Tag: silver age poetry translations

“We were together…” – A. Blok

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 26/?

With the theme of love (it is never that simple), we return to the poems that Dmitri Shostakovich set to music in his Op. 127, “Seven Songs on the Poetry of Alexander Blok.” (See “Music,” part 7, here.) This one was chosen to be the third part of seven, taking the tension down from the previous song, “Gamayun” (of which more later). It has an elegiac quality; it is clearly talking about love from the past that is no longer present. 

* * *

We were together, I recall…
The fiddle sang, the night was flowing…
Those days you were mine above all,
And lovelier by the hour growing.
Through woman’s smiled request to guess,
Through fountains’ murmur soft receding,
Your lips begged for a kissed caress,
The music for heart’s breach was pleading.

Alexander Blok, March 9, 1899; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, July 2016.

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“All promised him to me…” – A. Akhmatova

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 25/?

Continuing the theme of love poems (with a twist): This poem by Anna Akhmatova, from her collection White Flock, was dedicated in manuscript to B. V. Anrep, which dedication was subsequently crossed out.

Boris Vasilievich von Anrep (1883-1969) was a poet and artist, who had quit law school to study art (specifically, mosaics) in France and England. By the beginning of the 1920s, he was getting multiple contracts for mosaics in British stately homes, and in 1923, he created the mosaic floor in the Blake Room of the Tate Gallery.

But he spent World War I in Russia, as a reserve officer, and there he met Akhmatova in 1915 in Tsarskoye Selo. She immediately began dedicating poems to him, and seventeen of the poems in White Flock are marked with his name. They would meet whenever he would return from active duty. However, he apparently only saw their relationship as a warm friendship. He had married Yunia Khitrovo, an aristocrat, in 1908, at the insistence of their families as she had been “compromised” by him. Akhmatova met her in 1916 and dedicated another poem to her. By 1911, he had started a relationship with the singer Helen Maitland, and lived with both Helen and Yunia in Paris, while also pursuing other relationships on the side.

He never returned to Russia after 1917, but in 1952, he was commissioned to create four large mosaics for the British National Gallery, and portrayed Akhmatova as Compassion in one of them. They met for the last time in 1965, shortly before Akhmatova’s death.

***

All promised him to me, it seemed:
The sky’s edge with its dull gold glister,
On Christmas Eve the sweetest dream,
The many-chiming wind at Easter,

The ivy’s curving scarlet vines,
Park waterfalls white-churning down,
The two great perching dragonflies
On the wrought-iron fence rust brown.

I couldn’t not believe, not hope,
That soon in friendship we’d be meeting
When I would walk on mountain slopes
Along a path of rocks sun-heated.

Anna Akhmatova, 1916; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, July 2016.

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“Some wait for joy, some seek ovations…” – M. Lokhvitskaya

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 24/?

I mentioned Mirra Lokhvitskaya (1869-1905) before in connection to her correspondence with Konstantin Balmont. As much of her side of the conversation was destroyed, we know of their relationship through a series of poems they dedicated to each other. There was much speculation as to whether their relationship was sexual, but most reliable sources believe that it was platonic — despite the sensuality of her poems, Lokhviskaya lived a quiet life married to Eugene Gibert (a second-generation French immigrant who worked as a civil engineer) and raising five sons.
 
She was born Maria Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, in a large family. Her younger sister Nadezhda would grow up to be the satirist and memoirist with the pseudonym Teffi, whom I have already mentioned in connection to her reminiscences of Zinaida Gippius. Apparently, all the children in the family wrote poetry but got mercilessly teased by each other for doing it; there are several conflicting stories that Maria took the pen name Mirra from a poem or poetic translation of her brother’s that was the object of family mockery.
 
In her heyday she was the first notable female Silver Age poet, paving the way for Anna Akhmatova and Maria Tsvetaeva. She was also among the most commercially successful poets of any gender: her collections sold well where most others’ sold poorly. Her contemporaries observe, though, that she was often underestimated because she was small and beautiful, so people didn’t notice anything other than her looks. Unfortunately, she died at the young age of 35, apparently of heart disease.

Most of her poems on Wikisource, though full of lyric imagery, are tricky to translate. She was fond of using very strictly formal verse, such as the triolet, which, like a villanelle, is structured around repeating lines; I would have a hard enough time composing one of those on any topic, much less convey the same meaning with one. This poem is thankfully simpler, and fits our mini-theme of love.

***

Some wait for joy, some seek ovations,
Some look for honours in the field,
Some yearn for mad gratification,
Some for reply to prayers appealed.

