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- Herausgeber: Arc Publications
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Serie: Arc Classics: New Translations of Great Poets of the Past
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Half-Light & Other Poems brings together the most important and enduring poems by this neglected writer, one of Russia's great 19th century poets. In a new translation by Peter France, the philosophical, social and iterary struggles of Russia under Tsar Nicholas I are brought to vivid life in the verses of a man who felt profoundly and was highly skilled at expressing his emotions and beliefs in dazzling, often fantastical fashion.
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Half-light
Published by Arc Publications,
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road
Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK
www.arcpublications.co.uk
Translation copyright © Peter France 2015
Copyright in Introduction © Peter France 2015
Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2015
978 1908376 88 6 (pbk)
978 1908376 89 3 (hbk)
978 1908376 90 9 (ebk)
Design by Tony Ward
Cover design by Tony Ward
Printed by Lightning Source
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are one or more variant versions for many of the poems printed here. With a small number of exceptions on points of detail (notably in the poem ‘Rhyme’), the translations have been made from the one-volume edition of Baratynsky’s poems edited by L. G. Frizman and published in the Novaya Biblioteka Poeta collection (St Petersburg, 2000). Earlier versions of some of the translations appeared in Fulcrum, Cardinal Points, International Literary Quarterly, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (ed. R. Chandler, 2015) and European Romantic Poetry (ed. M. Ferber, 2005). The translator’s thanks go to all those who have helped and encouraged him in this labour of love, in particular Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, Ilya Kutik, Irina Mashinski, Siân Reynolds and Antony Wood.
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without
the written permission of Arc Publications.
‘Arc Classics:
New Translations of Great Poets of the Past’
Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier
Yevgeny Baratynsky
Half-light
AND OTHER POEMS
Translated and introduced by
PETER FRANCE
2015
To the memory of my dear friend and co-translator, the poet Jon Stallworthy
CONTENTS
Introduction
СУМЕРКИ / HALF-LIGHT
Князью Петру Андреевичу Вяземскому
•
To Prince Pyotr Andreevich Vyazemsky
Последний поэт
•
The Last Poet
«Предрассудок! он обломок»
•
‘Prejudice? just a fragment’
Новинское
•
Novinskoe
Приметы
•
Signs
«Всегда и в пурпуре и в злате»
•
‘Always in purple and in gold’
«Увы! Творец непервых сил!»
•
‘Alas! poor average writer’
Недоносок
•
Stillborn
Алкивиад
•
Alcibiades
Ропот
•
A Grumble
Мудрецу
•
To a Sage
«Филида с каждою зимою»
•
‘Phyllis with each returning winter’
Бокал
•
Goblet
«Были бури, непогоды»
•
‘I have known them, storms and bad weather’
«На что вы, дни!»
•
‘Days! What’s the use!’
Коттерии
•
Cliques
Ахилл
•
Achilles
«Сначала мысль, воплощена»
•
‘Thought, when embodied first of all’
«Еще, как патриарх, не древен я»
•
‘I am not yet ancient as a patriarch’
«Толпе тревожный день приветен»
•
‘Fretful daytime pleases the multitude’
«Здравствуй, отрох сладкогласный!»
•
‘Greetings! sweet-tongued boy’
«Что за звуки?»
•
‘What sounds are these?’
«Все мысль да мысль!»
•
‘Thought, yet more thought!’
Скульптор
•
Sculptor
Осень
•
Autumn
«Благословен святое возвестивший!»
•
‘Blessed be he who speaks of what is sacred!’
Рифма
•
Rhyme
OTHER POEMS
Признание
•
An Admission
Буря
•
Tempest
Последняя смерть
•
Ultimate Death
«Мой дар убог»
•
‘My talent is pitiful’
«К чему невольнику мечтания свободы?»
