[Carl Copeland]

When I stroll down a busy street,
step in a crowded church, or in
the midst of revels take a seat,
it’s then I let my mind take wing.

The years flit by—so go my thoughts—
and all of us now gathered here
will pass beneath eternal vaults,
and someone’s hour is drawing near.

I see a lonely oak and say:
the forest’s patriarch will stand
long after my forgotten day,
as it outlived our fathers’ span.

When I embrace a precious child,
I softly say: Farewell! Your day
is come, and I must step aside—
your time to bloom as I decay.

Each day, each year I wistfully
see off while trying to devise
in each the anniversary
of my eventual demise.

Will fate send death to me abroad—
in war, at sea, on dusty ways?
or will the valley just beyond
the hill receive my cold remains?

Although unfeeling bones as soon
would molder anywhere as here,
I’d still lie resting in a tomb
not far from places I hold dear.

Around the entrance to the tomb,
let tender life then play and climb,
and let indifferent nature bloom
and with eternal beauty shine.


Edits
S1L2: beside > or in
S1L3: the young and reckless > the midst of revels
S1L4: I let reflections fill my mind. > I let my musing mind take wing. > I let my restless mind take wing. > it’s then I let my mind take wing.
S2L1: will fly > flit by
S4L1: caress a tender > caress a little > embrace a darling > embrace a dear young > embrace a precious
S4L2: time > day
S4L4: decline > decay
S6L2: trails > ways
S8L2: at play then teem, > then play and climb,
S8L3: let nature, in indifference, bloom > and let indifferent nature bloom
S8L4: gleam > shine


Professor Pnin comments on this poem in Nabokov’s novel of the same name:

In a set of eight tetrametric quatrains Pushkin described the morbid habit he always had—wherever he was, whatever he was doing—of dwelling on thoughts of death and of closely inspecting every passing day as he strove to find in its cryptogram a certain “future anniversary”: the day and month that would appear, somewhere, sometime upon his tombstone.
     “‘And where will fate send me,’ imperfective future, ‘death,’” declaimed inspired Pnin, throwing his head back and translating with brave literality, “‘in fight, in travel, or in waves? Or will the neighbouring dale’—dolina, same word, ‘valley’ we would now say—‘accept my refrigerated ashes,’ poussière, ‘cold dust’ perhaps more correct. ‘And though it is indifferent to the insensible body ...’”
     Pnin went on to the end and then, dramatically pointing with the piece of chalk he still held, remarked how carefully Pushkin had noted the day and even the minute of writing down that poem.
     “But,” exclaimed Pnin in triumph, “he died on a quite, quite different day! He died—” The chair back against which Pnin was vigorously leaning emitted an ominous crack, and the class resolved a pardonable tension in loud young laughter.


Crib

If I walk along noisy streets,
enter a crowded church,
sit among mindless/wild youths,
I give myself up to my dreams/thoughts.

I say: the years will rush past,
and however many of us are visible here,
we’ll all descend beneath eternal vaults,
and someone’s hour is already near.

If I gaze at a solitary oak,
I think: the patriarch of the woods
will outlive my forgotten age,
as it outlived the age of [our] fathers.

If I caress a dear child,
I already think: Farewell!
I yield my place to you;
it’s time for me to decay, for you to bloom.

Each day, each year
I’m accustomed to see off with a thought,
trying to divine the anniversary
of my future death among them.

And where will fate send death to me?
In battle, on a journey, amid the waves?
Or will the neighboring valley
receive my frigid ashes/remains?

And though for the unfeeling body
it’s all the same moldering anywhere,
I’d still like to repose
closer to dear parts.

And at the tomb’s entrance
let young life play
and indifferent nature
shine with eternal beauty.


Original

Брожу ли я вдоль улиц шумных,
Вхожу ль во многолюдный храм,
Сижу ль меж юношей безумных,
Я предаюсь моим мечтам.

Я говорю: промчатся годы,
И сколько здесь ни видно нас,
Мы все сойдём под вечны своды —
И чей-нибудь уж близок час.

Гляжу ль на дуб уединенный,
Я мыслю: патриарх лесов
Переживёт мой век забвенный,
Как пережил он век отцов.

Младенца ль милого ласкаю,
Уже я думаю: прости!
Тебе я место уступаю:
Мне время тлеть, тебе цвести.

