Min as translator of Crabbe: a Russian transformation of Peter Grimes (1).

Thomas, W.K. ; Ober, Kenneth H.

When George Crabbe's poem The Borough first appeared in 1810, it proved immediately popular. A collection of twenty-four verse "Letters," it was reprinted that year and five times in the following five years; since then it has reappeared several times in conjunction with other poems of Crabbe. One of its narrative Letters in particular, "Peter Grimes," has proved especially popular and has often been anthologized. In fact, in 1945 Benjamin Britten (with Montague Slater as librettist) wrote an opera about its hero, and in 1971 Michael Marland wrote a further dramatic version of the poem. (2)

Crabbe's story is about a man, Peter Grimes, who lived in a Suffolk coastal town. As a boy he rebelled violently against his pious father, and as a youth, in order to pay for his cards and ale, he "fish'd by water and he filch'd by land." (3) As a grown man, seeking to exercise complete control over a human soul, he secured three apprentice boys in succession and abused them horribly, until he became responsible for each boy's death. At length the town ostracized him, and, compelled to live alone by the "bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree" (174), he gradually went mad. In his madness he ran, terror-stricken, till seized and taken to the parish poorhouse. There, "a lost, lone man, so harass'd and undone" (256), with sympathetic women crowding about his death-bed, he described the visions he had had of his father and two of the boys who came to him repeatedly and tried to lure him to his death. Finally he paused in his story, then "cried, / 'Again they come,' and mutter'd as he died" (374-5). The most striking aspect of the story is that while exposing Peter's cruelty unflinchingly Crabbe somehow manages by the end of the poem to arouse a surprising amount of charity for him.

There is indeed something fascinating about "Peter Grimes" and about the man it describes. It is not surprising, therefore, that the poem has been repeatedly reprinted, or that it has been adapted in various forms. What may be surprising, however, is that "Peter Grimes" made an appearance in nineteenth-century tsarist Russia, through the efforts of three leading Russian men of letters.

Aleksandr Vasil'evic Druzinin (1824-64), a prominent writer, critic, and specialist in English literature, introduced George Crabbe (1754-1832) to Russia in the 1850s with his critical biography of the English poet. Crabbe's work, which Druzinin said was not known either in Russia, Germany, or France, exactly illustrated (he believed) his own critical theory that art should not be subjected to the needs of society, but should instead describe reality. (4) Crabbe was the "first toiler in the field of moving his native literature closer to the depiction of actual life" (pervyj truzenik na poprisce sblizenija svoej rodnoj slovesnosti s izobrazeniem dejstvitel'noj zizni). Nor was Crabbe's importance confined to English literature: he was instead "the most natural writer of our century" (o samom natural'nom pisatele nasego stoletija). (5) To support this judgement and the various analyses he made of Crabbe's works, Druzinin supplied translations of several excerpts. His labours must have stimulated interest in Crabbe, for two other noted translators soon began publishing Russian versions of the English poet. Nikolaj Vasil'evic Gerbel' (1827-83) translated portions from poems earlier than The Borough, (6) as did Dmitrij Egorovic Min (1818-85), who then proceeded to publish a translation of the whole of "Peter Grimes" in 1862. (7) A few years later Gerbel' reprinted "Piter Grajms" along with other of Min's translations (and his own) in his anthology of English poets, Anglijskie poety v biografijax i obrazcax.

It was particularly appropriate that Min should translate "Peter Grimes." (8) He published much original poetry in leading literary journals and proved so acceptable a translator that, after translating Crabbe (and Schiller's "Das Lied von der Glocke" in 1856), he proceeded to publish translations of Byron's Siege of Corinth (1873, 1875), part of Byron's Don Juan (1881), Shakespeare's King John (1882), and Dante's Inferno (1885). In addition, he published translations of selected poems from Wordsworth, Tennyson, William Morris, and Uhland. But it was not alone in writing poetry that his activities and interests paralleled Crabbe's: like Crabbe, Min was a practising physician, receiving his first medical degree in 1839 and his advanced medical degree in 1851. In fact he published many medical and scientific articles, and not long after translating Crabbe he became a professor of forensic medicine at the University of Moscow. Evidently he was trained in close observation, as was Crabbe, who pursued botany to the point of publishing a treatise in the subject, and, again like Crabbe, as a physician he would have had the opportunity of observing the development of insanity at close hand.

Yet, ironically, Min, who would appear to have been admirably well suited to be a translator of Crabbe's poem, presents a Piter Grajms who is quite a different character from Crabbe's Peter Grimes. It is precisely because of this difference that the Russian translation makes such an interesting study in comparison: how could such an intelligent and well-qualified translator make such a radical alteration in total effect, especially when he offered what appears to be a fairly literal translation? The answer is to be found in scores of little details which, in their accumulation, greatly affect the various devices Crabbe used to shape the reader's response to his poem and its hero.

One of the more important of these devices appears in the person of the narrator. Crabbe's narrator quickly, though unobtrusively, emerges as completely trustworthy. When Peter, who rebelled against his father and abused him vilely, grieves on hearing of his death, the narrator quietly suggests the reason for the grief in a little parenthesis tucked into the couplet:

 His father's love he scorn'd, his power defied,
 But, being drunk, wept sorely when he died. (10-11)

The same clear-eyed, slightly sardonic perception reappears shortly after, when the narrator indirectly presents Peter's defence for his verbal assault on his father, saying that Peter, "with oath and furious speech, began / To prove his freedom and assert the man" (22-3). About the relation between Peter's growing thefts and his attitude towards people, the narrator says:

 And as these wrongs to greater numbers rose,
 The more he look'd on all men as his foes. (49-50)

The order in the statement is what makes the comment and shows the perception: the narrator does not say that Peter regards men as his enemies and consequently robs them; rather he first robs them and then regards them as his enemies, seeking, evidently, to justify his conduct to himself. Nor is Peter the only one on whom the narrator turns his clear-eyed perception. He describes the men who bind orphans to virtual slavery as "undisturb'd by feelings just or kind" (61). About the townspeople he says that none inquire how Peter treats his first apprentice, none do anything to help the boy, none remonstrate with Peter: in fact, when they hear the boy's cries, they calmly say, "Grimes is at his exercise" (69-78).

