, and spiritual disposition.
These masters have one very rare advantage: they know how to curb their individual preferences, sympathies, and tastes for the sake of the most prominent identification of the creative personality that they must recreate in translation.
In one of Kipling's stories, a pompous and pompous German says about his monkey that “there is too much Ego in its Cosmos.” The same can be said about some translators. Meanwhile, the modern reader, as a person of a deeply scientific culture, increasingly urgently demands from them all possible suppression of their excessive Ego. However, this demand has been heard for a long time.
“In translation from Goethe,” Belinsky said, “we want to see Goethe, and not his translator; if Pushkin himself had undertaken to translate Goethe, we would have demanded from him that he show us Goethe, and not himself” 28 .
Gogol made the same demand for translators. “The translator acted in such a way,” he wrote about one translation, “that you cannot see it: it turned into such a transparent “flow that it seems as if there was no glass” 29.
It's not that easy. This needs to be learned. This requires a lot of training.
Here the highest virtue is the discipline of limiting one's sympathies and tastes.
The famous translator of the Iliad, N. I. Gnedich, points out that the greatest difficulty facing the translator of the ancient poet is “a continuous struggle with one’s own spirit, with one’s own inner strength, whose freedom must constantly be curbed” 30 .
“Continuous struggle with one’s own spirit”, overcoming one’s personal aesthetics is the duty of all translators, especially those who translate great poets.
In this case, you need to love the translated author more than yourself and selflessly, selflessly serve the embodiment of his thoughts and images, showing your ego only in this service, and not at all in imposing your own tastes and feelings on the original.
It would seem that it is not a difficult task to translate this or that writer without embellishing or improving him, and yet only through very long practice does the translator learn to suppress the attraction to personal creativity in order to become a faithful and honest comrade, and not a shameless owner of the translated author . I once translated Walt Whitman and since then, for each new edition, I have been repairing my translations anew: almost all the repairs consist of me carefully throwing out those word patterns and ornaments that, out of inexperience, I introduced into the first edition of my translation. Only through long, many years of effort am I gradually approaching that “roughness” that distinguishes the original. I am afraid that, despite all my efforts, I have still not been able to convey in translation all the “wild sloppiness” of the original, for it is extremely easy to write better, more gracefully than Whitman, but it is very difficult to write as “bad” as he.
Here again Gnedich comes to mind.
“It is very easy,” he wrote, “to decorate, or better yet, to tint a verse of Homer with the colors of our palette, and it will seem more dapper, more magnificent, better for our taste; but it is incomparably more difficult to preserve it Homeric, as it is, neither worse nor better. This is the responsibility of a translator, and the work of those who have experienced it is not easy. Quintilian understood it: facilius est plus facere, quam idem: it is easier to do more than the same” 31.
As a result, Gnedich asked readers “not to judge if any turn or expression seems strange or unusual, but first... check it with the original” 32 .
This should be the same request to the reader from every translator.
Just as a good actor will most clearly demonstrate his individuality if he completely transforms himself into the Falstaff, Khlestakov or Chatsky he portrays, fulfilling with every gesture the sacred will of the playwright, so a good translator reveals his personality in its entirety precisely when he completely subordinates it to the will of the Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Hemingway, Salinger, Joyce or Kafka he translates.
Such self-restraint of translators was not always considered obligatory. In Pushkin’s times, for example, it was constantly published in magazines that “translating poets into one’s native language means either borrowing the main idea and decorating it with the richness of one’s own dialect (my italics - K. Ch.), or, comprehending the power of poetic expressions, conveying them with faithfulness in your own language" 33 . It was considered completely legal to “decorate” the translated texts with “the riches of one’s own dialect,” since at that time the goals of translation were completely different. But now the time for decorative translations has passed. Our era will not allow any deliberate deviations from the translated text, simply because its attitude towards the literatures of all countries and peoples is primarily educational.
And there is nothing to fear that such a translation will allegedly depersonalize the translator and deprive him of the opportunity to demonstrate his creative talent. This has never happened before. If the translator is talented, the will of the author does not fetter, but, on the contrary, inspires him. The art of a translator, like the art of an actor, is completely dependent on the material. Just as the highest achievement of acting is not in deviation from the will of the playwright, but in merging with it, in complete submission to it, so the art of a translator, in its highest achievements, lies in merging with the will of the author.
Many people find this controversial. Professor F.D. Batyushkov, arguing with me, wrote:
“A translator cannot be likened to an actor... The actor, however, is subordinate to the author’s intention. But in every poetic idea there is a number of possibilities, and the artist creates one of these possibilities. Othello - Rossi, Othello - Salvini, Othello - Olridge, Othello - Zacconi, etc. - these are all different Othellos on the canvas of Shakespeare's plan. And how many Hamlets, King Lears we know, etc., etc., etc. Duse created a completely different Marguerite Gautier than Sarah Bernhardt, and both are possible, viable, each in their own way. The translator cannot exercise such freedom when “recreating the text.” He must reproduce what is given. The actor, embodying, has the opportunity to discover new things; the translator, like the philologist, cognizes the known 34.
