Russian literature. A short introduction

in the ordinary sense, shows another method of proceeding, one according to which the rendering is deliberately made so inadequate to the original as to leave the latter’s integrity intact.

My own translation of Pushkin’s 1836 poem ‘I have raised myself a monument’ below is of this second kind – finickingly literal, without pretensions to being an independent poem. It is nearly half as long again in terms of word count, an inevitable result of the fact that word-units are longer, on average, in Russian than in English. Therefore, the English sounds much more verbose than the Russian. While some alliteration survives (by pure chance), the metre, with the use of the shortened fourth line in each stanza to puncture the grandeur of the first three, does not. There are some problems with vocabulary too. The beautiful word podlunnyi becomes sublunar, a word that sounds like a citation from a NASA bulletin; the term nerukotvornyi (Greek acheiropoietos), applied to a miraculous icon, has to be paraphrased. Yet the translation draws attention to some of the hidden problems in a piece so often anthologized and learned by heart in the original Russian that its subtlety becomes blunted. And though workaday English cannot convey the way that Pushkin orchestrates his themes linguistically – with a sound play on ‘p’ to bring out the grandiose motif of posthumous survival – the dramatism of the piece still comes through.

‘Я памятник себе воздвиг нерукотворньІй’

Exegi monumentum

Я памятник себе воздвиг нерукотворньІй, К нему не зарастет народная тропа, Вознесся вьІше он главою непокорной Александрийского столпа.

Нет, весь я не умру – душа в заветной лире Мой прах переживет и тленья убежит –