While I — all visions false, mistaken,
Like bygone dreams fever-distressed,
I’ll trade now for the bliss of waking,
Oh dear friend, upon your breast.

Mirra Lokhvitskaya, 1896—1898; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, August 2016.

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“Your opened hand, your tilted shoulder…” – M. Voloshin

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 23/?

We gradually shift from the theme of religion and myth to the theme of love, via a poem that incorporates both myths and love. 

Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932) was a prominent member of the Symbolist circle. He finished his education as an autodidact after being expelled from Moscow University for “participation in unrest and student agitation.” He travelled Europe to study art (he was a notable landscape artist) and also participated in scientific expeditions to Central Asia. He had been both a Freemason and an Anthroposophist. During the Russian Civil War, while living in Koktebel in the Crimea, he used his house as a safehouse for the persecuted — first, the Reds from the Whites, then after the Reds gained power, the Whites from the Reds. 

This is a love poem that uses palmistry notions. To my knowledge, there is no Ring of Venus in the standard palmistry map of the hand, but there is a Girdle of Venus: a curved line under the middle and ring fingers, above the topmost of the major lines, the “Heart Line.” In a quaint 1930s palmistry book I read once, the presence of a Girdle of Venus on the subject’s hand is associated with…the authors hedged about it with horror and finally said that they might as well tell you, it’s “onanism.” Being a well-informed palmistry skeptic these days, I was amused to think this while translating this poem. To clarify, other sources do claim it’s more about sensuality. 

***

Your opened hand, your tilted shoulder…
Your face not yet to me defined,
Your Ring of Venus stood out bolder,
I knew the power in its line.

The way the Lines of Will divided
Told: you and I alike are strained.
Trapped in one ring, captive inside it
In the twin flows of the mundane.

And if we meet in fated chances
(Perhaps in thunder of the chase),
I’ll love you not for speech or glances
But for your pale palm’s fine trace.

Maximilian Voloshin December 3, 1910; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, July 2016

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The Birch Tree – S. Gorodetsky

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 22/?

Winding up the mini-theme of the Silver Age poets and religion, we turn to pagan gods.

Sergei Gorodetsky (1884-1967) was, with Gumilev, the co-head of the Poets’ Guild that forged the Acmeist movement. However, he has since been overshadowed by Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and even Gumilev himself. He started out as a Symbolist, and seems to have kept the habits, with his imagery. He also served as a mentor to many of the “new peasant poets,” most importantly Sergei Esenin, helping the latter’s entry into Russia’s poetic circles. As well, he was a war correspondent and medical aide during the First World War, and allegedly, published a book of poems about Armenia commenting on the Armenian genocide. (Wikipedia claims he knew the Armenian language but that had “citation needed” beside it.) After the Revolution, he joined the forces of Soviet poets, as well as translating opera librettos.

In this poem, as he is wont to do, he invokes the “Slavic Pagan” gods Lel (the god of marriage) and Yarilo (god of the sun or summer). Trick is, those are both part of “cabinet mythology”: the attempt by nineteenth-century mythographers to create a mythology for pre-Christian Slavs that would be as diverse as Hellenic or Celtic, most of whose gods were made up. Yarilo, referring to “yar,” spring or summer (cognate with Germanic “Jahr” and thus English “year”), was originally associated with a festival at the end of spring, and the cabinet mythographers turned the name of the festival into a full-fledged god. Lel is similarly unattested as a god in pre-Christian sources, but Gorodetsky may not have known this.

But it’s still a lovely poem.

The Birch Tree

I fell in love with you one amber day
When, born in azure glow
From every twig, its thanks to say,
Warm languor trickling would flow.

White as hop blooms, lake waves foamed and rolled,
So white their bodies fair.
The laughing Lel the love-god pulled
The sunbeams of black hair.

Yarila himself splendidly had crowned
The tips of locks with verdant hue,
And braiding them, would scatter down
Green colour into azure blue.

Sergei Gorodetsky, June 14, 1906; translation by me, July 2016

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Music / “At night, when troubles fall in slumber” – A. Blok

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 21/?

I continue the mini-theme of how Silver Age poets dealt with God and religion, and we return to the greatest of the Russian Symbolists, Alexander Blok.

Today’s poem had no name as Blok wrote it in 1898. It was Dmitri Shostakovich who dubbed it “Music.” Yes, today’s musical setting is finally by a composer you have heard of. In 1967, while recovering in hospital from a broken leg, Shostakovich went through a two-volume set of Blok’s poetry and picked seven poems, mostly from 1898-99 with one from 1902 to create a song suite (he didn’t like the term “song cycle”) for voice, violin, cello and piano: his “Seven Songs on the Poetry of Alexander Blok,” Op. 127. This poem is the seventh, forming the climax of the suite as it is performed.