This objection of Professor F. Batyushkov turns out to be untenable at the first contact with the facts.
Wasn’t “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” translated by forty-five translators into forty-five different modes? Isn’t each of these forty-five reflected the creative personality of the translator with all its individual qualities to the same extent as the creative personality of the actor is reflected in each role? Just as there is Othello - Rossi, Othello - Salvini, Othello - Olridge, Othello - Dalsky, Othello - Ostuzhev, Othello - Papazyan, etc., there is “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” by Ivan Novikov, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” by Nikolai Zabolotsky, etc., etc. All these poets, it would seem, “cognized what was known” by other poets, but to each of them the “cognized” was revealed in a new way, with its own different features.
How many translations of Shota Rustaveli do we know, and not a single translation is in any way similar to the others. And this difference was due to the same reasons as the difference between the various incarnations of the theatrical image: the temperament, talent, cultural equipment of each poet-translator.
So Professor Batyushkov’s objections further affirm the truth against which he argues.
And, of course, the Soviet viewer sees the ideal actor as one who, in voice, gestures, and figure, transforms himself into either Richard III, or Falstaff, or Khlestakov, or Krechinsky. And the personality of the actor - rest assured! - will be expressed in his game by itself, in addition to his desires and efforts. An actor should not consciously strive for such protrusion of his self under any circumstances.
It's the same with translators. The modern reader holds most dear only those of them who, in their translations, try not to overshadow with their personality either Heine, Ronsard, or Rilke.
The poet Leonid Martynov does not want to agree with this. He finds the very idea that he should curb his personal preferences and tastes offensive. Turn into transparent glass? Never! Addressing those whom he has so far translated so diligently and carefully, L. Martynov now declares to them with pride:
...I put my own notes into someone else’s text,
I added my sins to those of others,
and as a result of thoughtful work
I still modernized the poems.
And this is true, foreign brothers;
although I listen to your voices,
but bend like a lady dancing,
as in dans-macabre or country dance,
convey the finest nuances
Middle Ages or Renaissance -
I don’t have a chance to succeed in that,
I can't, I exist on my own!
I can't literally and literally
like a parrot echoing a cockatoo!
Let what you create be brilliant,
I will translate everything in my own way,
and a brutal raid on me
a militia of interpreters will start:
they say, a thief in the night, he distorted slyly
meaning of classical speeches.
Then I hear: - Go for it! You have the right
and in our time of these things
were not avoided. Antokolsky Pavel
let him grumble, but it doesn’t matter.
Who hasn’t added their own to someone else’s?
This is how they did it everywhere and always!
Each of us has a reason
add, maintaining impartiality,
your indignation into someone else's grief,
into someone else's smoldering fire 35.
This declaration of translation liberties sounds very proud and even arrogant.
But we, the readers, humbly believe that the will of the translator has nothing to do with it.
After all, as we have just seen, every translator brings into every translation he makes a certain particle of his own personality. Translators always and everywhere add -
your indignation into someone else's grief,
into someone else's decay of your fire, -
and sometimes into someone else’s fire - your own decay.
In Hamlet, translated by Boris Pasternak, Pasternak's voice is heard, in Hamlet, translated by Mikhail Lozinsky, the voice of Lozinsky is heard, in Hamlet, translated by Vlas Kozhevnikov, Kozhevnikov's voice is heard, and nothing can be done about it. This is fatal. Literary translations are artistic because they, like any work of art, reflect the master who created them, whether he wants it or not.
We, readers, welcome all translations in which Martynov was reflected in one way or another, but we still dare to note that we would be very grateful to him if, say, in his translations of Petofi’s poems there was as little Martynov as possible and as much Petofi as possible.
This is how it has been until now. In all his translations, Martynov, out of his characteristic conscientiousness, sought to reproduce as accurately as possible all the images, feelings and thoughts of Petofi.
Now another time has come, and Martynov unexpectedly notifies readers that if he happens to translate, say, “Hamlet,” this “Hamlet” will be not so much Shakespeare’s as Martynov’s, since he considers it humiliating for himself to bow before Shakespeare, “ like a lady in a dance, as in a danse-macabre or a country dance.”
I am afraid that in response to his declaration, polite readers will say that although at another time and under other circumstances they would read the translator’s own poems with great pleasure, now, when they are faced with the need to familiarize themselves with Shakespeare’s tragedy “Hamlet” through his translation, they consider I have the right to wish that in this translation there would again be less Martynov and perhaps more Shakespeare.