Min's narrator, unfortunately, is not so perceptive. Where, for instance, Crabbe's narrator ascribed the reason for Peter's grief at the time of his father's death to his "being drunk," Min instead says, conventionally, that Piter "shed a few tears from sorrow" (proslezilsja s gorja). (9) Min omits altogether Crabbe's wry remark about Peter proving his freedom and asserting the man; moreover, Crabbe's perceptive couplet about Peter's justifying his thefts by looking "on all men as his foes" Min reduces to a simile: "Thus, engaged in dishonourable business, / He took leave of people like his worst enemies" (Tak, promysljajuci necestnymi delami, / Rasstalsja on s ljud'mi kak s zlejsimi vragami).

In the place of Crabbe's ironic perception, Min takes the quietly asserted moral orthodoxy of Crabbe's narrator and turns it into moral fervour. When Peter, newly bereaved, recalled his conduct to his father, for instance, the English version reads:

 ... he felt the shame: --
 How he had oft the good old man reviled,
 And never paid the duty of a child. (13-15)

In Min's version it reads thus, with the Russian having added the words we have italicized:

 ... he recalled with shame
 How unpardonably insolent he had been with his lather;
 How often, forgetting a son's duty, a holy duty,
 He had grieved the old man with arrogant stubboruness ...

 (... on vsponmil so stydom,
 Kak neprostitel 'no on derzok byl s otcom;
 Kak casto, pozabyv dolg syna, dolg svjascennyj,
 On starca ogorcal stroptivost'ju nadmennoj ...).

When Peter took up his new life after his father's death, Crabbe's narrator describes that life with a mingled sardonic irony and moral disapprobation:

 Now lived the youth in freedom, but debarr'd
 From constant pleasure, and he thought it hard;
 Hard that he could not every wish obey,
 But must awhile relinquish ale and play. (34-7)

Min's narrator uses only moral disapprobation and considerably increases the strength of that:

 And lo! a debauched life he began on his own,
 Regretting only that often, against his will
 He had to abandon both cards and wine,
 Having long since drunk up his father's property ...

 (I vot! razgul'no on nacal zizn' na vole,
 Odnim lis' tjagotjas', cto casto po nevole
 Byl dolzen pokidat' i karty, i vino,
 Dobro otcovskoe propiv davnym davno ...).

Even with regard to the practice of binding orphan parish-boys to tradesmen, Min's narrator differs from Crabbe's. Crabbe's condemns the practice, saying that it made "toiling slaves of piteous orphans" and that those responsible for it were (as noted) "undisturb'd by feelings just or kind" (59-64). Min's narrator says of those responsible, first that they are "people without conscience" (narod bessovestnyj) and then that they are people "with a commercial conscience" (s ... sovest'ju torgovoj)--one of his happier additions. The children themselves he says are pressed "Into terrible bondage ... like sheep, / Into bondage worse than behind prison walls" (V nevolju tjazkuju ... podobno ovcam, / V nevolju xudsuju, cem za stenoj tjurmy). In this and many similar passages, what was subdued moral comment from Crabbe's narrator becomes overt moral didacticism on the part of Min's.

Crabbe's narrator emerges as trustworthy because he combines an orthodox morality (quietly stated because taken for granted) with a clear-eyed perception often expressed through a wry irony. Min's narrator is certainly trustworthy from a moral point of view, but whether he emerges as being as trustworthy an intellectual guide as Crabbe's is another matter.

One serious consequence of this difference in trustworthiness can be seen in the presentation of the townspeople. Crabbe's narrator takes care to show his townspeople moving from a position of excessive non-involvement to one of excessive hardness and then to a Christian position of compassionate understanding. Min's narrator makes a number of important changes in the presentation. When the townspeople decline even to ask questions about the well-being of Peter's first apprentice, Crabbe's narrator culminates the depiction with the celebrated lines: "and some, on hearing cries, / Said calmly, 'Grimes is at his exercise'" (77-8). What a superb way of presenting a complicated situation in a single phrase! The townspeople know what the "exercise" is, but, being British and believing in an Englishman's right to do as he likes, they remind themselves that it is "his" exercise--his business, not theirs. Yet, knowing all the while what the "exercise" is and knowing that they really should intervene to help the boy, they excuse their inaction by referring to Peter's activity simply as "exercise." Min's narrator has no use for such subtleties or such moral understatements. He writes: "but everyone, hearing the weeping, / Calmly said: 'The butcher is using the lash again!'" (no kazdyj, slysa plac, / Spokojno govoril: "Opjat' za plet' palac!"). Condemning Piter and still remaining calm makes the townspeople inhuman monsters.

Gradually the townspeople bring themselves to act. When they get around to asking questions (after the death of the first apprentice), the questions are ineffective, for "Peter pass'd untroubled and unmoved" and promptly acquires another apprentice (95-102). When this one drowns in Peter's boat, they call Peter before a jury. "They were long in doubt," says Crabbe's narrator about the jury, but since Peter "faced the matter out" they let him go with only the admonition to keep his hatchway closed (112-15). Evidently the jury, after being collectively in doubt whether to take action against Peter, decide finally not to do so (apart from advising him): they are not yet prepared to do anything. Min, by changing two phrases, alters two concepts, that of the townspeople as a group acting hesitantly but in unison, and that of Peter as brazening out the inquiry: "they had a long argument, / But Grajms' serene look convinced all of them" (U nix gel dolgo spor, /No vsex uveril ix spokojnyj Grajmsov vzor). With the arrival of the third apprentice, the townspeople finally begin to move towards effective action. Because of the sentiment which they develop for the boy "of manners soft and mild" (120-1) and because of the fantasy they spin about his being "some noble sinner's son" (123), they give "fire, food, and comfort to the gentle slave" (133). And, when he too dies they call Peter before the burghers and through the mayor forbid him any further apprentices (152-64). In the concluding part of the mayor's speech there is an interesting difference between Crabbe's version and Min's. Crabbe's narrator has the mayor say "again shouldst thou appear, / Thou'lt find thy sentence, like thy soul, severe" (163-4), a clear indication, in its tautness, of how the townspeople have hardened against Peter and an appropriate preparation for their refusal to work with him. Min's narrator reports the mayor as saying, "if once / Again you appear before us, do not blame us" (esli raz / Esce k nam javis' sja, to ne penjaj na nas), which, for once, is understated below the English original.

