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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41) is best known in the West today as the author of the novel A Hero of Our Time. But at the time of his death, aged only 26, he was widely regarded as Russia's greatest living poet. He achieved almost instant fame in 1837 with On the Death of a Poet', his tribute to Pushkin - whose death in a duel foreshadowed Lermontov's own. Over the course of the next four years he went on to write many short poems, both lyric and satirical, and two long verse narratives. He was particularly known for his depictions of the Caucasus, where he was exiled for a time, taking part in battles such as the one described in his poem Valerik'. Lermontov traced his ancestry to Scotland, and this book offers a Scottish perspective on the Russian poet. Most of the translators are Scottish or have Scottish connections, and some of the poems are translated into Scots. As Peter France writes in his introduction, this bicentennial volume aims to bring Lermontov's poems to a new readership by enabling them to live again' in English and in Scots.
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After Lermontov
Translations for the Bicentenary
Edited by Peter France and Robyn Marsack
Acknowledgements
The idea for this set of new translations of Lermontov arose during a visit by Dr Ekaterina Genieva, Director of the Russian State Library for Foreign Literature (VGBIL), to Moffat in Dumfries and Galloway, where she was the guest of Elizabeth Roberts, co-founder of Moffat Book Events (MBE). MBE, a Scottish charity, is partnered by VGBIL in a programme of literary and other cultural projects in Scotland and Russia. See www.moffatbookevents.co.uk.
The project was developed under Peter France’s editorship, with the assistance of Robyn Marsack, Director of the Scottish Poetry Library. The editors wish to thank Dr Genieva and Dr Evgeny Reznichenko, Director of the Institute of Translation (Russia), for their encouragement, Rose France for providing literal translations of Lermontov’s poems and the poets themselves for their willingness to give Lermontov new life in English and Scots.
Contents
Introduction
Balcomie Castle towers among trees, just outside the fishing village of Crail in the East Neuk of Fife, looking out over the North Sea. This grand sixteenth-century house was the home of an ancient Scottish family, the Learmonths; from here one George Learmonth set off at the beginning of the seventeenth century to seek a fortune as a soldier in the troubled land of Muscovy. And it was to this Scottish adventurer – and before him to the semi-legendary Thomas Learmonth, Thomas the Rhymer – that Mikhail Lermontov traced his ancestry. His youthful poem, ‘A Wish’, speaks of his desire to fly away, raven-like, to his native wild place, an empty castle in misty mountains. It is clear that the poet’s romantic vision of Scotland was fed by literary sources – Ossian and Walter Scott – and this vision may in its turn have influenced the way he saw the region with which he is most associated, the Caucasus. Another Scot, Byron – generally not perceived as Scottish outside Scotland – bulked large in the pantheon of the young Lermontov.
For these reasons, Lermontov could be seen as one of the most Scottish of Russian writers (he is certainly one of the most Russian). But although there is a thriving association that brings together the Learmonth and Lermontov families, it cannot be said that the poet has been given a particularly important place in Scottish culture. In particular, Scottish poets have not rushed to translate him. It is true that the first English translation of one of his writings (‘The Gifts of Terek’, translated by the Englishman Thomas Budge Shaw) was published in an Edinburgh magazine, Blackwood’s, but in the twentieth century he figured only rarely in Scottish journals. Nor does his work seem to have tempted the two great Scottish poet-translators, Edwin Morgan and Alastair Mackie, both of whom were very open to Russian poetry. The present volume, made in Edinburgh for the bicentenary of the poet’s birth in 2014, aims to give Lermontov a more prominent place in Scottish literary culture.
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Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov was born in Moscow in October 1814; his father was a retired army captain, the descendant of George Learmonth. After his mother’s death in 1817 he was taken off by his possessive maternal grandmother to her estate in central Russia, where he spent the next ten years, receiving an excellent education, and developing his precocious talents as writer and artist (he left an impressive body of graphic work: sharply executed caricatures, scenes of military life, landscapes). As a boy and a young man, he made several visits to the Caucasus, where the mountain scenery and primitive life made a deep impression on him.
In 1827 he moved to Moscow, where he attended first a private school and then Moscow University. During these years he wrote great quantities of poetry, much of it inspired by unhappy love affairs. Leaving university after a conflict with the authorities, he transferred to a military academy in St Petersburg, graduating in 1834, when he received a commission in the Life Guard Hussars. As a young officer, he acquired a reputation as a debauchee, a dandy and a cynical wit. He continued to write, both prose and verse, and in 1837 attained instant fame with the poem ‘On the Death of a Poet’, a passionately rhetorical denunciation of those responsible for Pushkin’s death in a duel. Since this touched on circles close to the Tsar, Lermontov was arrested, tried, and punished by being sent to serve as a Dragoons officer in the Caucasus.
A year later he was pardoned and returned to the capital, by now a celebrity. He frequented high society and joined literary circles, including a secret political debating society; his poetry appeared regularly in literary journals, and in 1840 he published two volumes of verse and a work of prose fiction, A Hero of Our Time. Early the same year he had fought a bloodless duel with the son of the French ambassador, as a result of which he was sent back to the Caucasus. This time he served in a line regiment, taking part in dangerous engagements against the Chechens and other mountain peoples such as the one described so vividly in ‘Valerik’. He was put up for awards for bravery, but the recommendations were turned down by the authorities, Lermontov being regarded with suspicion and hostility by Tsar Nicholas and his police chief.
