phone number +44(0)191 384 6985. ---------------------------------------------------------------
Illustrated by S. Razvi
Foreword by R. Lane (Lecturer in Russian at the University of Durham)
Copyright (c) F. Jude
Durham, 2000
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Copyright owner.
The author welcomes orders, enquiries about and comments on this book at the publishing address:
I dedicate this book to Dr. R. Lane of the University of Durham for sharing with me his great expertise and for his encouragement.
Imperturbable form is the outward sign of nature's utter consonance. Only our spectral liberty imparts a sense of dissonance.
Whence this disharmony? How did it arise? In the general chorus, why this solo refrain? Why do our souls not sing like the sea and why must the thinking reed complain? (The sea is harmony. F. Tyutchev)
..... the great figures in imaginative literature are perpetually contemporary... they never become History. Ancient or modern, they live in the perpetual present of mankind, crowding it with an accumulation of life and a living variety of human experience.
(Essays in Literature and Society. E. Muir)
THE AUTHOR
A freelance teacher in the north east of England, having taught myself Russian I graduated from the University of Durham in 1972 with first class honours, following this with doctoral research in the work of Tyutchev, supervised by R. Lane. The research was never completed and I returned to it some four years ago, one result being this book.
THE ILLUSTRATOR
Shaheen Razvi is a freelance artist living in Scotland. She has done portraits, illustrated an Urdu text book and a multi-cultural collection of nursery rhymes. She has also contributed a series of oil paintings on an anti-racist theme to a major exhibition.
FOREWORD BY R. LANE TO THE 1983 EDITION
R. Lane
University of Durham, England
February, 1983
FOREWORD TO THIS EDITION
The poet Fyodor Tyutchev is known and appreciated by too few people outside of Russia, and yet his position as second to Pushkin (arguably only with the exception of Lermontov) has been acknowledged by generations of Russian/Soviet writers and critics. The reading public had always cherished his lyrics, although they did not always have sufficient access to them. Tyutchev can teach much of value about both how to savour the beauty of fleeting moments and how to face life's adversities with spirit.
It is precisely these qualities which have, I believe, been caught admirably in Frank Jude's translations. They transmit faithfully the feelings and the tone of the originals, sometimes with remarkable success. I believe that he has tackled sensibly the dilemma of the equation facing all translators of poetry - to what extent to reproduce the originals. It seems inevitable that some of the rhymes and the other formal features must be sacrificed to the need to reproduce the "feel" of Tyutchev's often amazing lyrics. Frank Jude has trod this tightrope with great sureness and Tyutchev's distinctive style remains largely unsacrificed. Because he has known and loved the Master for so long, his translations have become consonant with the original poems. In this way they fill a real lacuna. For this collection is the first accurate translation in bulk by a British author. Its only forerunner was Charles Tomlinson's slim volume of 1960. This contained poems of great distinction by an eminent poet, but there was more of Tomlinson in them than Tyutchev. What is more, Frank Jude has translated more poems than any other author, several for the first time into English, including some of the much neglected political pieces.
This book has been interestingly illustrated by Shaheen Razvi. Certain of the illustrations do not present the poems in the way in which some people might have visualised them, but they are nevertheless a bold break with the pretty-pretty presentation of anthological pieces hitherto dominant.
All in all, I believe that Frank Jude's book is essential reading for students and other readers of Russian poetry and is to be warmly recommended.
Since R. Lane wrote his Foreword in 1983, only one edition of "quality" translations of Tyutchev has appeared till now, Anatoly Liberman's versions of 181 of the poems published in 1991. In calling them "quality" translations, I make a deliberate value judgement, for his is not the only edition of selected poems to have appeared.
There are too many gaps in published Tyutchev scholarship for any one researcher to deal with. The present book is intended to be the first of several of various lengths and formats which I wish to produce as time allows and whose overall aim is to fill some of these gaps. I shall also continue to work at the translations of the poems. I am all too aware of the defects of several of my versions, although I hope they are at least accurately rendered, even if they do little justice to Tyutchev. Very little has been published in English about his personal letters. There has been no serious attempt to translate them in bulk, possibly because the task would be monumental. A satisfactory Russian version of all the poems has yet to appear. Russian editors still tend to favour splitting up the poems according to relative quality, a very subjective business, to say the least. A study of Tyutchev in the letters and memoirs of others would prove illuminating. His family, in particular two of his daughters, Anna and Ekaterina, deserve attention in their own right.
Studies carried out by Russian scholars during the late nineteenth century and the Soviet period, culminating in Pigaryov's Lirika edition and his book on the poet's life and work, Gregg's study of the life and poetry, and Lane's extensive research, represented by numerous articles, some of his contributions published in Literaturnoe nasledstvo (1988-89), now, it seems to me, need drawing together with the many other smaller contributions of the past twenty or thirty years into a single, new book in English on the writer, a thorough, critical re-appraisal of his work. Such a task will be for a new Tyutchev scholar of energy.
