Imagery in translation. Transla ting Alexander Pushkin into English

PROSE UNIT 6:

TRANSLA TING ALEXANDER PUSHKIN INTO ENGLISH

Introductory Notes

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837) gave to Russian literature more than any other writer, both in form and content, as poet, dramatist, historian, critic and story-teller.

He descended from a very interesting family. On his fa­ther's part, he belonged to one of the noblest clans in Russia, whose ancestors counted more generations of nobility and gal­lantry than the imperial family of the Romanovs. On his moth­er's, he had among his great grandfathers Abraham Hannibal, an Abyssinian captive prince, who was taken to Russia by Peter the Great and was patronised and protected by the Emperor. Peter engaged him into a noble Russian family and thus programmed the future luminary of Russian literature.

From his early childhood Alexander Pushkin knew languag­es and read a great deal in literature and history of the world. He was educated in the most aristocratic privileged school of Lyce­um where boys were taught by the best teachers in then Russia. They received proper education in classical and modern languag­es, literatures, world history, rhetoric and philosophy. He began to write very early, and his first poem in print appeared when he was about fifteen. He was a known poet when eighteen, graduat­ing from the Lyceum.

Spending a couple of years at civil service, he began his
professional literary career with a long folk-poem Ruslan and
Ludmila (1820), which placed him among the writers of rank and
fame. At the same time, his quick temperament and French up­
bringing in the family that was famous for their liberal views, let
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ideas of liberty get deeply rooted in him, which made him sort of persona поп grata in St. Petersburg. He was regularly exiled from the imperial centres, either to the southern outskirts of Russia, i.e., to Ekaterinoslav, Odessa or Kishinev, or to his family Pskov estate, Mikhailovskoye. Yet a few years spent in such detachment turned out to be quite productive, for he learnt much about life, people and places, which he would not have got staying in the capital among the Petersburg wit and beau nobility. He learnt to suffer and sympathise, to contemplate and compare. The most prominent fruit of that time were his Eugene Onegin and Boris Godunov.

His friendship with the active participants and organisers of 1825 December 14 uprising brought him another wave of the Court suspicions. He was pardoned and even protected by the Emperor himself, but that protection turned out to be a secret surveillance. There were some occasions when he wrote or pub­lished something that brought him in jeopardy and he was sent out to his Boldino estate.

In one of such minor exiles, which was later called his Boldino Autumn (1830), Pushkin wrote five stories and united them into a cycle, The Tales of Ivan Belkin. The style and lan­guage of the novelettes were so vivid, natural and fascinating that they immediately became the most popular reading in the soci­ety.

Later, Pushkin wrote his more serious books, among them Dubrovsky (1832) and The Captain's Daughter (1836). Critics agree that his prosaic manner is marked by special clarity and accuracy of expression. The reader may note such distinctive fea­tures of his prose as the absence of any lofty metaphors or epi­thets and a swiftly developing plot. As he himself said, "Accura­cy and brevity are the prime merits of prose."

The history of English translations of Pushkin has never been energetic, first of all due to the barrier of culture, then to the barrier of language. Resulted may be rather monotonous, at times blurred impression that the English reader receives of Russian

Практикум, по художественному переводу

writing; more often than not it lacks either taste or accuracy — or both. Vladimir Nabokov was one of those daring Russians who tried to re-create the real Pushkin into the virtual one who would have written his poetry and prose in English. Yet there is some subtle chemistry that changes inevitably in the process of con­verting the ideas from one linguistic shape into another... As soon as Григорий Иванович becomes Grigori Ivanovich he ceases to be a Russian but becomes & foreigner, when Lisa puts on her sarafan she puts on something quite exotic and strange, which impression is very far from that the source text produces on the Russian reader. Some means of compensation of this inevitable loss should be found.

Nor less important is the task to observe the functional val­ue of the source syntactical structures. Pushkin skilfully plays on the emphatic possibilities of Russian syntax, for instance, using inversion to differentiate between a normal and abnormal situa­tion. Thus, normal actions are usually presented in the direct or­der of words, «он был женат, он выстроил», etc. The actions that may seem strange or folly, or should sound ironical, are usu­ally presented in the inverted order, «выстроил он, развел он, служил он». If we fail to translate these features into English, tTfe translation will lose the slightly ironical and vividly colloquial rhythm of the source text; the translated text will sound too straight and monotonous lacking the easy, conversational manner of the Russian source.

The two translations of THE SHOT we use here for com­parison manifest all kinds of deviations from the vocabulary, syn­tax and style of the source text. The first translation was per­formed by a Russian native speaker on behalf of the Progress Publishers (1974); the second one belongs to an American.

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