A reader of this series asked me a short while ago, “Well, what is the message of these poems?” Well, for this one, laced with Symbolism as it is, I’m pretty sure the message is, “Blok thought sunsets were pretty.” He just expressed it quite fervently.

(Music)

At night when troubles fall in slumber,
And cities vanish in the shade,
Oh, God has music without number,
What wondrous sounds the earth gets played!

What matter all life’s storms and fears
If I’ve the burning bloom of rose?
What matter all the human tears
When blushing spread the sunset glows!

Accept, o queen of heaven’s gloaming,
Through blood, through torture, through the grave,
The cup of final passion foaming
From your most undeserving slave!

Alexander Blok, September 1898; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, July 2016

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Dedication – Z. Gippius

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 20/?

Our second Gippius poem. When Zinaida Gippius published her first volume of poetry, in 1894, the first poem, “Dedication,” immediately caused a scandal. How dare this woman write “I love myself as I do God”?

All her life, Gippius was religious and devout, but in a strange, eccentric way, though in a different way than her profoundly mystical husband Dmitri Merezhkovsky. Many years later, the writer Teffi (of whom hopefully more anon) wrote about knowing Gippius in Paris that she had always gone to Catholic church, rather than the Orthodox one. She loved scandal, her contemporaries attest, and on being asked about that line and about her eccentric dress, replied that in those days, she liked pulling those kinds of provocative tricks.

She enjoyed being called “the White She-Devil.” On being asked whether she feared the Last Judgement, Gippius expressed extreme indignation. “I had never encountered such scorn for the afterlife from anyone,” Teffi observed. “She did not deny the existence of the afterlife, but that the Lord would dare judge Zinaida Gippius […] — that was absurd to even consider.”

(In the same reminiscence, Teffi notes that Gippius had a clear weakness for cute kitten pictures, which she desperately tried to conceal.)

Dedication

The heavens are low and drear,
But my spirit is high, it’s known.
You and I are so strangely near,
And each of us is alone.

Pitiless is the path I have trod
And it leads me to death and the grave.
But I love myself as I do God,
And it’s love that my soul shall save.

And so if on my way I tire
And if pettily I complain,
If for joy I would dare desire,
And rebel against my own grain,

Do not leave me with no glance more,
In dull troubled days, do not leave.
Your weaker friend, I implore,
Console me, pity me, deceive.

As we both on to eastward go,
You and I are uniquely nigh.
The heavens are gloating low,
But I trust that our spirit is high.

Zinaida Gippius, March 1894; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, July 2016

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“Those who are woken, pray for me” – E. Kuzmina-Karavaeva (M. Skobtsova)

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 19/?

There is only one poem by Elizaveta Kuzmina-Karavaeva (Maria Skobtsova) on the Russian Wikisource, and I translated it mainly as an excuse to talk about this woman’s extraordinary life. Poet. Acmeist. Memoirist. Mayor. Theologian. Nun. French Resistance fighter. Righteous Gentile. Martyr. Saint.  

She was born Elizaveta Pilenko in 1891 in Riga, and grew up near the Black Sea in Anapa and Yalta. Her father’s death in 1906 made her lose her own faith, and forced the family to move to St. Petersburg. There she met Alexander Blok, starting a long correspondence, and married the former Bolshevik Dmitri Kuzmin-Karavaev, through whom she met many of the poets in the Poets’ Guild, the centre of Acmeist activity. With their support, she began to publish poetry, and her collections were well-received.

In 1913 she left her husband and joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party after the February Revolution. She apparently wished to assassinate Leon Trotsky for closing the SR Party Congress, but friends persuaded her to instead move back to the Black Sea to work for the SR there. She was very active as a community organizer in Anapa, and in 1918 was elected mayor of the city when it fell under White Army control.

She led underground resistance against the Bolsheviks, while trying to protect the population from the terror of the new regime. She was arrested and put on trial, but managed to escape capital punishment due to a skilled defence and help by the judge, D. Skobtsov, whom she ended up falling in love with and marrying. In 1920, after the White movement in southern Russia was destroyed, she and her family escaped to Georgia, then Constantinople, Serbia, and finally Paris in 1924, where she published memoirs and novellas in the Russian-language press.  

In Paris, more and more moved by religious impulse after the deaths of her daughters, she completed a course of study at the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute by correspondence, and in 1932 became a lay nun, taking the name Maria. Now under the name Mother Maria Skobtsova, she extensively published theological writings, memoirs and poetry, as well as frequently lecturing.