There follows an extended passage, which we shall examine in a later section, in which the narrator describes Peter's plight in exile on the river in such a way that the reader begins to feel great pity for him. In fact, so much pity is aroused that when Peter goes into the Borough seeking for relief from his isolation and is met instead (211-14) only with taunts from the women--"Now, Peter, thou'st no boy to beat"--and exclamations from the children--"That's the wicked man"--we feel that the townspeople have gone to the opposite extreme and have become excessively hardened to Peter. In presenting this later response of the townspeople to Peter, Min's narrator follows Crabbe's narrator rather closely, except for one curious little detail: where Crabbe has the children run away from Peter (213-14), Min has them run after him (gonjas' za nim).

But when Peter goes mad and is taken to his death-bed, the two versions differ radically. Crabbe's narrator describes him as growing "furious," running "up the country," and, when caught, as being a "distemper'd man" and a "groaning man" (251-4). Min's narrator condenses all these traits into one image and says that Piter "began to roam the fields like an indomitable beast" (stal ryskat' po poljam, kak zver' neukrotimyj), an image that certainly militates against the sympathy engendered for Piter when he was described suffering in his isolation. It is with the townspeople, however, that the greatest difference exists. Crabbe's narrator shows them following Peter to the parish-bed, cursing him. Once they gather round his bed, however, they change: they see him as "a lost, lone man, so harass'd and undone" (256); consequently

 Our gentle females, ever prompt to feel,
 Perceived compassion on their anger steal;
 His crimes they could not from their memories blot;
 But they were grieved, and trembled at his lot. (257-60)

Their compassion for the man, without their for a moment forgetting his crimes, matches the feelings which the narrator has aroused in us during his description of Peter in exile on the river: our response, the women's response, and (presumably) the narrator's response are one. Not so with Min's narrator. He omits the crucial line about the "lost, lone man" and even conveys indignation at the women's response, saying that they,

 ... forgetting now hatred, suddenly pitied him.
 Frightful seemed to them, worthy of pity
 The fate of one who had committed such crimes!

 (... zabyv tut nenavist', vdrug szalilis' nad nim.
 Strasna kazalas' im, dostojna sozalen'ja
 Sud'ba sversivsego takie prestuplen'ja!).

With Min's narrator, we are left wondering what our own response should be.

Another possible aspect of Crabbe's narrator, though not of Min's, emerges at the end to provide a further clue to what our response should be. Crabbe's narrator says that a priest comes to Peter's bedside and listens as he offers his virtual confession (261, 268, 288). Yet at the end, when Peter looks in dread at those gathering about his bed, the narrator mentions only the "frighten'd females." There is, in fact, an explanation for this apparent muddle. In the Preface to The Borough Crabbe said that the narrator was "an imaginary personage brought forward to describe [the] Borough" for the author and that he should be regarded as a citizen of the Borough describing it in a series of letters to a friend. (10) But in a Letter appearing before "Peter Grimes," the narrator clearly speaks in the person of Crabbe himself, referring to Crabbe's earlier poems, (11) and so the reader who comes to "Peter Grimes" in this context will realize that the person telling the tale is in effect Crabbe himself. Consequently if, by the priest who attends the dying man, the narrator means himself, both as narrator and as Crabbe the author (who was also a practising priest in the Church of England), there would be only one male present, the priestly narrator who sees only "frighten'd females" gathered round the death-bed. If Crabbe's narrator does indeed bring forward his own priestly function in this way, he provides a further model of the charitable response we ourselves should experience and in effect allows us to listen, with him, to Peter's confession and, with him, to give that troubled man our emotional absolution. Min, instead of translating Crabbe's words "a priest too came, to whom his words are told" (261), wrote, for his narrator, "They with horror told me" (Oni-to s uzasom i rasskazali mne). As we have seen, then, Min is probably right in his identification of the priest with the narrator (though he may have omitted the priest out of regard for the tsarist censor), but unfortunately in the process Min also omits any indication that a priest is in any way involved. There is no "confession" so named, there is no one of a priestly nature present, and consequently we the readers are not invited to grant final absolution to the suffering Peter and so obtain, for ourselves, a charitable catharsis.

Exceeding in subtlety even his use of the narrator is Crabbe's acute observation of the human mind. The principal person to whom this observation applies is naturally Peter himself. In the couplet already quoted (10-11) about Peter's being drunk and weeping sorely when his lather dies, one is prompted to ask why he weeps, for his drunkenness does not cause him to weep: it merely allows him to weep. Nor can the cause be that Peter is going to miss his father, for he has scorned his father's love, has defied his power, and presumably has lived apart from him for quite some time. Instead, the cause must be a recognition of how wrong he has been in his violent and abusive conduct to his father. This interpretation is virtually confirmed in a later, parallel couplet:

 On an inn-settle, in his maudlin grief,
 This he revolved, and drank for his relief. (32-3)

The pronoun "this" refers to Peter's conduct towards his father and. coupled with his need to drink for "relief," suggests that there is a conflict within Peter between the memory of how he has actually behaved towards his father and his realization now of the way he should have behaved towards him. His father has urged on him a pious life, based on a reading of the Bible (6-7, 1618), but Peter has sought freedom from parental "tyranny" and, prompted by his "hot spirit," has expressed that freedom in oaths and even physical assault (21-7). After his father's death the freedom he seeks takes the form of constant card-playing and ale-drinking, but even here he finds his pleasures checked, for he must first "acquire the money he would spend." Accordingly, in a further expression of his freedom, he turns to theft, professing to recognize no legitimate checks to his pleasure: justice does not exist and the law is simply to be evaded (34-48). But again Crabbe's comment shows that there is conflict deep within him: the more Peter steals, "The more he look'd on all men as his foes" (49-50). As noted before, Peter evidently seeks to justify his thefts, his antisocial way of life; and the fact that he feels a need to justify indicates that he is very much aware of the claims on him of the orthodox way of life. Thieve and curse as he may, Peter cannot escape his growing conflict.

