Imagery in Translation

EXERCISES FOR TRANSLATION

• Study the rhythm, metre, stanza and rhyme patterns in the poem as well as their expressive functions in the text.

• Study the choice of words in the poem and comment on their logical and emotive value in the text. *

• Identify the syntactic character of the sentence and com­ ment on its function in the creation of the poetic maxim.

• Study the epithets in the poem and comment on their ex­ pressive power.

• Study the structure of the antithesis in the poem and com­ ment upon its role in the imagery and poetic thought.

• Reconstruct the main stylistic device of the poem and comment upon the structure and function of the metaphor.

• Experiment with the text: change the rhyme scheme, re­ place lines, words and stylistic units. Compare the result with the original poem and comment upon the difference.

• Translate the text word for word into English and analyse

the result.

• Reconstruct the rhyme scheme of the source text in Rus­ sian and complete the lines according to the original stanza me­ tre.

• Consider the ways of reproducing the stylistic compo­ nents of the Russian poem in English and see if any changes and transformations are inevitable or desirable,

• Complete the translated text and read it aloud to compare how of the poem sounds in English and in Russian.

• Discuss the results and comment on your preferences in the choice of words and transformations of the source stylistic units.

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Imagery in Translation

POETRY TEXT8:

TRANSLATING MARINA TSVETAYEVA INTO ENGLISH

Introductory Notes

Some poets are, as it were, singled wit by Fate which plac­es them in such circumstances that their lives become equal to their poetry while poetry becomes their lives. Marina Ivanovna Tsvetayeva (1892-1941) was one of that elect. Her whole life, from early childhood to her tragic end, was unusual and far from commonplace. This applies to her family, her education, travel­ling round Europe with her father when a child, her early mar­riage to Sergey Efron, her family life, her friendships, her emi­gration and return, her relationship with her own children, and her very death, by suicide. If words might embrace such fatal circumstances, those words would he passion, poetry and trage­dy. Almost everything in her life was in one way or another pas­sion, poetry and tragedy. Passion, poetry and tragedy describe her love, life, creative activity, friendship and hatred, everything. Passion, poetry and tragedy mark her poems, each of them indi­vidually — and all of them together.

Let us listen to David McDuff, an ardent translator of Tsvetayeva's poetry: "Tsvetayeva is not an easy poet to translate into any language. The Russianness of her poetic style is some­thing that defies transposition into another linguistic and cultural idiom. Her poems are rooted in the rhythms and patterns of Russian speech, yet they go beyond that speech toward a cosmic language of their own....

Like Reiner Maria Rilke, a poet with whom she felt a lifelong bond and sympathy, although they never met, Tsvetayeva strove constantly beyond the limits of the 'real' world... She heard,

quite literally, the music of the spheres. This is not to say that _

there is anything abstract or wanly ethereal about her poems — they sing out of the flesh and blood of the poet, out of her lived life. But their essential movement is all in a rush towards another world. i

"The rhymes and rhythms of Tsvetayeva's poems serve a dual function: they are her main compositional device, and they play an emblematic, even a symbolic role.

I believe it is necessary for any translator of Tsvetayeva's poetry to make at least some attempt to reproduce the formal and structural attributes of her poems, even though it is an attempt that is forever doomed to failure. Not to try is, it seems to me, to ignore the very heart, the central meaning of Tsvetayeva's work."

The poem under consideration, Мой день беспутен и нелеп, was written in 1918, in the hard times after October Rev­olution, 1917, when the entire world seemed to have turned up­side down. Tsvetayeva's personal tragedy in those times was deep­er still: she did not know whether her husband was alive or not; she was starving and lost one of her two little daughters to starva­tion. It was a period of chaos and uncertainty.

While analysing and comparing, think of the role of rhyme, stanza pattern and metre in the Russian text. When translated in verse libre, this poem is transformed accordingly, and its expres­sive and emotive values become something else. For example, when we compare the variants dissolute and dissipated for the Russian беспутен, we can detect incoherence even on the verbal level: both English words refer to the idea of immoral behaviour, which would correspond to the Russian разгульный, распутный, whereas Tsvetayeva uses the word беспутный in its primary meaning according to the Russian Dictionary, that is, бестол­ковый, неразумный, лишенный смысла, which should equal ei­ther confusion or mess in English. Thus, the very first line mis­leads the English reader; it would be more appropriate to begin with something like My day goes in a silly mess.

Chosen for the task of translation, the poem Моим стихам,

написанным так рано is one of those prophecies that appear

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from time to time in the poetry of the select, the most poetic po­ets. Tsvetayeva was 20 years old when she wrote it, but it is as deep, wise and perfect as any mature poem of hers, whatever the shortcomings of the form. Everything said in it has come true. The task may appear complicated by the difference between Rus­sian and English grammar, as well as such imagery as святилище, фимиам, черти that seems archaic in English nowadays.

Task for comparison:

Мой день беспутен и нелеп

* * *

Мой день беспутен и нелеп: У нищего прошу на хлеб, Богатому даю на бедность,

В иголку продеваю — луч, Грабителю вручаю — ключ, Белилами румяню бледность.

Мне нищий хлеба не дает, Богатый денег не берет, Луч не вдевается в иголку,

Грабитель входит без ключа, А дура плачет в три ручья — Над днем без славы и без толку.

Translated by Angela Livingstone and Elaine Feinstein:

My day is dissolute, absurd,

I ask the beggar for the bread,

I give the rich man poor man's coins,

I thread a needle with a ray,

1 trust the burglar with a key,

I rouge my pallid skin with bleach.

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