When Nazi forces occupied France, the informal convent where she lived became a Resistance headquarters. She and her fellow priests and nuns issued baptismal certificates to Jews. When Jews in Paris were rounded up in the Velodrome d’Hiver to be sent to Auschwitz, Mother Maria succeeded in smuggling four Jewish children out of there in trash bins. In 1943, she and her son were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps. She was killed in the gas chamber at Ravensbruck concentration camp on March 31, 1945, Holy Saturday, only a week before the camp was liberated. 

In 1985, Yad Vashem recognized her as Righteous Among the Nations for her work saving Jews from the Holocaust, and in 2004, with some controversy (related to her two marriages and children, her political activism, the fact that she smoked, and her somewhat heterodox preaching and what some saw as a tendency to holy fool-ishness), the Russian Orthodox Church canonized her as a martyred saint.

The poem below was written before the October Revolution, but both presages her later theological involvement and the struggles she was to endure. 

***

Those who are woken, pray for me,
All those who hold a splinter of my soul.
The hour has come, brief steps lie to the goal —
All I have seen in dreams has come to be.

Brothers and friends are lost in weary sleep.
The spirit is in mortal suffering spent.
The hour has come; the roads we’ve trod all end,
And God alone my soul will keep.

Elizaveta Kuzmina-Karavaeva (Maria Skobtsova), 1916; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, July 2016.

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“Leaves fall on your grave…” – M. Tsvetaeva

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 18/?

This poem by Marina Tsvetaeva is part of a cycle addressed to Peter Efron, her husband’s brother, who had died of tuberculosis.

She uses the you-formal form throughout in addressing him, a distinction I tried to preserve by using “sir.” In my effort to keep to the rhythm (and make the poem somewhat singable to the numerous musical settings that Russian composers have made of it) I changed the last lines from the letter of the original to a call, although since she does vary the meter of the last line of each verse, I felt I could relax my constraints on this. “To take you home” has more syllables than the original, but there was no shorter way I could do it in English.  

***

Leaves fall on your grave with the end of the year.
The air wafts winter’s chill.
Listen, my dead sir, listen, my dear,
You are mine still.

You laugh! From the blessed travel cart heading out!
The moon’s overhead.
Mine — as inalienably, with no doubt,
As this hand I spread.

With my bag I’ll go at dawn without fail
To the hospital door.
You’ve just gone away for a holiday, to sail,
To the great ocean shore.

I kissed you! Bespelled you! I laugh at the notion
That dark is the graveyard loam.
I don’t believe death! I await at the station
To take you home.

Let leaves crumble down, what mourning crepe said
Gilt words now erase clear through.
And if the whole world believes you are dead,
Then I am dead too.

I see you, I feel you — all around I scent you!
What matter the wreaths mourners send!
I haven’t forgotten you, I won’t forget you
To eternity’s end!

Of such vows I know the pointless vanity,
Worthless, destroyed.
A call to the endless – A call to infinity –
A call to the void.

 
Marina Tsvetaeva, 1914; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, July 2016.

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Modernity – N. Gumilev

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 17/?

To follow up on yesterday’s second Mandelstam poem in this series, here is one that is closely related to the first one I posted (found here). Apparently, reading the Iliad late at night, and writing poems about the weird mental state that results, was a common pastime among the Acmeists, and Gumilev had done it four years earlier. However, the two poets’ responses to the same situation are fascinatingly different; Gumilev focuses on the modern world’s contrast with the world of the Iliad, while Mandelstam looks at the Achaeans directly.

(I am aware that it’s mammoths, not mastodons, that lived in Siberia. Please feel free to go to Gumilev’s grave and address your concerns, although I suspect he knew as well, and was just reaching for a rhyme with “horizons” in the original.)

Modernity

I shut Homer and sat by the bay window glass.
On my lips the last word of the Iliad fluttered.
The night watchman’s long shadow unhurriedly passed,
And above something — lamplight or moonlight — bright sputtered.

So, so often I’d throw down challenging looks
And I met in reply many challenging glances:
Odysseuses over a shipping firm’s books,
Agamemnons amid seedy public-hall bouncers.

Likewise, far in Siberia where blizzards weep,
Mastodons grow more still in their silver glaciers.
Over there their dull yearning makes snowdrifts sweep,
And it’s their blood that reddens horizon frontiers.

I am sad from the book, yearning from the moon’s light.
Perhaps I need no hero, the way it is going.
Here come down the alley, strange in tender delight,
A pair of students embracing, like Daphnis and Chloe.

Nikolai Gumilev, 1911; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, July 2016.

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