'Samuil Marshak's translations Wordsworth's "Lucy" Poems (1).

Ober, Kenneth H. ; Ober, Warren U.

Ironically, William Wordsworth (1770-1850)--"the greatest English poet since Milton" and one whose "historical influence on language, ideas, and manners has been immense" according to the respected scholar of English Romanticism, Carl Woodring--"has been translated to little effect ... relative to a Dante, a Shakespeare, a Bunyan, or a Dostoevsky." (2) One of the relatively few translators of Wordsworth has been Samuil Marshak (1887-1964), quintessential Soviet Russian man of letters of his time. Marshak was a successful poet, translator, political satirist and state propagandist, magazine editor, and author of children's books. Moreover, he was the founder of the state children's publishing house, and in his moving depiction of pre-revolutionary Jewish life in his memoirs he established himself as "a link in the chain of many generations of Russian Jewry." (3)

One of the projects Marshak undertook as poet-translator involved four of the five short lyrics of Wordsworth that posterity has brought together under the rubric of the "Lucy" poems. (These four poems appear below in Appendix A; Marshak's translations, in Cyrillic, appear in Appendix B; our back-translations of Marshak's versions appear in Appendix C.) (4) It should be noted at the outset that much is lost if the reader tends to view the "Lucy" poems as simply traditional "love" poems. The "Lucy" poems are in fact, first of all, as Geoffrey Durrant says, "'lyrical ballads,' each of which tells a verse story and presents it dramatically. To confuse the mode of the 'Lucy' poems with that of the love lyric is to overlook their structure, in which, as in the traditional ballad, a story is told as boldly and briefly as possible.... (5) A comparison of, say, the first stanza of "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" with the first stanza of the traditional ballad "Katharine Jaffray": There livd a lass in yonder dale, And doun in yonder glen, O. And Kathrine Jaffray was her name, Well known by many men, O.

and the last stanza of "A slumber did my spirit seal" with stanza 26 of" The Lass of Roch Royal": O cherry, cherry was her cheek. And gowden was her hair, But clay cold were her rosey lips, Nae spark of life was there. (6)

demonstrates that Wordsworth follows the folk ballad in his handling of rhythm, structure, and, to a certain extent, theme and imagery, although he--followed by Marshak--uses a variant ballad stanza: a4--b3--a4 b3. (Wordsworth bought a copy of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, the great repository of British ballad materials, in Hamburg in 1798 a few months before he started to write the "Lucy" poems during his and Dorothy's sojourn in Germany.) (7)

Secondly, the "Lucy" poems are, as Carl Woodring suggests, elegies. They "are elegiac in the sense of sober meditation on death or a subject related to death," and they "have the economy and the general air of epitaphs in the Greek Anthology.... If all elegies are mitigations of death, the Lucy poems are also meditations on simple beauty, by distance made more sweet and by death preserved in distance." (8) A side-by-side comparison of a poem from the Greek Anthology, the "Epitaph of the Singing-Girl Musa," with both stanzas of "A slumber did my spirit seal" reveals the similarity in tone and structure of the "Lucy" poem, ironic and spare as it is, to the Greek epitaph and thus helps to support Woodring's point: Musa the blue-eyed, the sweetly singing nightingale, Lies here suddenly mute in this little grave, Still as a stone, who was once so witty, so much loved: Pretty Musa, may this dust rest lightly upon you. (9)

Though one is not obliged to accept F. W. Bateson's thesis that the figure of Lucy is Wordsworth's device for sublimating his incestuous feelings for his sister Dorothy, (10) it does seem likely that, as Wordsworth's editor, Ernest De Selincourt, suggests, the figure of Lucy is in fact inspired by Dorothy). (11) Any reader, of course, is free to regard Lucy as a purely imaginary figure without doing the slightest harm to the poems.

In "Strange fits of passion have I known" the speaker describes for "the Lover's ear alone" an episode in his life and the strange fantasy that accompanies it. Mounted on his horse, he is intent on reaching the cottage of Lucy, who seems to him "every day / Fresh as a rose in June." He is aware of his horse's hoofbeats, which, like the ticking of a clock, measure the passage of time until his reunion with Lucy, and, as well, of the moon setting over Lucy's cottage, which by focussing his attention on Lucy herself only adds to his haste. When the moon sets behind the cottage, the speaker suddenly becomes conscious that, though the passage of time reunites lovers, in the end it must bring separation through death: the rose inevitably fades; the clicking hoofbeats and the ticking clock inexorably mark the all-too-fleeting hours vouchsafed to those who love.

