Chapter 7. Poetry Translation

Once, I suddenly remembered that I knew English. I had studied it at school for a full eleven years—did I really have the right to forget it? Of course not. But the lack of practice had transformed my English from a language into a memory. I needed somehow to restore my skills. Naturally, my first attempt was reading unadapted literature in English. But what did I actually retain from it? I was too lazy to consult a dictionary for every unfamiliar word, and there were countless such words. Yet, as one of the classics once wrote, there was another way.

Long before the events described above, I happened upon a marvelous book entitled American Poetry in Russian Translation (Moscow: Raduga, 1983). Oh, what poems it contained! Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Longfellow, Wystan Hugh Auden, Walt Whitman, Edwin Robinson. And the translations themselves were extraordinary: Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, Mikhail Zenkevich, Korney Chukovsky, Ivan Bunin, Innokenty Annensky… I compared the translations with the originals, especially since the book included several different versions of each translation.

Years later, when I myself decided to take up translation, I remembered that book. My experience in poetic translation is not especially vast, but it is original: I translate not from other languages into Russian, but from Russian into English. Believe me, that is more difficult. But also far more interesting. At the very least, one’s vocabulary in the foreign language grows not by the day but by the hour.

As an introduction, let me present my own translation of Dana Sideros’s poem “Cartoons” from Russian into English.

In the final line, I could have written “We are so we run run run,” which would have been closer to the original, but I liked the allusion to Descartes’s famous phrase “I think, therefore I am,” and so I altered the ending.

But that is not the point. The point lies in the principles of poetic translation that I have formulated for myself and encourage you to follow as well, because they will allow you to translate from one language into another beautifully, accurately, and properly.

In reality, the rules of poetic translation are quite few in number—but they are strict. If you do not follow them, nothing worthwhile will come of it. So, the most important thing is the preservation of meter and rhyme scheme. In a poetic translation, the meter and rhyme pattern must correspond rigorously to those of the original author. If the original is written in five-foot iamb, then the translation must also be in five-foot iamb. If the original follows an abab scheme, then the translation must preserve the same pattern. A sonnet may only be translated as a sonnet, and an ode only as an ode.

Perhaps no work has suffered more at the hands of unskilled translators freely reinterpreting the author’s intention than Edgar Allan Poe’s famous “The Raven.” “The Raven” possesses an extremely distinct musical rhythm and rhyme scheme. Let me remind you:

…and so on, for a total of eighteen stanzas.

Now then, it has been translated perhaps fifteen or twenty times—I would not dare to give an exact number. But many of these translations are astonishing in their lack of thoughtfulness. For example, in 1878 Sergey Andreyevsky published in European Bulletin a translation of “The Raven” written in four-foot iamb! Andreyevsky justified this by claiming that it was more important to preserve the atmosphere of the poem, even at the expense of technique. Subsequent translations—those by Palmin, Kondratyev, and Obolensky—were likewise written in four-foot iamb. In 1885 there even appeared a prose “translation” by an unknown author. In general, many English-language poems suffered this fate almost until the very end of the nineteenth century. The first truly adequate and successful translation of “The Raven” was produced by Konstantin Balmont in 1894:

However, as early as 1890 Dmitry Merezhkovsky had also produced a translation preserving the original meter, though from a poetic standpoint that version is not distinguished by great quality. In my opinion, the finest translation was made by Mikhail Zenkevich:

The complete original text may be read, for example, on lib.ru. The same page also contains numerous translations, both good and bad. I especially recommend becoming acquainted with Zenkevich’s version.

As we may observe, the translation must preserve both the meter (four-foot paeon III—or, as some prefer to interpret it, eight-foot trochee with a caesura after the fourth foot) and the rhyme scheme:

In this scheme I have also taken into account the internal rhymes running through the middle of the line. In fact, not every stanza of “The Raven” follows precisely this rhyme pattern. For example, already in the second stanza:

The difference is tiny—one internal rhyme is missing—but I believe that even such nuances must absolutely be taken into account. Let me give one more example: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Excelsior!”:

…and so on. In Wilhelm Levik’s translation, this poem reads as follows:

Levik departs rather significantly from complete dictionary-level correspondence with the original, yet he brilliantly conveys the mood and, most importantly, fully preserves the rhythm of Longfellow’s poem.

