Selected Poetry (Penguin) Read online

  Alexander Pushkin

  * * *

  SELECTED POETRY

  Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by

  ANTONY WOOD

  Contents

  Chronology

  Translating Pushkin

  Further Reading

  Introduction

  SELECTED POETRY I

  LYRIC POEMS St Petersburg, 1814–20 To a Young Beauty who has Taken Snuff (1814)

  The Rose (1815)

  To Baroness M. A. Delvig (1815)

  To Princess V. M. Volkonskaya (1816)

  The Singer (1816)

  The Window (1816)

  Liberty: An Ode (1817)

  To Chaadayev (1818)

  O. Masson (1819)

  A Good Revel (1819)

  Renaissance (1819)

  You and I (1820)

  To Yuryev (1820)

  Exile, 1820–26 ‘The light of day has faded’ (1820)

  The Nereid (1820)

  ‘I have outlived desires’ (1821)

  The Prisoner (1822)

  A Songbird (1823)

  Night (1823)

  ‘I went alone before the dawn’ (1823)

  [On Vorontsov] (‘Half trade, half grand seigneur’) (1824)

  ‘Zephyrs share / The midnight air’ (1824)

  To *** (‘It comes to me again, that moment’) (1825)

  ‘Late blooms I find more pleasing’ (1825)

  Winter Evening (1825)

  Prose Writer and Poet (1825)

  Mniszek’s ‘sonnet’ from Boris Godunov (1825)

  Confession (1826)

  The Prophet (1826)

  Moscow and St Petersburg, 1826–30 [To my Nanny] (‘My dear companion of past times’) (1826)

  Winter Road (1826)

  To I. I. Pushchin (1826)

  ‘Deep in the Siberian mines’ (1827)

  Arion (1827)

  The Angel (1827)

  The Poet (1827)

  19 October 1827 (1827)

  The Talisman (1827)

  Recollection (1828)

  Thou and You (1828)

  ‘My beauty, sing to me no more’ (1828)

  Portrait (1828)

  The Drowned Man (1828)

  The Upas Tree (1828)

  ‘Raven flies to raven’ (1828)

  The Poet and the Crowd (1828)

  A Flower (1828)

  ‘City of splendour, city of poor’ (1828)

  Signs (1829)

  ‘Once there lived a humble knight’ (1829)

  ‘The mists of night enfold the Georgian hills’ (1829)

  From Hafiz (1829)

  ‘The drums of reveille sound …’ (1829)

  The Monastery on Mount Kazbek (1829)

  ‘Winter. The country’ (1829)

  Winter Morning (1829)

  ‘I loved you: in my heart, perhaps’ (1829)

  ‘I walk the crowded thoroughfare’ (1829)

  ‘Inscribe my name? What good –’ (1830)

  ‘No, I have lost the taste for stormy pleasure’ (1830)

  To the Poet (1830)

  Madonna (1830)

  Demons (1830)

  Elegy (1830)

  To the Bust of a Conqueror (1830)

  Rhyme (1830)

  Invocation (1830)

  Mary’s song from A Feast during the Plague (1830)

  Master of the Revels’ song from A Feast during the Plague (1830)

  ‘Bound for your distant homeland’ (1830)

  Married Life, 1831–6 To the Slanderers of Russia (1831)

  My Pedigree (1831)

  For the Album of Princess Anna Abamelek (1832)

  The Beauty (1832)

  Autumn (A fragment) (1833)

  ‘It’s time, my love, it’s time!’ (1834)

  [From Anacreon:] A fragment (1835)

  ‘… I see again / That corner of the earth’ (1835)

  ‘The ready power of suffering’ (1835)

  The Stone Island Cycle: From Pindemonte (1836)

  ‘The desert fathers and unblemished women’ (1836)

  Imitation of the Italian (1836)

  Secular Power (1836)

  ‘When, alone with my thoughts, I leave the city’ (1836)

  ‘I have made myself, but not with hands, a monument’ (1836)

  II

  NARRATIVE POEMS (POEMY) The Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1823)

  The Gypsies (1824)

  The Bridegroom (1825)

  Count Nulin (1825)

  A Little House in Kolomna (1830)

  The Bronze Horseman (1833)

  III

  FAIRY TALES (SKAZKI) The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831)

  The Tale of a Fisherman and a Little Fish (1833)

  The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions (1833)

  The Tale of the Golden Cockerel (1834)

  Abbreviations

  Glossary of Metrical Terms

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH PUSHKIN was born in Moscow in 1799. His father, a low-ranking guards officer before early retirement, was of ancient lineage sunk into obscurity. His mother was the granddaughter of a north or north-central African captured as a boy and adopted by Peter the Great – Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who became an eminent military engineer. By the age of twelve Pushkin, given the run of his father’s extensive library, was already widely read in French and Classical literature, and during schooling at the Imperial Lycée at Tsarskoye Selo he devoted his energies to mastering all the verse forms of his time.