•
‘What is the freedom of dreams to the prisoner’
«Болящий дух врачует песнопенье»
•
‘Song heals the aching spirit’
«Я посетил тебя, пленительная сень»
•
‘Enchanted groves, I came to visit you’
На посев леса
•
Planting a Wood
Пироскаф
•
Steamship
Biographical Notes
INTRODUCTION
Among the great figures of Russian literature, Yevgeny Baratynsky is one of the least known outside Russia. Why this should be so is rather mysterious. Partly it must be due to the ‘purgatory’ that he suffered for some sixty years after his death in 1844 – and again in post-Revolutionary Russia, where it was only in the last third of the twentieth century that he came into his own as one of the outstanding poets in the language.
Whatever the cause, for the most part he has been published in English in a fragmentary way. And yet there is a lot that might attract foreign readers to his poetry. Of all European writers of the time, he seems closest to Giacomo Leopardi, long considered one of Italy’s greatest lyric poets. Leopardi, born in 1798 and dying in 1837, was an almost exact contemporary of Baratynsky (1800-1844), and there is much in the clear-sighted, bleak vision of man and society in the Canti that reminds one of the poet of Half-light: the historical pessimism, the noia (something like Baudelaire’s spleen), the awareness of human fragility and ephemerality, but also the idealism and the vital honesty and magnanimity.
The parallels are not exact of course. Leopardi’s poetic language, with its unprecedented exploration of freer verse forms, is quite different from that of the classicist Baratynsky, for whom metre and (usually) rhyme gave strength and permanence to poetry. And although both came from noble families that were removed from real power, Leopardi’s situation in post-Napoleonic Italy was poles apart from the Russian poet’s experience of post-Napoleonic Russia. Their private lives, too, though both difficult, evolved in quite separate ways.
Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky (sometimes spelled Boratynsky) was born in the first year of the new century on the family property in the Tambov region of central Russia. His father, losing the favour of Tsar Paul I, went to live in the country, devoting himself to improving his estate and creating a beautiful garden. Yevgeny remembered this garden fondly (see the poem ‘Enchanted Groves’), but he was less influenced by his father than by his strong-willed, intelligent and affectionate mother, Aleksandra Fyodorovna Cherepanova (many of his letters to her survive and some have been translated into English by G. R. Barratt [The Hague, 1973]). The boy was at first educated by tutors at home, but after his father’s death in 1810, he was given a place at the School of Pages, an elite boarding school in St Petersburg. To all appearances, his future was assured.
His school days, in which he discovered a love for literature and the desire to be a poet, were cut short by an event that changed the course of his life. Whether in emulation of the Robin-Hood activities of the hero of Schiller’s Die Räuber (as he later claimed) or simply to buy good things for his sixteenth birthday party, he and a classmate stole a substantial sum of money from another classmate’s father; they were immediately found out, disgraced and expelled from the school. A career as an officer was now closed to Baratynsky, especially in view of the personal disfavour of the tsar. Even so, after a period of suicidal depression, he decided to attempt to rehabilitate himself by enlisting as a private soldier.
His conditions of service were in fact quite favourable. At first he continued to live in St Petersburg, where he was one of a circle of highly gifted poets (later to be considered as the Pléiade of the Golden Age), including Aleksandr Pushkin, for many years a friend and ally, and his particular friend Anton Delvig. Before long he was transferred to Finland, but even here he was able to make frequent visits to St Petersburg – unlike Pushkin, who was at the same time exiled to the distant South for four years. Baratynsky’s view of Finland was a Romantic one, full of granite cliffs and waterfalls – his affecting long poem, ‘Eda’, set among Finnish country people, is a northern equivalent of Pushkin’s verse tale of the tragic love of a Russian soldier and a village girl, ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus’ – and Pushkin thought highly of his rival’s poem. The years spent in Finland were in fact very productive of verse, much of it published, sometimes with cuts imposed by the censor, in advanced St Petersburg journals. At this time Baratynsky was close to the young writers and officers who embraced the Decembrist cause, yet he himself, though he sympathised with their radical ideas and aspirations, held back for the most part from direct political commitment, as some of the Decembrists noted in their unfavourable reactions to ‘Eda’.