День каждый, каждую годину
Привык я думой провождать,
Грядущей смерти годовщину
Меж их стараясь угадать.

И где мне смерть пошлёт судьбина?
В бою ли, в странствии, в волнах?
Или соседняя долина
Мой примет охладелый прах?

И хоть бесчувственному телу
Равно повсюду истлевать,
Но ближе к милому пределу
Мне всё б хотелось почивать.

И пусть у гробового входа
Младая будет жизнь играть,
И равнодушная природа
Красою вечною сиять.

[Andrew Frisardi]

I am guessing that quite a bit has been written about Pushkin and a death wish. His challenge to a duel suggests it, as do some of his poems. The morbidity of this side of his poetry seems to contrast with Eugene Onegin. Do you agree? Or is this impression just a result of my unfamiliarity with him?

In my first reading of this poem, before looking at the crib, the opening image struck me as odd: church, even a crowded one, is not a place I’d usually associate with “wild youths.” Sober old people is more what church seems like to me. Yet the crib says the same thing. It’s a scene I find hard to picture.

But I get it: the energy of the young people is the life that he’s aware is impermanent and that he is leaving behind before they do. I wonder, would another adjective besides "wild" be better to describe them, to get that sense? Are they just rambunctious?

This is not an easy poem to translate in strict tetrameter and with rhyme, and I agree that reverting to off-rhyme is much better than creating a fully rhyming poem that is dead on arrival. You've done nice work.

S1 seemed the one that needs the most work. The end-stopped lines in Pushkin’s opening stanza seem important for setting the tone of the poem, so I’d try hard to avoid enjambment. I hope you don’t mind, but I messed around with S1 using the crib and came up with this:


When I walk noisy avenues,
I stop inside a crowded church,
and sitting with some reckless youths,
my mind begins to dream and search.


I’m not saying this is good, just that I think you haven’t exhausted the options there of getting in the rhymes and off-rhymes, the tetrameter, and the end-stopped lines.

Your S2 does this well, imo. I like that stanza. I’m not sure I understand what P. means by gathering under eternal vaults, however. Does he mean in the spheres of heaven? Is there a way for that to be clearer and still stay close to Pushkin’s sense?

I also think S3 works well. Outlasting a “span” is a little different from outlasting an “age,” it seems to me, but I think it is close enough.

S4, too, reads nicely. I’d prefer a comma after line 3, instead of the em dash, and revising line 4 to “for you to bloom as I decline,” to avoid the repetition of “your time.”
In that same stanza, “tender child” and “caress” might have unfortunate sexual connotations, especially these days. Is another adjective possible?

S5: Add a comma after “see off”?

In S6, line 2’s “trails” is not the greatest match for “remains.” Would “in battle, journeying, in waves” work? I like getting the idea of the journey in there, which “dusty trails” does not evoke.

The next stanza is lovely. The rhymes work very well, the sense is clear.

The last stanza is good overall as well. “In indifference” is a little awkward, however. Would “indifferently, let nature bloom” be an option?

That’s all for now. I’ll pop back after further readings, if anything occurs to me worth saying.

[David Callin]

I'm afraid I find the poem excessively morbid, Carl, but that's Pushkin, not you.

What might be you, though, is some of the rather tortuous phrases you're pushed into by the original. I'm thinking particularly of "beside / the young and reckless take a seat", "see off while trying to devise / in each" and "let tender life at play then teem".

I haven't really got beyond those, into the poem proper (but my overall feeling about it is as above).

I think you've given yourself a tricky one here. Is it just too uncongenial to the 21st century mind? (I may be flattering myself in thinking I have a 21st century mind.)

Cheers

David

[Andrew Frisardi]

I agree with David about "let tender life at play then teem" in the last stanza. I hadn't noticed it earlier, but it feels awkward and unpoetic.

As for the whole of it, of course it is impossible to make a Romantic poem's content (which includes some specific word choices) "contemporary" per se.

But that's not your or any translator's task. If it were, many good or (in Pushkin's case) great poets would be off-limits to translators. And there has probably never been another time more self-conscious about being "contemporary" than ours is anyway.

Translation is a two-way street. We translate the past into the present, but also, if the present is up to it, the present into the past. Time is a permeable membrane, and translation proves it.