  On leaving school he spent three years in St Petersburg while holding a sinecure in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made lasting friendships at literary societies and wrote anti-autocratic poems which circulated in manuscript and offended Tsar Alexander I, resulting in a six-year exile from the capital, beginning at the age of twenty-one just when he was achieving national fame with his first long poem, the mock-epic fairy tale Ruslan and Lyudmila. His four years in the Russian South saw the composition of narrative poems inspired by Byron, and he began the novel in verse Eugene Onegin. During his last two years of exile on his parents’ estate near Pskov, his mature period as a lyric poet began, and he wrote the historical drama Boris Godunov.

  After the Decembrist uprising failure of 1825, Pushkin was granted conditional freedom. Over the rest of the 1820s, living in Moscow and St Petersburg and increasingly in debt, he attained the peak of his popularity before losing touch with changing public taste. He wrote some of his finest works in rural isolation, among them the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, verse fairy tales such as The Tale of the Golden Cockerel and Tsar Saltan, the prose tale The Queen of Spades, and a set of miniature verse dramas including Mozart and Salieri. In 1831 he married the young beauty Natalya Goncharova, a leading adornment at court balls. In January 1837 he was killed in a duel precipitated by a young guards officer’s pursuit of Natalya.

  ANTONY WOOD learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during National Service and read Modern Languages (French and German) and English at Cambridge. After twenty years as a book-commissioning editor in London he worked as a freelance translator and founded the imprint Angel Books, devoted to translations of European literature. Paul Scofield, Simon Callow and Ralph Fiennes have been among those who have participated in readings of his own translations of Pushkin on radio and at literary festivals. He has collaborated in several bilingual publications of the Pushkin State Theatre Centre, St Petersburg. In 1999 he was awarded a Pushkin Medal by the Russian government. His published translations of Pushkin include Mozart and Salieri: The Little Tragedies (1982), The Gypsies & Other Narrative Poems (2006) and the first version of Boris Goduno
v (in Chester Dunning et al., The Uncensored ‘Boris Godunov’, 2006; stage production in Princeton, 2007).

  Chronology

  1799 Born in Moscow on 26 May, eldest of three children (with a younger brother and sister) of Sergey L’vovich Pushkin and Nadezhda Osipovna.

  1800–1811 Brought up in Moscow, Pushkin has the run of his father’s well-stocked library of French literature and attends his and his father’s poet brother Vasily’s literary salons frequented by leading figures.

  1801 Paul I is killed in a palace revolution. Accession of Alexander I.

  1811 Pushkin enters the new Lycée at Tsarskoye Selo founded by Alexander.

  1812 Napoleon invades Russia. Battle of Borodino.

  1814 Napoleon’s defeat outside Paris. Poems by Pushkin published for the first time, anonymously, in a St Petersburg magazine.

  1815 The poet Gavrila Derzhavin hears Pushkin read one of his poems and names him his successor.

  1816 Pushkin takes a keen interest in the meetings of the literary society Arzamas while at school.

  1817 Graduates from the Lycée. Appointed to a sinecure in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Begins work on Ruslan and Lyudmila; writes ‘Liberty: An Ode’.

  1817–20 Leads a dissipated life in St Petersburg; continues to write daring liberal verses, resulting in his exile.

  1820 Ruslan and Lyudmila published, making Pushkin a national celebrity. Travels with the Rayevsky family in the Caucasus and Crimea on journey to exile in Kishinev, Bessarabia. Begins first Byronic poem, The Prisoner of the Caucasus.