The following year Lermontov went to take the waters at Pyatigorsk in the northern Caucasus. In ‘A Dream’, he had vividly imagined his own death in a duel in the Caucasus, and so it was to be, possibly with the connivance of the highest authorities. His former friend N.S. Martynov, for reasons that remain uncertain, challenged him and shot him dead in a rainstorm, in apparently suspicious circumstances, on 15 July 1841. His death echoed that of Pushkin four years earlier, but there was no one to write ‘On the Death of a Poet’ for him.
In a short life, Lermontov wrote a great deal. He was the author of several plays, the most successful being The Masquerade, with its characteristically world-weary hero. This hero figure was further developed, but in a much more subtle way, in Lermontov’s best-known work (the only one widely known in the West), A Hero of Our Time; this is usually described as a novel, though it is really a series of tales linked by the central character, Pechorin. There are several other prose narratives, some of them unfinished; ‘Ashik-Kerib’, a Turkish tale, provided the subject for a remarkable film by the Armenian film director Paradzhanov. And there are an equally large number of extended verse narratives, notably ‘Mtsyri’ (translated as ‘The Novice’ by Charles Johnston), and the two masterpieces which are represented by excerpts in the present volume, the ‘Song of the Tsar Ivan Vaslilyevich…’ and ‘The Demon’. The first is a magnificent recreation or pastiche of the folk epics known as byliny, sung to the stringed instrument called the gusli. The second, which has become virtually synonymous with Lermontov in Russia, is an ‘Eastern Tale’; the fallen angel of the title falls in love with a village beauty, she pities him, but dies of his kiss, and he remains a damned spirit roaming the earth. The poem was begun in 1829 and probably finished ten years later, by which time Lermontov had enriched it with captivating pictures of the wild Caucasus. It later inspired some famous works by the artist Mikhail Vrubel.
As for the shorter poems, with which this volume is mainly concerned, there is a mass of lyric verse written before the age of 20 and not included by Lermontov in his published poems. These poems are usually seen as prentice work, derivative Romantic pieces, Byronic in attitude in spite of the poet’s disclaimers. They are often wonderfully musical, however, and some of them, such as ‘Angel’ and ‘Sail’, have become great popular favourites, often set to music and recited by heart. A relatively small selection from this early work will be found here, including poems which dwell on the poet’s Scottish ancestry.
By general agreement, Lermontov’s essential poetic achievements date from the four years between his emergence as a public poet in 1837 and his death in 1841. In many cases, these poems develop the personal lyricism of his early verse, but with a new power and originality (‘It’s dull and it’s sad…’, ‘Night-Walk’). A good number of them pursue the political, satirical line of ‘On the Death of a Poet’; Lermontov was not detached from contemporary life, and he was not unwilling to come out fighting. ‘Journalist, Reader and Writer’ reflects in a Pushkinian way on the possibilities of poetry in the modern age, and other poems attack a variety of targets, from the falsities of polite society (‘Never trust yourself’) to the oppressions of the tsarist regime (‘Unwasht Russia, fare ye weel’) or the hypocrisy of bourgeois France bringing back Napoleon’s remains to a hero’s burial (‘The Final Welcome Home’). Particularly remarkable is the way this most self-centred of poets manages to project himself into the minds of others, to adopt a voice far remote from his own, as in ‘Borodino’ and ‘Last Will’. In one case, the long poem ‘Valerik’, the romantic passion of the poet serves as a frame for a stunningly realistic rendering of an early Chechen war, a verse anticipation of the Sebastopol Stories that Tolstoy would write some fifteen years later.
Having shot to fame in 1837, Lermontov was widely regarded as Russia’s greatest living poet, the true heir of Pushkin, and he was to remain an undoubted popular favourite. But his brief poetic career can also be seen as the swan-song of the great age of Russian poetry, the Golden Age which was dealt a mortal blow by the death of Pushkin. After Lermontov in his turn had been killed, there were still to be major volumes of verse by Evgeny Baratynsky and Fedor Tyutchev, but poetry, after its gorgeous flourishing, had been displaced by prose as the driving force of Russian literary culture. Pushkin himself had increasingly preferred prose, and Lermontov, with A Hero of Our Time, had gone one step further in the creation of modern Russian prose fiction. It is all the more remarkable that at the same time he was writing some of the greatest poems in the Russian language.
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This bilingual Scottish edition of Lermontov’s poems is meant to be read in the English-speaking world, but also in countries where Russian is spoken and where readers are interested in seeing how Lermontov fares in English or Scots translation. A bilingual volume takes up more space, so the editors have had to be quite selective. As well as two excerpts from longer poems, we have included many of Lermontov’s best-known shorter poems, and a few from his voluminous juvenilia. The poems are arranged in rough chronological order, except that we begin with the opening sections of ‘The Demon’ (on which he worked from 1829 to about 1840).
The translations are all new, made especially for this volume. They are the work of sixteen translator-poets, some of whom know Russian, while others have worked from annotated literal versions, generally trying out their results on Russian speakers. We haven’t attempted to impose a uniform style of translating, since the variety of responses provoked by Lermontov is an essential part of our story. But whether they are close or free, whether or not they aim to echo the form of the Russian, they are all translations, fixing their attention on the original work with a view to making it live again in English or in Scots. Almost all the translators are Scots by birth or by residence, but the majority translate in English. We are very glad, though, to be able to include a number of poems in Scots, hoping that these will show what a good medium the old language is for the translation of a poet who very likely did not know of its existence. For one short poem, ‘Unwasht Russia, fare ye weel’, we have printed translations into both Scots and English.
Peter France
Edinburgh, October 2013