As for this specific poem: Do people still have morbid thoughts about their own deaths? I reckon there isn't an adult who hasn't had them. I know I have. And Pushkin puts some of that into verse. I can relate to it.

Pushkin is a great poet and it is always enlightening to read what great poets thought about and wanted to say.

Editing back to add: Coincidentally, after writing the above, I was looking on Amazon at a poetry book I want to buy soon, by the North Carolina poet Morri Creech, The Sentence, which came out a few months ago. Here's the book description:

In The Sentence, Morri Creech interrogates our daily lives and experiences to examine the anxieties and despair that often attend our awareness of mortality. Through a variety of subjects, and through styles ranging from rhyme and meter to prose poetry, he takes an unflinching look at what it means to live in the shadow of the end, the common fate to which each of us is sentenced.

Creech no doubt takes a different tack from Pushkin, but there it is: the subject of this poem is one thing that never dies.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

I am guessing that quite a bit has been written about Pushkin and a death wish. His challenge to a duel suggests it, as do some of his poems. The morbidity of this side of his poetry seems to contrast with Eugene Onegin. Do you agree? Or is this impression just a result of my unfamiliarity with him?

Pushkin is loved for his lightness and exuberance, but also for his embrace of life as a whole, including, of course, death. It’s often called “universal responsiveness”—a term invented by Dostoevsky, but inspired by a passage from Gogol: “All our Russian poets—Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Batyushkov—kept their own identity. Only Pushkin didn’t. […] Just try grasping his character as a man! Instead, you’ll get the same wondrous figure, responsive to everything […]. And how true his responses, how keen his ear! You can hear the smell and color of the earth, time and peoples. In Spain he was a Spaniard, in Greece a Greek, and in the Caucasus a free mountaineer in the full sense of the word […]”

Professor Pnin exaggerates Pushkin’s morbidity, but things have been written about a death wish, especially in connection with his final duel, as you mention. Some have even suggested that the duel was his form of suicide. I personally do not believe that, but the circumstances of the duel are just odd enough to keep that and other stories in circulation.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

In my first reading of this poem, before looking at the crib, the opening image struck me as odd: church, even a crowded one, is not a place I’d usually associate with “wild youths.” Sober old people is more what church seems like to me. Yet the crib says the same thing. It’s a scene I find hard to picture.

That reading never occurred to me, and I’m trying to figure out where I went wrong. Maybe the parallelism of the first three lines keeps them separate in the original: “Whether I stroll … whether I enter … whether I sit …” Maybe my active “take a seat” makes it seem like the third in a sequence of actions. Maybe it’s Pushkin’s “youths,” who are clearly young men. In short, though it can’t be proved, I’m sure he’s seated among wild youths at some sort of party.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

S1 seemed the one that needs the most work. The end-stopped lines in Pushkin’s opening stanza seem important for setting the tone of the poem, so I’d try hard to avoid enjambment. I hope you don’t mind, but I messed around with S1 using the crib … I’m not saying this is good, just that I think you haven’t exhausted the options there of getting in the rhymes and off-rhymes, the tetrameter, and the end-stopped lines.

I don’t mind at all. Someone else’s version, even if it’s not what I want for whatever reason, can get me thinking in new directions. And this stanza does, apparently, need rethinking.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

Your S2 does this well, imo. I like that stanza. I’m not sure I understand what P. means by gathering under eternal vaults, however. Does he mean in the spheres of heaven? Is there a way for that to be clearer and still stay close to Pushkin’s sense?

I don’t know exactly what he means here either, except that people aren’t gathering under eternal vaults but passing beneath them when they die. One writer says they evoke ancient notions of gates to the underworld.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

S4, too, reads nicely. I’d prefer a comma after line 3, instead of the em dash, and revising line 4 to “for you to bloom as I decline,” to avoid the repetition of “your time.”

The repetition is undesirable, but I’m not sure your suggested L4 links clearly enough back to “time” in L2. I’ll think on it

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

In that same stanza, “tender child” and “caress” might have unfortunate sexual connotations, especially these days. Is another adjective possible?

I was worried about that. Can I get away with changing “tender” to “little,” or will “caress” still look suspect?

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

S5: Add a comma after “see off”?

It seems to me that a comma would add an element of opposition, whereas here the idea is that one thing is happing while another is happening.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

In S6, line 2’s “trails” is not the greatest match for “remains.” Would “in battle, journeying, in waves” work? I like getting the idea of the journey in there, which “dusty trails” does not evoke.