Sometimes difficulties arise. For example, poems built upon sound imitation or combinatorial constructions are almost impossible to translate adequately. Palindromic and anagrammatic poetry, for instance, is essentially untranslatable. In 1969 the French experimental novelist Georges Perec wrote his greatest work—the novel A Void (La Disparition). In this enormous work, written in French, the most common letter in the language—the letter “e”—is entirely absent. Through this mad device Perec encoded the fact that his parents had perished during the war: his father at the front, his mother in Auschwitz. Thus, in his novel the language loses its dearest letter, just as he himself lost what was dearest to him—his parents. The novel was translated into Russian twice and published in 2004; in one of the translations, produced by Valery Kislov, the lipogrammatic principle was fully preserved, with the most common letter in Russian—the letter “o”—completely absent. As a simpler example, let me cite yet another poem by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Bells.”

The poem even concludes with a veritable playful extravaganza:

In translating this poem, Balmont was unable to convey its elements of sound instrumentation. The repeatedly recurring words “bells,” “time,” “rolls,” and “tinkle” are meant to draw the reader into the many-voiced ringing of bells. Valery Bryusov, however, in his own translation at least attempted to imitate the mood Poe wished to convey:

Bryusov conveys Poe’s sound effect through the resonant word “звон.”

There do exist, however, very bold experiments in translating combinatorial poetry. For example, below follows the monovocalic poem “The Russo-Turkish War” by Charles C. Bombaugh in a translation by Ivan Chudasov. In this poem—both in English and in Russian—only a single vowel is used: “a.”

When translating blank verse, it is sufficient to preserve the meter. I should note one thing: if the original poem is unrhymed, do not introduce rhymes into the translation. That, too, would violate the author’s intention. Free verse is even simpler to translate. Essentially, one may use any words and observe no formal constraints at all—that is, translate poetry in much the same way as prose. One reservation, however: when translating strict syllabic forms (for example, haiku—a three-line poem with a 5+7+5 syllabic structure), the syllable count really ought to be preserved.

To summarize: the author’s original meter and rhyme scheme must absolutely be preserved in translation.

With the exception of combinatory works, content in poetry takes precedence over form. Therefore, the translator’s task is to convey not only—and not so much—the form as the mood and meaning of the original poem. Accordingly, when translating, it is important to proceed from the source text itself.

There are several methods of translation. Most often, translation proceeds as follows: first the translator produces a literal crib of the poem with the help of a dictionary. Sometimes no dictionary is needed—if one knows the language sufficiently well. And sometimes the crib is prepared by an entirely different person. For example, the bard Yuliy Kim wrote the libretto for the cult musical Notre-Dame de Paris using a literal prose translation prepared for him by a professional translator from French. In short, first you make a crib, and then you begin the technical work of rhyming. It is not especially fascinating work, because it resembles writing poetry according to a predetermined template. In fact, that is precisely what it is. There is one excellent rule here: the more precisely your translation—its vocabulary and sentence structure—corresponds to the original, the better. In prose translation this is fairly easy to achieve, but in poetic translation, which requires the preservation of meter and rhyme, it is difficult. Nevertheless, do not approach translation carelessly. A translation must not only reflect what the author wished to say, but also stand as a flawless poem in its own language—a poem that can be read and admired even without knowing that it is a translation.

And now I shall tell you how I myself translate. From Russian into English, while being by nature a native speaker of Russian. I maintain that this is more difficult, but far more fascinating. Naturally, my English-language translations contain many liberties permissible perhaps only in poetic texts, yet these liberties are not as terrible as they might be. I strive to convey the author’s worldview as fully as possible and to correspond closely to the original text.