"No success could please his cruel soul," Crabbe comments; for which reason

 He wish'd for one to trouble and control;
 He wanted some obedient boy to stand
 And bear the blow of his outrageous hand. (54-6)

Two words are crucial: "cruel" and "obedient." Does Crabbe mean that Peter has one soul and that it is cruel, or does he mean that Peter has more than one soul, only one of which is cruel? In view of the tact that Peter has, when drunk, "felt the shame" of his conduct towards his father and that he obviously has to drink in an effort to escape from it (12-13, 32-3), it would appear that Crabbe believes Peter does indeed have a cruel soul and another soul--or another aspect of the same soul--which at least acknowledges the claims of filial piety and conventional morality. That "cruel soul," however, in its need to justify itself, seeks to find some "obedient" boy, such as Peter himself has not been but such as would represent filial piety and conventional morality, and seeks to inflict on that surrogate the kind of suffering that would refute these conventional values. The import of "obedient" is confirmed by what happens at the climax of the torture Peter inflicts on the boy:

 The trembling boy dropp'd down and strove to pray,
 Received a blow, and trembling turn'd away,
 Or sobb'd and laid his piteous face; -while he,
 The savage master, grinn'd in horrid glee. (83-6)

Peter's cruel soul is right; obedience and piety merely suffer, while cruelty and brutality prevail: this is what Peter "proves" to himself.

Because of the changes Min makes, the Piter Grajms he presents is free of internal conflict. As noted, Peter's drunken grief has become natural sorrow in Piter, and the description of Peter's attitude towards the victims of his theft has been so changed that one is no longer invited to probe his motives. Similarly, Crabbe's ambiguous phrase "cruel soul" (53) becomes in Min "evil soul" (zloj duse). Admittedly the potentiality for ambiguity still exists, especially since Min retains the earlier detail that Piter "recalled with shame" (vspomnil so stydom) his conduct towards his father. But certainly Min makes nothing of the potentiality. Instead, although he retains the concept of Peter's wishing "to trouble and control" someone (54), he translates Crabbe's "obedient boy" (55) as "little boy" (mal'cika) and so misses the point of why Peter wishes to trouble and control him. Likewise, where Crabbe climaxes the description of Peter's brutal treatment of the first boy at the moment when the boy "dropp'd down and strove to pray" (83), Min omits the detail altogether and with it the point of Peter's "exercise."

As time goes on, the conflict within Crabbe's Peter can be seen growing in intensity. When his second apprentice mysteriously drowns in his boat, Peter defends himself by resorting to the town's values: the boy, he says, "was idle both by night and day" (109)--as Peter himself has been. Evidently Peter is fully aware of the two sets of of values, the town's conventional ones and his own antisocial ones. That he feels the conflict between the two is shown by his conduct at the inquest. While the jury deliberates, "sturdy Peter faced the matter out" (113). But, when he is dismissed and told to keep his hatchway closed when he has boys in his boat,

 This hit the conscience, and he colour'd more
 Than for the closest questions put before. (116-17)

His conventional soul is evidently much more alive, and the values of his father and the town are making an increasingly stronger claim on him. Not that his cruel soul has given up: in fact, when he lashes his third apprentice,

 ... he consider'd what he'd lately felt,
 And his vile blows with selfish pity dealt. (136-7)

That is, Peter's rebellion against society's values has been right, and he should not have been made to suffer. At the inquest into this boy's death, Peter "profess'd the lad he loved, / And kept his brazen features all unmoved" (157-8). There is a beautiful ambiguity here. On the surface there is irony, since ostensibly he has no impulse to move his features. Just below, however, there is a suggestion, in view of his past vicious abuse of the boy and his present lip service to the town's values, that Peter has indeed to keep his features unmoved--and has to work hard at keeping them unmoved--lest the conflict within him break apart.

In fact there is in Peter's conduct during the storm in which his third apprentice dies a hint that the conventional values of society have won dominance over his rebellious, antisocial, and pleasure-seeking nature. Crabbe tells us that in the storm "His liquor fail'd, and Peter's wrath arose" (148)--and then the boy dies. If Peter is drinking to overcome tear of the storm, fear will presumably become dominant once the liquor runs out. That it is wrath, instead of fear, which surfaces leads one to speculate why. Does Peter drink to keep down the morally conventional thought that through the storm he is being punished for his sins? If so, when the liquor fails, wrath could become his "cruel" soul's alternative defense against the conventional thought, and could then well be turned with dreadful violence against the representative of that conventional thought, the boy.

Min, in his translation, retains some of these details, but he changes or omits others, and in doing so he removes most of the opportunity for seeing conflict in his protagonist. His Piter still appeals to the townspeople's values when he says that his second apprentice is a "scapegrace" (povesa) who "was fooling around" (salil) when he falls and drowns himself. Piter's conscience is still strongly shaken by the jury's admonition. When his liquor comes to an end during the storm, Min slightly modifies Crabbe's statement that his "wrath arose" to read that he "became doubly spiteful" (zlobnee stal vdvoe). But where Crabbe says that at the two inquests Peter "faced the matter out" (113) and "kept his brazen features all unmoved" (158), Min removes most of the ambiguity by saying that Piter has a "serene gaze" (spokojnyj ... vzor) and by describing him as "boldly enduring the interrogation of the judges" (smelo vyderzav dopros sudej). A more radical change appears in another passage. Where Crabbe says that Peter deals his vile blows on the third apprentice "with selfish pity" because he remembers the treatment he received from the jury (136-7), Min changes Piter's action from one of reasserting his old values to one of caution, for he, "keeping the past examples in mind, / Blows and shoves did not lavish excessively" (preznie xranja v ume primery, / Udarov i tolckov ne rastocal bez mery).