  1821 Writes the blasphemous poem The Gabrieliad (unpublished). Meets Karolina Sobanskaya.

  1822 The Prisoner of the Caucasus published.

  1823 Begins the novel in verse Eugene Onegin. Transferred to Odessa under the command of the new governor-general of New Russia (i.e. the South) and Bessarabia, Count Mikhail Vorontsov. Meets Amalia Riznich.

  1824 Affair with Vorontsov’s wife Yelizaveta. The Fountain of Bakhchisaray published, a great commercial success. Death of Byron. After being discovered by the authorities studying atheism, Pushkin is transferred to his mother’s estate at Mikhaylovskoye near Pskov. Writes memoirs, later burnt. Writes The Gypsies. St Petersburg suffers the most destructive flood in its history.

  1825 Receives visit during first winter at Mikhaylovskoye from his close school friend and Decembrist Ivan Pushchin. Meets Anna Kern and writes ‘To ***’ (‘It comes to me again, that moment’). First chapter of Eugene Onegin published. Writes Boris Godunov and Count Nulin. Death of Alexander I; accession of Nicholas I. Decembrist uprising in support of a constitutional monarchy.

  1826 Pushkin writes ‘The Prophet’. Summoned to meet Nicholas I, who ends his exile and states that he will be his personal censor. First collection of lyric poems published and quickly sells out. The tsar’s secret police organ created, responsible for censorship: the Third Department of the Tsar’s Chancellery, headed by Count Aleksandr Benckendorff. Five of the Decembrists are hanged and some hundred and twenty exiled to Siberia. Pushkin given official reprimand for reading Boris Godunov, unpublished, to friends without permission.

  1827 The Gypsies published. Becomes friendly with the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz in Moscow.

  1828 For the last time Pushkin is accused of suspected authorship of the blasphemous narrative poem The Gabrieliad; after a confidential interview with the tsar, no more is said. Writes Poltava, a long narrative poem on Peter the Great, the Ukrainian Cossack leader Mazepa and Charles XII of Sweden; it receives a mixed reception on publication in 1829. Russian victory over Persia brings definitive absorption of Dagestan, eastern Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia into the Russian Empire. Death of Nikolay Karamzin. Pushkin meets Natalya Goncharova.

  1828–9 Third Russo-Turkish War. Pushkin travels through Transcaucasia and rides with the Russian army in a skirmish.

  1829 Playwright and diplomat Aleksandr Griboyedov lynched by a mob in Tehran. Second collection of Pushkin’s lyric poems published. Begins the verse drama Rusalka, to be finally revised and completed in 1834.

  1830 Betrothal to Natalya Goncharova. French July Revolution; King Charles X replaced by Louis Philippe I. Quarantined on his father’s estate of Boldino in Nizhny Novgorod province in the autumn during a cholera outbreak, writes The Tales of Belkin, the last two chapters of Eugene Onegin, the ‘Little Tragedies’, A Little House in Kolomna and some thirty short poems.

  1831 Pushkin marries Natalya on 18 February. Appointed Russia’s official historian laureate, succeeding Karamzin. Boris Godunov published in censored form, to a mixed reception. Publishes poem ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ supporting Russian suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830–31. Writes The Tale of Tsar Saltan.

  1832 Third collection of lyric poems published, also containing The Tale of Tsar Saltan and the blank verse ‘Little Tragedy’ Mozart and Salieri.

  1833 First complete edition of Eugene Onegin published. Pushkin works on A History of the Pugachev Rebellion; the tsar grants him an interest-free loan of 20,000 roubles to cover publication costs, to be repaid in two instalments. At Boldino in the autumn writes in four weeks The Bronze Horseman, The Tale of a Fisherman and a Little Fish, The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Champions and first drafts of prose tale The Queen of Spades. The tsar demands radical cuts to The Bronze Horseman which Pushkin is unable to make, so the poem remains unpublished, apart from the prologue, in his lifetime. Appointed to the humiliatingly lowly court post of kamer-junker (gentleman of the chamber), necessitating regular appearances at balls with his wife.

  1834 A History of the Pugachev Rebellion published. Pushkin begins work on a history of Peter the Great. Continuously mounting debts. A letter from Pushkin to Natalya with a disparaging reference to Nicholas’s two predecessors and the poet’s appointment as kamer-junker is opened by the authorities, causing tensions between Pushkin and the tsar. Attempts to resign the new post and retire from the capital to the country to write and work refused by the tsar with the threat of withdrawal of access to state archives. Writes The Tale of the Golden Cockerel.