1. First of all, I always divide the original Russian poem into quatrains (stanzas, verse paragraphs, sestets—underline whichever is appropriate). This is especially important if the original is written not in stanzas but continuously in lines. As an example, let me cite my translation of Oksana Beletskaya’s poem “Helen”:

…and so on. The point is that I first divided the poem into quatrains:

Then I translated the poem stanza by stanza. This is genuinely convenient. You translate the first stanza, compare it with the original, read it aloud, adjust something if necessary.

2. After that I proceed to the translation itself. Naturally, I do not possess a sufficiently large vocabulary for a fully fluent translation into English. Nevertheless, I do not make a literal crib: I look up only those words I do not know, and not every single one, but only the significant and characteristic ones. Returning to Dana Sideros and her “Cartoons”:

Here there are several obviously significant words that one should strive to preserve in the translated text: двор, растяжка, язва, яма, бросать, рояль, подтекст, друг, суета. It is by no means certain that all of them can be preserved, but one should aim for it.

3. Preserving rhyme is extremely difficult. Extremely. Meter and rhythm are comparatively easy, but rhyme… And here enters… ABBYY Lingvo. Though of course one may also use a large English dictionary, but that is more complicated. The method is very simple. For example, suppose we need a rhyme for the word “mines,” but cannot think of anything suitable in English that also fits the meaning of the poem. Then I open the dictionary and enter a deliberately nonexistent word with a similar ending—for instance, “qine.” In response, ABBYY Lingvo gives me a huge number of similarly spelled words: bine, cine, dine, fine, line, nine, pine, sine, tine, vine, wine, whose plural forms (if one adds -s) will rhyme with “mines.” One can also think of other spellings that might produce rhymes: for example, the randomly entered “lyne” yielded the words “dyne” and “syne,” which in the plural likewise rhyme with the original word. One may also search for longer variants such as “define,” and so forth.

In general, one should seek out beautiful turns of phrase that demonstrate the richness of one’s vocabulary: “…The yard is littered with trip-wire mines, large-toothed cattraps, carnivorous bines…” In the original, this corresponds to “…весь двор в растяжках и язвах ям…”.

4. There are also several small “tricky details” worth bearing in mind while translating. For example, English quotation marks look like this: “”, whereas Russian ones look like this: «». At the same time, if a Russian text contains a short English quotation or a single English word, the quotation marks appropriate to the main body of the text—that is, Russian quotation marks—are used. Accordingly, in an English text one must not forget to observe the rules not only of spelling, but also of syntax. And typography as well.

In addition, pay close attention to proper names and geographical names so that you do not end up with “Romeo and Julia” instead of “Romeo and Juliet.” The point is that many names and titles have traditional forms in Russian (just as they do in English). Thus, for example, the famous nineteenth-century traveler Richard Burton (Ричард Бартон) sometimes turns into Rikhard Byrton (Рихард Бёртон) in incompetent translations, whereas the translator merely needed to consult a reliable encyclopedia to verify the correct transcription.

Many such curiosities occurred in connection with Edgar Allan Poe’s classic poem “Ulalume.” Konstantin Balmont titled his translation “Улялюм,” as did Viktor Toporov, while Valery Bryusov called his version “Юлалюм.” The latter—Bryusov’s transcription—is the more accurate, since historical evidence indicates that Poe himself pronounced the invented name as “Yulalum.” Therefore, if you are translating the poetry of a living poet and have any doubts, take the time and effort to contact the author directly and clarify everything firsthand.

And still, the main thing is not to stray too far from the original, to preserve its spirit—whether cheerful, sorrowful, or in some sense philosophical. A poem is not the cry of reason but of the soul, and the translator must convey the author’s feelings.

That is probably all I have to say about translation. If anything else occurs to me, I shall certainly write about it. Translate to your heart’s content—both into your native tongue and into foreign languages. Even if it gives nothing to world literature, it will at least give a great deal to you.

Incidentally, if you are interested in my translations, you may read them on my translations page.