Of course, no one ever demanded “parrot” translations from him. Everyone was completely satisfied with his previous translations, in which he so well conveyed the poetic charm of the originals.
These are the kind of translations that our era demands, which values documentation, accuracy, authenticity, and reality above all else. And even if it later turns out that, despite all the efforts, the translator nevertheless reflected himself in the translation, he can be justified only if this happened unconsciously. And since the basic nature of the human personality is reflected not only in its conscious, but also in its unconscious manifestations, then even without the will of the translator, his personality will be sufficiently expressed.
It's unnecessary to worry about this. Let him only care about the accurate and objective reproduction of the original. By doing this, he will not only not cause any damage to his creative personality, but, on the contrary, will demonstrate it with the greatest strength.
This is what Leonid Martynov has done so far. In general, for some reason it seems to me that this whole rebellion against “danse macabres” and “counterdances” is a momentary whim of the poet, an instant flash, a whim, which, I hope, will not affect his future translation work in any way.
Notes:
1. “Literary newspaper”, 1933, No. 38, p. 2.
2.The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman. New York - London, 1902, vol. 9, p. 39 (written in 1855 or 1856).
3. The first number in brackets indicates the page of the English edition of “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley with Memoir, Explanatory Notes, etc” (London, James Finch and C0.), the second - the page of Balmont’s translation (Shelley. Poly. collected op. translated by K. D. Balmont, vol. I. St. Petersburg, Znanie, 1903).
4.See: Walt Whitman. Grass shoots. Translation from English by K. D. Balmont. M., book publishing house "Scorpio", 1911, p. 133, 136, 139. In further references to this book, its pages are indicated by numbers placed after each quotation.
5. Letter to N. I. Gnedich dated September 27, 1822. - A.S. Pushkin. Complete, collected. cit., vol. XIII. M. -L. , Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1937, p. 48.
6.F. I. Tyutchev. Complete collection of poems. L., 1939, p. 222.
7. From European poets of the 16th-19th centuries. Translations by V. Levin. M., 1956, p. 67, 68.
8.O. Kholmskaya. Pushkin and translation discussions of Pushkin’s time. - Sat. "The Mastery of Translation". M., 1959, p. 307.
9. “Instead of a preface. Excerpt from a letter." - Complete works of V. A. Zhukovsky, vol. II. St. Petersburg, 1906, p. 216.
10.P. Chernyaev. How modern and subsequent critics appreciated the translation of Zhukovsky’s “Odyssey”. - “Philological Notes”, 1902, issue. I-III. With. 156, 158.
11.L. Borovoy. Traitor Coriolanus. - “Literary Newspaper”, 1934, No. 22.
12.I. S. Turgenev. Full collection Op. and letters in 28 volumes. Letters, vol. III. M. -L. , 1961, p. 30.
13. Collection of the Society for benefits to needy writers and scientists. St. Petersburg, 1884, p. 498.
14.Collected works of Senkovsky (Baron Brambeus), vol. VII. St. Petersburg, 1859, p. 332. (Hereinafter, italics are mine. - K. Ch.).
15. N.V. Gogol. About the Odyssey, translated by Zhukovsky. - Full. collection cit., vol. VIII. M., 1952, p. 240. (Emphasis by me. - K. Ch.).
16.Collected works of A.V. Druzhinin, vol. III. St. Petersburg, 1865, p. 40.
17.I. S. Turgenev. Full collection Op. and letters in 28 volumes. Letters, vol. 3. M. - L., 1961, p. 84.
18.A. S. Bulgakov. Early acquaintance with Shakespeare in Russia. - “Theatrical Heritage”, collection. 1. L., 1934, p. 73-75.
19.A. S. Bulgakov. Early acquaintance with Shakespeare in Russia, p. 78.
20. Levon Mkrtchyan. Avetik Isahakyan and Russian literature. Yerevan, 1963. p. 120.
21. Ibid., p. 126.
22.P. F. Yakubovich. Poems. L., 1960, p. 338.
23. Letters from V. Ya. Bryusov to P. P. Pertsov. M., 1926, p. 76.
24.Sh. Corbet. From the history of Russian-French literary relations. - In the book: International relations of Russian literature. Under. by the editors of academician M. P. Alekseeva. M. - L., Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1963, p. 203.
25.Georgian classical poetry in translations by N. Zabolotsky, vol. I. Tbilisi, 1958, p. 512. About David Guramishvili, see the article “Speech of Rasul Gamzatov” in the book: Irakli Andronikov. I want to tell you... M., 1962, p. 325-327.
26.N. Zabolotsky. Translator's notes. - In the book: The Mastery of Translation. M., 1959, p. 252.
27.F. M. Dostoevsky. Writer's diary for 1880. We're talking about Pushkin. - Full. collection works of art, vol. XII. M. -L., 1929, p. 387.