By the time Crabbe's Peter is ostracized and living in exile on the river, he feels that he is being punished for what he has done. Out among "the tall bounding mud-banks" he "chose from man to hide, / There hang his head" (185-6), as if admitting his guilt and accepting punishment. There, "dull and hopeless he'd lie down" (192) and "sadly listen to the tuneless cry" of sea-birds (194-5). In fact,

 He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce,
 And loved to stop beside the opening sluice;
 ...
 Where all presented to the eye or ear
 Oppress'd the soul with misery, grief, and fear. (199-200, 203-4)

He is evidently heaping punishment on himself. But he is not the only source. There are three places on the river

 Which Peter seem'd with certain dread to see;
 When he drew near them he would turn from each,
 And loudly whistle till he pass'd the reach. (205-8)

Evidently he fears that something supernatural will further punish him. When he flees to the town for relief, he finds only more punishment in the taunts from the townspeople (209-14). Returning to his isolation on the river--and the three dreaded places on it--he finds his punishment increased, for now, though still forced to labour, he has no gain from his labour, since the shoals of fishes glide by him (219-21). Then come the horrors of his dreams and the terrors of his waking hours.

Min characteristically changes two of these key passages radically. He omits the lines about Peter choosing to hide from man, and, concerning Piter's stopping beside the open sluice, he writes: "Tormented by black dreams, like a heavy burden, / Often he stood before an open sluice" (Mectami cernymi tomim, kak tjazkim gruzom, / Neredko on stojal pered otkrytym sljuzom)--a phrasing which at least shifts the initiation of punishment away from Piter's consciousness.

With the internal conflict of the two value systems missing from Min's Piter, there is of course less reason for feeling sympathy for him. When, earlier, Min omits the ironic perception of Crabbe's narrator, he in effect attempts to compensate by emphasizing the narrator's moral orthodoxy. So here, when the balance Crabbe achieves between condemnation of crimes and sympathy for the criminal is upset by the removal of a major source of the sympathy, Min, again in effect, attempts to compensate by extending what sympathy he has left for his Piter into sentiment. This extension, and its effects, can be readily seen in the description of Piter's return to isolation after his abortive sally into the Borough. Crabbe arouses sympathy for Peter in his renewed isolation by saying, "Alone he was, the same dull scenes in view, / And still more gloomy in his sight they grew" (217-18), and by pointing out that now he is not only "employ'd alone" but also at "bootless labour," for he is now, in spite of all his efforts, unable to catch any fish (219-22). Min pulls out all stops. Piter, he says, "again began to live alone among the steppes" (stal ... snova zit' odin sredi stepej); he "sighed in the uninhabited remoteness" (vzdyxal v glusi bezljudnoj). And what did he sigh for? For "the brotherly help of someone's hand" (bratnej pomosci xot' c'ejnibud' ruki). And what did he catch when he fished? Not just nothing, as is implied by Crabbe, but "only clods of mud" (komki lis' tiny). Having thus stretched sympathy into sentiment, Min evidently seeks to restore Crabbe's balance by likewise stretching the original recognition of Peter's undesirable traits. He does so by exaggerating two of the original phases. Where in Crabbe Peter curses the shoals of fish that elude him (221), in Min Piter "cursed life" (zizn' ... proklinal). And where in Crabbe it is said that "though man he hated" (219), in Min Piter is described, unconditionally, as "bitterest enemy of the people" (zlejsij vrag ljudej). Unfortunately, however, simply strengthening the statement of two conflicting qualities does not necessarily keep them in balance, and what with Crabbe's narrator is a paradox--being able to sympathize with a man who has done evil deeds--becomes with Min's narrator the virtual impossibility of feeling sentimentally sad for the bitterest enemy of the people.

The medical theory of the day, not surprisingly, runs closely parallel to Crabbe's description of Peter's illness. In his Treatise on Insanity, the English translation of which appeared in 1806, shortly after Crabbe had begun work on The Borough, Philippe Pinel described the "specific character of melancholia," which was later to be known as monomania and still later as depression. The person afflicted was sane in all regards except for the one subject; that subject often produced delirium and sometimes acts of violence; the person was often reduced to "habitual depression and anxiety, and frequently a moroseness of character amounting even to the most decided misanthropy." (12) "Profound melancholy," Pinel observed, "is frequently succeeded by actual derangement of the intellect." (13) Pinel was evidently known in Russia, since his Treatise is mentioned specifically in the most authoritative pre-Revolutionary encyclopaedia. (14) In addition, Min himself published a lengthy article on mental health a few years after translating "Peter Grimes." (15) Consequently it is doubly puzzling why Min was not aware, as evidently he was not, of what Crabbe was doing in his description of Peter's early mental state, before he went obviously mad.