Frank Jude
Durham, England
January, 2000
CONTENTS
Foreword by R.C. Lane to the 1983 edition vi
Foreword to this edition vii
Contents 8
Preface 26
Note on transliteration 34
Acknowledgements 35
Introduction 36
The Poems 53
Notes 237
Selective Bibliography
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF TYUTCHEV'S POEMS
The title/first line of a known translation and the author's name are given after the English title/first line. Some titles are in French or Latin. Where the first line is given in French, the poem was written in French. Italics are used for the first line of each untitled poem. Where the title is a proper name identical in the languages in question, it is given once only (e.g. Sakontala).
Title/first line Page
1. Lyubeznomu papen'ke 53
Dear Dad!
2. Na novyi 1816 god 53
New Year 1816
3. Dvum druz'yam 54
To Two Friends
4. Puskai ot zavisti serdtsa zoilov noyut 55
Let envy gnaw Zoilus's heart
5. Poslanie Goratsiya k Metsenatu, v kotorom priglashaet ego k 55
sel'skomu obedu A Letter from Horace to Mecenatus Inviting him to Dinner in the Country
Tyrrhena progenies, tibi (Horace)
6. Vsesilen ya i vmeste rab 57
Omnipotent am I while weak
7. Uraniya 57
Urania
8. Nevernye preodolev puchiny 61
Inconstant, watery gulfs finally behind him
9. K ode Pushkina na Vol'nost' 61
On Pushkin's Ode to Freedom
10. Kharon i Kachenovsky 62
Charon and Kachenovsky
11. Odinochestvo 62
Solitude
L'Isolement (Lamartine)
12. Vesna (Posvyashchaetsya druz'yam) 63
Spring (Dedicated to my Friends)
13. A.N.M. 64
14. Gektor i Andromakha 64
Hector and Andromache
Hektor und Andromacha (Schiller)
15. Na kamen' zhizni rokovoi 65
Along the fateful shore of life
16. "Ne dai nam dukhu prazdnoslov'ya!" 65
"Do not endow us with the spirit of idle gossip!"
17. Protivnikam vina 66
(Yako i vino veselit serdtse cheloveka)
To Wine's Detractors
(For wine, indeed, brings joy to man's heart)
18. Poslanie k A.V. Sheremetevu 67
An Epistle to A.V. Sheremetev
19. Pesn' Radosti 67
Song of Joy
An die Freude (Schiller)
20. Slyozy 70
Tears
21. S chuzhoi storony 70
From a Foreign Land
Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
22. Drug, otkroisya predo mnoyu 71
Be open with me, my love
Libeste, sollst mir heute sagen (Heine)
23. Druz'yam pri posylke Pesni Radosti - iz Shillera 71
To My Friends (On Sending them Schiller's "Song of Joy")
24. K N. 72
To N.
25. K Nise 72
To Nisa.
26. Pesn' skandinavskikh voinov 72
The Song of the Norse Warriors
Morgengesang im Kriege (Herder)
27. Problesk 73
The Gleam
28. V al'bom druz'yam 74
In an Album for my Friends
Lines written in an Album at Malta (Byron)
29. Sakontala (Kalidasa/Goethe) 74
30. 14-oe dekabrya 1825 75
December 14th. 1825
31. Zakralas' v serdtse grust', - i smutno 75 Sadness stole into my heart and I vaguely
Das Herz ist mir bedruckt, und sehnlich (Heine)
32. Voprosy 75
Questions
33. Korablekrushenie 76
The Shipwrecked Man
Der Schiffbruchige (Heine)
34. Kak poroyu svetlyi mesyats 77
As the bright moon sometimes
Wie der Mond sich leuchtend dranget (Heine)
35. Privetstvie dukha 77
The Spirit's Greeting
Geistesgruss (Goethe)
36. i Kto s khlebom slyoz svoikh ne el 78
He who has not eaten tears with his bread
Wer nie sein Brot mit Tranen a?
ii Kto khochet miru chuzhdym byt'
He who would be a stranger in the world
Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergiebt (Goethe)
37. Zapad, Nord i Yug v krushen'e 78
Hegira
Hegire (Goethe)
38. Vesennyaya groza 80
A Spring Storm
39. Mogila Napoleona 80
Napoleon's Tomb
40. Cache-Cache 80
Hide and Seek
41. Letnii vecher 81
A Summer Evening
42. Olegov shchit 81
Oleg's Shield
43. Videnie 82
A Vision
44. Bairon 82
Byron
Totenkranze (Zedlitz)
45. Sredstvo i tsel' 86
The Means and the End
46. Imperatoru Nikolayu I 86
To the Emperor Nicholas I
Nicolaus das ist der Volksbesieger (Ludwig I of Bavaria)