28.V. G. Belinsky. Full collection cit., vol. IX. M. 1955, p. 277.
29.N. V. Gogol. Full collection cit., vol. XIV. M., 1952, p. 170.
30.N. I. Gnedich. Poems. L., 1956. p. 316.
31.N. I. Gnedich. Poems. L., 1956, p. 316.
33. “Moscow Telegraph”, 1829, No. 21. I quote from the article by G. D. Vladimirsky “Pushkin the Translator” in the 4-5th book of the “Vremennik of the Pushkin Commission” (“Pushkin”. M. -L., 1939, p. 303).
34.See brochure: Principles of literary translation. Articles by F. D. Batyushkov, N. Gumilev, K. Chukovsky. L., 1920, p. 14-15.
35. Leonid Martynov. Translation problem. - “Youth”, 1963, No. 3.
The telephone rank.
“Hello! Who's there?"
“The Polar Bear.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m calling for the Elephant.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants a little
Peanut brittle.”
“Peanut brittle! … And for whom?”
“It's for his little
Elephant sons.”
“How much does he want?”
“Oh, five or six tons.
Right now that's all
That they can manage—they’re quite small.”
The telephone rank. The Crocodile
Said, with a tear,
“My dearest dear,
We don’t need umbrellas or mackintoshes;
My wife and baby need new galoshes;
Send us some, please!”
“Wait-wasn’t it you
Who just last week ordered two
Pairs of beautiful brand-new galoshes?”
“Oh, those that came last week-they
Got gobbled up right away;
And we just can’t wait-
For supper tonight
We'd like to sprinkle on our goulashes
One or two dozen delicious galoshes!”
The telephone rank. The Turtle Doves
Said: “Send us, please, some long white gloves!”
It rank again; the Chimpanzees
Giggled: “Phone books, please!”
The telephone rank. The Grizzly Bear
Said: “Grr-Grr!”
“Stop, Bear, don’t growl, don’t bawl!
Just tell me what you want!”
But on he went-“Grr!” Grrrrrrr…”
Why; what for?
I couldn't make out;
I just banged down the receiver.
The telephone rank. The Flamingos
Said: “Rush us over a bottle of those
Little pink pills! ...
We've swallowed every frog in the lake,
And are croaking with a stomachache!”
The Pig telephoned. Ivan Pigtail
Said: “Send over Nina Nightingale!
Together, I bet,
We'll sing a duet
That opera lovers will never forget!
I'll begin-"
“No, you won’t. The Divine Nightingale
Accompany a Pig! Ivan Petrovich,
No!
You’d better call on Katya Crow!”
The telephone rank. The Polar Bear
Said: “Come to the aid of the Walrus, Sir!
He's about
to choke
on a fat
oyster!”
And so it goes. The whole day long
The same silly song:
Ting-a-ling!
Ting-a-ling!
Ting-a-ling!
A Seal telephones, and then a Gazelle,
And just now two very queer
Reindeer,
Who said: “Oh, dear, oh, dear,
Did you hear? Is it true
That the Bump-Bump Cars at the Carnival
Have everyone burned up?”
“Are you out of your minds, you silly Deer?
The Merry-Go-Round
At the Carnival still goes round,
And the Bump-Bump Cars are running, too;
You wanted to go right
Out to the Carnival this very night
And buzz around in the Bump-Bump Cars
And ride the Ferris Wheel up to the stars!”
But they wouldn’t listen, the silly Deer;
They just went on: “Oh, dear, oh, dear,
Did you hear? Is it true
That the Bump-Bump Cars
At the Carnival
Have everyone burned up?”
How wrong-headed Reindeer really are!
At five in the morning the telephone rank:
The Kangaroo
Said: “Hello, Rub-a-dub-dub,
How are you?”
Which really made me ravaging mad.
“I don’t know any Rub-a-dub-dub,
Soapflakes! Pancakes! Bubbledy-bub
Why don't you
Try calling Pinhead Zero Two! …”
I haven’t slept for three whole nights.
I'd really like to go to bed
And get some sleep.
But every time I lay down my head
The telephone rings.
“Who's there-Hello!”
“It's the Rhino.”
“What's wrong, Rhino?”
“Terrible trouble,
Come on the double!”
“What's the matter? Why the fuss?”
“Quick. Save him..."
“Who?”
“The hippopotamus.
He’s sinking out there in that awful swamp…”
“In the swamp?”
“Yes, he’s stuck.”
“And if you don’t come right away,
He'll drown in that terrible damp
And dismal swamp.
He'll die, he'll croak-oh, oh, oh.
Poor Hippo-po-po………………”
“Okay...
I'm coming
Right away!”
Whew: What a job! You need a truck
To help a Hippo when he’s stuck!
Korney Chukovsky
Translated by William Jay Smith
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