The reason may, ironically, be found in a comment which Crabbe himself made in his Preface to The Borough. (16) This comment rings the changes on two characteristics claimed for Peter that run counter to the reading we have offered. Peter is said to lack feeling: he is "untouched by pity"; he is "flinty"; he is "a man of feeling so dull." He is also said to lack any sense, before he goes mad, of having done wrong: he is "unstung by remorse" and "uncorrected by shame"; he has "a mind ... depraved." Concerning the second characteristic, the poem itself, of course, provides ample refutation. At the time of his father's death Peter "felt the shame" of his former conduct to him (12-13), he needed to drink so as to relieve himself of the memory of that conduct (33), he was forced to justify to himself the thefts he made from others (49-50), and at the inquest into the death of the second apprentice Peter's conscience was affected so strongly that he coloured (116). Clearly, long before he went mad Peter had a keen sense that he had done wrong. That he was void of feeling is equally untrue. He felt for himself, naturally: with his third apprentice "he consider'd what he'd lately felt, / And his vile blows with selfish pity dealt" (136-7), and when isolated on the river "He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce" (199). That he felt fur others, however belatedly and however much he sought to repress these feelings, can be seen from his need to drink for relief and to justify his actions to himself: if he had not felt disturbed by what he had done, he would have felt no such need, and if he had not, deep down, felt some sort of pity for those he had hurt, he would not have felt disturbed. Evidently in the story of Peter Grimes we have another instance of how much wiser it is to trust the work of art itself rather than its author when that author is speaking as a critic. Yet, of course, if Min had read Crabbe's critical comment in the Preface, he would have found there ample reason not to look for any indication of conflict within the mind of Peter before he actually went mad. Whether Min read the Preface or not cannot be known; what is certain is that the Piter Grajms he has presented in his translation is much more the character of the Preface than of the poem.

The most striking aspect of Crabbe's story of Peter Grimes is, as mentioned, the change in the reader's response that is evoked approximately halfway through the poem. To that point the reader has felt revulsion for Peter and his crimes; but from there on, the reader feels increasing sympathy growing up within him. A principal source of that sympathy is the picture of Peter's life of isolation on the river, and specifically the details Crabbe has chosen through which to present that picture. Those details depict the natural objects truthfully and, curiously, at the same time reflect Peter's situation. For example, the description of the river begins with the "bounding marsh-bank" (174), which is repeated a few lines later as "the tall bounding mud-banks" (182) and is parallelled in the "bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks" (178). The emphasis on boundary is significant, for Peter is kept in isolation on the water-side of the boundary, ostracized by those on the other side, beyond the stakes and the banks. Peter looks on river scenes described as "dull views" (173); he concentrates on the "mud half-cover'd and half-dry" (176); his boat is "impeded" (180); and he gazes on "entangled weeds" (179)--all this reflects his state of mind, which is further epitomized in the "blighted tree" close to the "bounding marsh-bank" (174). As the reader comes to realize the double function of these natural details, sympathy for Peter in his dreary isolation grows. That sympathy increases as Peter encounters other objects that reflect his alienation, melancholy, and despair. He sees "gaping muscles left upon the mud" (190), "sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks" (177), and "sidelong crabs," concerning whom he, "dull and hopeless," would trace how they, like him, "had scrawl'd their crooked race" (192-3). He also hears "the tuneless cry / Of fishing gull [and] clanging golden-eye" (194-5), the "bellowing boom" which the "loud bittern" gives from its "bull-rush home" in "the salt-ditch side" (197-8), and, most appropriately, the "dull, unvaried, sadd'ning sound" of the "small stream" that runs, like him, "confined in narrow bound" (201-2). Crabbe concludes his passage of natural description by saying that

 ... all presented to the eye or ear
 Oppress'd the soul with misery, grief; and fear, (203-4)

but the observant reader will have realized that the same objects which now oppress, first reflected the very same qualities of mind.

Unfortunately Min appears to have been rather unobservant. He retains a few double-functioning details: Crabbe's "dull views" (173) have become "melancholy pictures" (grustnye ... kartiny), and the "gaping muscles" (190) are metamorphosed into "sticky slugs writhing" (slizni klejkie, vorocajas'). That these details are translated without an awareness of their double function, however, is shown by Min's omissions and changes. All three indications Crabbe gives of the marsh banks as a boundary between Peter and society disappear, with the word "bounding" being omitted in two of the phrases and the whole little vignette of the "bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks" (178) being omitted as well. Likewise with Min, Piter's boat is no longer "impeded" (180) and the "weeds" floating by have changed from being "entangled" (179) to being simply "heaps of sea grasses" (grudy trav morskix). Reductions in connotation are perhaps as important as outright omissions. The "blighted tree," which in Crabbe (174) so effectively symbolizes Peter, in Min becomes "stunted bushes" (caxlye kusty), which are not quite the same thing. The "sidelong crabs" that "scrawl'd their crooked race" (193) shrink to simply "crabs," which Piter watches "crawling backwards to the water" (k vode polzuscix zadom), and the "small stream" that, like Peter himself, "confined in narrow bound, / Ran with a dull, unvaried, sadd'ning sound" (201-2), changes its activity and is depicted as "in a shallow current seeping between the boards" (melkoju struej socas' mezdu dosok).

Even more striking evidence that Min does not notice the double function of the natural details is seen in what he adds to this section of the poem. Though on occasion he retains Crabbe's "mud," at other times he substitutes "sand": the spawn of eels are pictured "on the sand" (na peske), the crabs crawl "along the sand" (po pesku), and the current of the river washes to banks "on the warm sands" (na teplye peski)--and warm sands do not parallel Piter's state of mind so well as mud. More startling are the changes Min makes in the description of the river itself. Where Crabbe's Peter watches "the lazy tide / In its hot slimy channel slowly glide" (186-7), Min's Piter looks "At the current hardly moving in the muddy channel, / Thick, turbid, like a black snake" (Kak v tinistom rusle cut' dvizetsja struja, / Gustaja, mutnaja, kak cernaja zmeja). The black snake is a striking visual figure in itself, and provides the sense of sliminess and slow gliding that Crabbe presents more directly, but in its very vividness it distracts attention from its proper object: Piter watching the slow-moving tide that is associable with the death of two of his apprentices. Min's other change in the description of the river goes in the opposite direction. Whereas with Crabbe the river is always associated with the slow tides, mud, weeds, and "a dull, unvaried, sadd'ning sound" (202), with Min it is a "sparkling river" (sverkajuscej reke), which, although it murmurs "a mournful song" (pesn' zaunyvnuju), is still described as "joking" (sutja)--and certainly neither Peter nor Piter ever sparkles or jokes. In fact, in Peter's explicit response to the river, Min misses the point, for whereas Crabbe's Peter, when he would "lie down and trace" the movements of the "sidelong crabs," was depressed by melancholy--"dull and hopeless" (192-3)--Min has his Piter look at the crabs with merely "a drowsy gaze" (sonnym vzgljadom).