  1835 Publication of selected works in volumes of narrative verse, lyric poems and prose. The tsar grants Pushkin’s request for an interest-free loan of 30,000 roubles, soon to be repaid, in lieu of salary. Georges d’Anthès, adopted son of the Dutch envoy Baron Jacob van Heeckeren, begins to pay court to Natalya.

  1836 Pushkin launches quarterly journal The Contemporary, in which he publishes his own and others’ work, including his novel The Captain’s Daughter, Gogol’s story ‘The Nose’ and early lyrics by Fyodor Tyutchev. Writes the ‘Stone Island cycle’ of poems. In November receives an anonymous round-robin letter announcing his ‘cuckoldry’.

  1837 In January, Pushkin provokes a duel with d’Anthès. He is severely wounded in the duel and dies two days later (29 January). The tsar pays off Pushkin’s debts, grants a pension to Natalya and further sums to his four children, and undertakes to bear publication costs of his works.

  1838 Pushkin’s published works unreliably reprinted.

  1841 Publication of posthumous works in three volumes edited by Vasily Zhukovsky; also unreliable.

  1855–7 First attempt at a comprehensive edition of Pushkin’s works in seven volumes edited by P. V. Annenkov: lacking in editorial rigour, and corruptions remain.

  1887 Expiry of Pushkin’s copyrights. A number of unrigorous and unreliable collected editions follow over the next forty years.

  1937–59 The Complete Works in seventeen volumes, with textual annotation only, published by the USSR Academy of Sciences, its launch marking the centenary of Pushkin’s death; it remains the most thorough and reliable complete edition; reissued Moscow, 1994–7.

  Translating Pushkin

  Pushkin had a direct and contemporary sound to his first readers. His verse is immediately recognisable for the perfection and precision with which he metricises Russian, and it can translate naturally, broadly speaking, into the English of our time. I have tried to ref
lect the hallmarks of Pushkin’s style – in lyric verse the personal, everyday register with a contrastingly elevated level in more formal genres such as ode, elegy and sonnet, and sometimes the mixture of diction in the same poem, the informal word in a formal context in deliberate provocation of the purist reader. I have endeavoured to follow the contours of Pushkin’s lines, whether the original metre is kept or not, in word placing and emphases, enjambement, repetition and parallelism, and often punctuation.

  The biggest problem for the English translator of Russian verse is that Russian abounds in long, sinuous words that can be made even longer by inflection, whereas English words are shorter and abound in monosyllables. In verse, English can have a monotonous, heavy sound unless something is done to break up successions of monosyllables. A line in Russian has the natural, swift, light rhythm of the language, and a metrically four-stress line, i.e. tetrameter, usually ripples past with only three, often only two natural word stresses, sounding more spontaneous and conversational than English does over the same metrical length. Furthermore, a Russian word, however long, takes only one stress, which can often dominate a whole phrase or even a whole line of verse. Russian word order is more flexible than English and can be arranged to match the metre more readily; Pushkin is a master in this, also in taking every advantage of variable stress patterns and inflected word endings.

  The polysyllabic nature of the Russian language means that a line of verse translated literally into English will be shorter than the original. If the original metre is kept in translation, syllables will usually need to be added in English to maintain scansion. This causes padding, the arch-enemy of poetry and verse translations, especially of Pushkin. Preservation of original metrical form has therefore been a low priority in many of the lyric translations that appear in this book, though it remains an ideal that can sometimes be achieved. I have usually sought equivalence for Pushkin’s six- and five-stress lines, hexameters and pentameters, in shorter English lines. In keeping Pushkin’s favourite metre, the iambic tetrameter, I have relaxed absolute metrical strictness (in accordance with English tradition), though keeping faith with scansion: I have often, for example, chopped the initial unstressed syllable of an iambic line to suit the greater proportion of stressed syllables in English, making the line trochaic, starting with a stressed syllable (used continuously, that metre has an entirely different, weightier rhythm, but not in isolation). Or, again in iambic metre, I have from time to time practised inversion (reversed the stress in one foot), usually at the beginning of a line, starting the line on a stress and having two successive unstressed syllables as it proceeds. Both these metrical relaxations, not in Russian classic tradition, are common in English poetry.