To my ear, “trails” is, if anything, a slightly better off-rhyme than “waves,” and “dusty trails” “abroad” sound like a journey to me, though “dusty” is my own improvisation, so I do have some wiggle room here.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

The last stanza is good overall as well. “In indifference” is a little awkward, however. Would “indifferently, let nature bloom” be an option?

I’ve restored my previous version of this line, which is closer to the original and should solve your problem.

Thanks as always, Andrew. I’ve been under the weather for a few days and will get around to David’s and your further comments, and better yet, to Spaziani, when I’m feeling just a little better.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by David Callin

I'm afraid I find the poem excessively morbid … Is it just too uncongenial to the 21st century mind?

Do you mean to say that our 21st-century minds (if we have them) can no longer look death squarely in the eye unless it’s cushioned with false comfort, defused with humor or cheapened by endless massacres on screen? If so, you may have a point.

Originally Posted by David Callin

What might be you, though, is some of the rather tortuous phrases you're pushed into by the original. I'm thinking particularly of "beside / the young and reckless take a seat", "see off while trying to devise / in each" and "let tender life at play then teem".

For the moment, I can’t see changing the second of those phrases, but it looks like the other two need work. As always, your discerning and uncensored opinions are appreciated. Thanks, David!

[Andrew Frisardi]

Originally Posted by Carl Copeland

I was worried about that. Can I get away with changing “tender” to “little,” or will “caress” still look suspect?

"Caress" does seem to have sexual connotations these days. I might be wrong on this, but it strikes me as a word that is mostly used to describe affection between lovers. Would "embrace" work? "Little" is better than "tender."

To my ear, “trails” is, if anything, a slightly better off-rhyme than “waves,” and “dusty trails” “abroad” sound like a journey to me, though “dusty” is my own improvisation, so I do have some wiggle room here.

"Dusty trails" didn't evoke journeying for me. The image that came to mind was hiking on dirt roads or paths in the countryside, something that can be done close to home. The journeying or traveling seemed important to me, with the associations to dying when one is far from home.

[David Callin]

Originally Posted by Carl Copeland

Do you mean to say that our 21st-century minds (if we have them) can no longer look death squarely in the eye unless it’s cushioned with false comfort, defused with humor or cheapened by endless massacres on screen? If so, you may have a point.

Ah well, it's more that, although we're always walking towards it (the distinguished thing), we don't need to be always thinking about it, which seems to have been Pushkin's problem. But who am I to pontificate on Pushkin's problems?

On thinking about the question, I think I definitely have a 20th century mind, but one from one of the century's more sheltered pockets - geographically and temporally - thankfully.

I always enjoy reading your (and Andrew's) translations. It gives me an agreeable feeling of cosmopolitan-ness. And I enjoy them as poems too.

Season's greetings, feller. (As we say over here.)

David

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

"Caress" does seem to have sexual connotations these days. I might be wrong on this, but it strikes me as a word that is mostly used to describe affection between lovers. Would "embrace" work? "Little" is better than "tender."

I’ve taken on “embrace” and changed “tender/little” to “dear young.” I’ve made a number of other changes as well, though I haven’t eliminated the enjambment in S1. I’m keeping your church/search rhyme in reserve.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

"Dusty trails" didn't evoke journeying for me. The image that came to mind was hiking on dirt roads or paths in the countryside, something that can be done close to home. The journeying or traveling seemed important to me, with the associations to dying when one is far from home.

I’ll have to take that into consideration then. I could always change “dusty” to “far-flung” or “distant,” but it seems a bit redundant along with “abroad.” Still thinking.

Thanks again, Andrew!

[Carl Copeland]

David, just don’t go around telling people Pushkin is morbid. They’ll look at you funny. Pushkin is everything. That’s the most famous statement about him, made by a 19th-century Russian critic: “Pushkin is our everything.” Since you found this poem a downer, here’s a little pick-me-up from Pushkin himself:

If you find that life deceives you,
don’t be angry, don’t be glum.
Humbly bear the day that grieves you:
days of joy, believe, will come!

In the future lives the heart,
and, though dreary be the present,
all is fleeting, all will part,
and what’s parted will be pleasant.

Season’s greetings to you too, feller (I think my mother would say “feller” sometimes in fun)!

Carl