In the last third of his story Crabbe makes use of another kind of pattern, in which he often repeats details from the first third, with the result that the reader feels a sense of developing cyclic completion. In view of the "furious speech" (22) with which Peter as a rebellious boy turned on his father, it is only fitting that, when his insanity finally manifests itself, it should be described in these words: "Furious he grew, and up the country ran" (251). When his second apprentice (according to Peter) falls to his death (110), and the jury implicitly rebukes him, Peter's conscience is obviously aroused and he colours (116-17); appropriately, when in his delirium Peter begins what Crabbe calls "part confession and the rest defence" (288), he speaks "as one alluding to his tears and crimes: / "It was the fall'" (269-70). At the inquest into the death of his third apprentice, Peter "kept his brazen features all unmoved" (158); now on his death-bed, "with accustom'd art / He hid the knowledge, yet exposed his heart" (286-7). Having complained earlier about needing to "acquire the money he would spend" (39), he now speaks of his "days in painful labour spent" (295). Peter's dead father, who, long before, prophesied that Peter would remember him (29), now reappears to plague and torment him (292-3, 302-3), and Peter is then driven into repeating the "sacrilegious blow" of his boyhood (26, 330).

Having thus firmly established matching points of parallel in his pattern of early and late, Crabbe then uses ironic reversal. Peter, who as a boy spurned the Bible and the pious life (16-19) and who as a man struck his apprentice when he "strove to pray" (83), now begs of his hallucinatory judge, "My Lord, in mercy, give me time to pray" (277). When Peter earlier struck his father, the father "groaned" (28), but Peter remained unfeeling; now, when Peter strikes his spectre father, again he hears "a hollow groan," which, however, this time "weaken'd all [his] frame," and he who once scorned his father's love (10) cries, "Father! have mercy!" (330-2). (17) Appropriately, in view of his having struck his father on his "bare head" (27), the sight of his father's spectre strikes Peter "to the brain" (341). Where before Peter sought "a feeling being subject to his blow" (88), now, evidently in retributive punishment, "each little villain sprite / Enjoy'd [his] pains" (346-7), and where before Peter "grinn'd in horrid glee" (86), they now show "glee / In their pale faces" (352-3). Even the liquor which indirectly led to the death of the third apprentice (148-52) reappears, for the spectre of Peter's father scoops up water from the river,

 And there came flame about him, mix'd with blood;
 He bade me stoop and look upon the place,
 Then flung the hot-red liquor in my face. (356-9)

The growing sense of cyclical completion is, with Min, sadly attenuated. Repetitions of events rather than of phrasing are usually included, such as Piter's attempt to pray after having spurned the Bible and his being harassed by the spectres after his lather's warning, "My son, you will remember me more than once!" (moj syn, menja ne raz vspomjanes'!). As would be expected, in view of Min's frequent inattention to verbal detail, some repetitions that depend on the particular choice of phrase are missing, such as Crabbe's play on "furious" and Peter's "accustomed art" of hiding guilty knowledge. Probably the greatest loss, however, is Min's omission of Peter's phrasing about a man's seeing "the things which strike him to the brain," which neatly parallels the "sacrilegious blow" he had dealt his father "on his bare head" (26-7, 341). Min places the early blow "on his father's grey head" (otcu v ego sedoe temja), and, with regard to the later sights, Min simply has Piter say, "What horrors there day and night I see!" (Kakie uzasy tam dnem i noc' ju vizu!). The sense of unerring appropriateness, as well as the sense of cyclic completion, has been lost.

In the concluding lines of the poem the various' patterns which Crabbe has fashioned come together to shape our response to Peter's fate and complete our sense both of fulfilment and of catharsis. With Min, little of these patterns remains. With Crabbe, vestiges of the conflict that divided Peter's mind can be seen in the resentment with which he complains that his father and the two boys "forced" him to look into "a place of horrors" (362-3). (Min's paternal spectre does not have to force Piter: he merely says, "Look!" [Smotri!].) By now conventional morality has triumphed over Peter, for in that place of horrors he hears and recognizes "the shriek / Of tortured guilt" (364-5). (Min's Piter does not mention guilt: he merely exclaims, "What a cry I heard there" [kakoj tam slysal krik].) Crabbe's Peter also looks "in dread" at the "frighten'd females" gathered round his bed (370-1). (Min's Piter is described as simply "casting a wild look" [brosaja dikij vzgljad].) Evidently the Suffolk Peter feels his guilt keenly and just as keenly feels his punishment. He is indeed "a lost, lone man, so harass'd and undone" (256)--a phrase Min omits--and, like the women clustered round his death-bed, we feel compassion for him, for, although we still recognize his crimes, we are grieved and tremble at his fate. These same women, clustered close about Peter and unwittingly causing him dread, mark the boundary between him and society, just as did the "bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks" (178)--again, a phrase Min omits. Here on his death-bed, Peter is still as much isolated from mankind as he was on the river. Likewise the pattern of repeating early details continues, with the very beginning parallelled ironically in Peter's ending. When his father urged on him the Bible as "the word of life" (18), meaning, of course, that it was the guide to life everlasting in heaven, the young Peter spurned both him and the Bible: now the dying Peter hears the voices of tortured guilt say to him from the place of horrors: "All days alike! for ever! ... And unremitted torments every day!" (366-7)--life everlasting, but in hell itself. This aspect of ironic pattern Min does include. But, although he includes another aspect of the pattern--the concluding one--he so modifies it that its force is diverted. Crabbe's Peter as a boy "broke loose" from his father's care (8) and has continued to break the rules of his society throughout the rest of his life: now on his death-bed it is with a "broken voice" that he cries out for the last time and dies (374-5). Min unfortunately says rather that his young Piter "repulsed his father's hands" (ot ruk otca otbilsja) and, at the end, substitutes a visual picture for Crabbe's vocal note: instead of describing the voice, Min says that Piter screamed, "opening his lids frightfully" (otkryvsi strasno veki).

Although some of Min's other changes are as radical as this last one, for the most part his are little changes, applied to little details. But like flakes of snow falling on parts of a landscape, they accumulate, and in their accumulation they radically alter its appearance. The result is that the Piter Grajms who beat and tortured boys and who lived alone among the steppes is a very different person from Peter Grimes, the lost, lone man of Suffolk.

W.K. THOMAS

University of Waterloo

KENNETH H. OBER

University of Alberta

WARREN U. OBER

University of Waterloo

Notes

(1) This article is reprinted here by the kind permission of the editors of Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, where it first appeared in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 4 (1977): 35-53, and Elizabeth E. C. Thomas, widow of W.K. Thomas, late Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus, University of Waterloo.

(2) Michael Marland, Peter Grimes: A Dramatization of the Poems by George Crabbe in "The Borough" (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1971).

(3) George Crabbe, Letter XXII: "Peter Grimes," in The Borough, in Poems, ed. Adolphus William Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905) 1, 1. 43. This edition of the poem is used throughout the present study; succeeding line numbers will be given in parentheses in the text, without repeating the number of the Letter.

(4) A. Druzinin, Georg Krabb i ego proizvedenija (St Petersburg: Tipografija Glavnogo Staba Ego Imperatorskogo Velicestva po voenno-ucebnym zavedenijam, 1857) 1. This study was reprinted from Sovemennik, 54 (1855)1-46, 111-50; 55 (1856) 1-32, 55-91; 56 (1856) 47-74; 57 (1856) 1-38; it was reprinted in Sobranie socinenij; A.V. Druzinina, ed. N.V. Gerbel', IV (St Petersburg: Imperatorskaja Akademija Nauk, 1865) 363-587.

(5) Druzinin, Georg Krabb, I (italics are Druzinin's).

(6) N.V. Gerbel', "Lastocki" (a portion of The Village, Book 1), in Otecestvennye zapiski, 109 (1856) 345; "Svad'ba" (a portion of The Parish Register, Part II), in Biblioteka dlja ctenija, 144 (1857) 114; "Iz Krabba" (a portion of The Parish Register. Part I), in Syn otecestva, 39 (29 Sept. 1857) 941. The first two are reprinted in Gerbel"s Anglijskie poety v biografijax i obrazcax (St Petersburg: A.M. Kotomin, 1875) 186-7.

(7) D.E. Min, "Prixodskie spiski: I" (a portion of The Parish Register; Part I), in Russkij vestnik, 6 (1856) 440-6; "Novorozdennye" (another portion of The Parish Register. Part I), in Russkij vestnik, 8 (1857) 134-42: "Prixodskie spiski: Poema Georga Krabba, III" (a third portion of The Parish Register, Part I). in Russkij vestnik, 30 (1860) 191-6; "Iz poema 'Mestecko'" (Letter I of The Borough), date and location unknown; "Piter Grajms (iz Krabba)" (Letter XXII of The Borough), in Russkij vestnik, 42 (1862) 415-25. All these, except the third one, were reprinted in Gerbel"s Anglijskie poetry, 181-95.

(8) In the following paragraph, biographical facts for Min are drawn from Enciklopediceskij slovar' XIX (St Petersburg: Brokgauz and Efron 1896) 405. Those for Crabbe are drawn from Rene Huchon, George Crabbe and His Times, 1754-1832, tr. Frederick Clarke (New York: Dutton, 1907).

(9) The text of Min's translation that has been used is "Piter Grajms," in Nikolaj Vasil'evic Gerbel', Anglijskie poety v biografijax i obrazcax (St Petersburg: A.M. Kotomin, 1875) 191-5. Unfortunately, since the lines of Min's translation are unnumbered, it would be pointless to offer numbers here.

(10) Crabbe, Poems, 1, 268-9.

(11) The Borough, XVIII, 21-4.

(12) Philippe Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, tr. D.D. Davis (Sheffield: Todd, 1806; rpt New York: Hafner, 1962) 149.

(13) Ibid., 139.

(14) Enciklopediceskij slovar' XXIII-A (St Petersburg: Brokgauz and Efron, 1898) 624.

(15) "Concerning some doubtful conditions of mental health relative to forensic medicine" (O nekotoryx somnitel'nyx sostojanijax psixiceskogo zdorov'ja v sudebno-medicinskom otnosenii), in Rec' i otcet moskovskogo universiteta (1868) 18-87.

(16) Poems, 1, 278-9. In the edition of Crabbe's poems prepared by his son this particular passage appears at the end of "Peter Grimes" itself (IV, 53n).

(17) The Biblical connotations of Peter's cry, "Father! have mercy!" prompt one to wonder whether Crabbe meant anything by the names he chose for his hero. He would of course have been aware from Scripture that Peter means rock (Matt. 16 : 18) and could have chosen the name to indicate his hero's outward hardness. At the same time, the fact that Peter strikes at the spirit of his father three times raises a possible parallel with St Peter, who denied his spiritual lather three times. Further, the surname Grimes, derived from Old English, most appropriately means, when translated, son of spectre (Penguin Dictionary of Surnames, ed. Basil Cottle [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967] 123). Since we do not know whether Crabbe had access to either a study of surnames or a dictionary of Old English that would have given him this information, we can only speculate. It is known that he was an omnivorous reader of all sorts of books that many would regard as recherche and that he was regularly supplied with copious quantities of recently published books (The Life of George Crabbe by His Son, ed. Edmund Blunden [London: Cresset, 1947] 137).