Marshak's translation of "Strange fits of passion have I known" shows that he gets Wordsworth's point. The two ways of looking at time so effectively juxtaposed in the original poem are present, though muted, in the translation. (12) But, where Wordsworth achieves intensity through distance and restraint, Marshak deploys the stock counters of the sentimental love poem. Wordsworth speaks, in the third person, of "the Lover" to whom his poem is addressed, but Marshak startles his readers by addressing them directly: "Those of you, / Who yourselves of love have experienced the power." Where Wordsworth's lover bends his way to Lucy's cottage, Marshak injects a hint of illicitness by having his lover rush to a rendezvous with her. Wordsworth's understatement in speaking of his lover's sudden fantasy of Lucy's death as "fond and wayward thoughts" is masterful; Marshak's lover, though, somewhat shrilly declares that, upon his becoming aware of Lucy's mortality, "Anguish clutched my heart." Wordsworth's reader is constantly aware of the sinking moon; Marshak's reader is as surprised as the lover himself by the moon's disappearance behind the roof of the "hut." Wordsworth's horse simply "moved on" "with quickening pace;" Marshak's distracts the reader by running "gaily." Marshak seems to feel the need to look ahead to Lucy's death, made explicit in the other poems, by having his lover's sudden realization of Lucy's mortality occur "for the first time." Finally, Wordsworth's opening line "Strange fits of passion have I known" is awkwardly mistranslated by Marshak: "What secrets knows passion."

The second "Lucy" poem, "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," tells of her "growth, perfection, and death" (in the words of Durrant), (13) in solitude, far from the busy town and near the source of the River Dove. (Wordsworth knew three rivers of that name--in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Westmorland--any one of which would have been appropriate in this context.) Lucy's loveliness of body and spirit is effectively conveyed through the complementary images of the second stanza: the solitary violet, virtually unseen, and the first star of evening (Venus, emblem of love), public and visible to all. The speaker's concluding line on Lucy's death, unnoticed by the world, is, again, a masterstroke of understatement: "oh / The difference to me."

Marshak's translation of "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" becomes in some respects the most genuinely Wordsworthian of the four by preserving the stark simplicity of the original in its sensitive treatment of Lucy's growth, perfection, and death. Marshak's second stanza, especially, captures the economy and spareness of Wordsworth's images of the violet and the star. The translation, however, is startling in its transference of the devastating pain of loss occasioned by Lucy's death from "me"--the speaker--to the external world. Marshak consciously or unconsciously blurs that aspect of Wordsworth that John Keats called the "egotistical sublime" and instead focusses on the speaker's perception that "The world has changed." Secondly, Marshak simplifies Wordsworth's metaphor of the evening star which is all the fairer because of the watcher's knowledge that, with the onset of darkness, the star, now so resplendent, will be lost among the myriad other stars. Marshak loses the image of the first star of evening when he insists that the "star twinkled ... / Alone, always alone." Finally, Marshak apparently throws up his hands in bafflement over the meaning of "the springs of [the river] Dove" and changes the locale of Lucy's "untrodden ways" to a place "Where an icy-cold spring gushed."

Written after Wordsworth and Dorothy's return from their trip to Germany, and suffused with nostalgia, "I travelled among unknown men," as Durrant suggests, "expresses with quiet assurance the value of a life lived within the protective circle of a national and social tradition." (14) There are a serenity and an acceptance in this poem that distinguish it from the others. The cycle of the day, the process of life from childhood to death, the image of the turning wheel by the fireside--all seem to reinforce a sense of completion: a sense that "ripeness is all." Marshak's translation of the poem is workmanlike and professional in its treatment of nostalgia, the value of life lived within a cultural tradition, and the acceptance of the cycle of Lucy's growth, perfection, and death as a natural phenomenon. Marshak tries to universalize his treatment by substituting "fatherland" for Wordsworth's "England" in the first stanza, though late in the poem he speaks of "an English hearth." Instead of translating literally Wordsworth's neutral "I travelled among unknown men," Marshak weakens the poem at the outset by using a melodramatic cliche that suggests his speaker is something like a Byronic hero: "To strangers, to distant lands / Abandoned by fate.... " He further dilutes the translation in the third stanza by flinching from Wordsworth's forthrightly passionate "Among thy mountains did I feel / The joy of my desire" (which becomes "In your mountains snuggled a house") and by omitting the integral image of the spinning wheel in favour of a prosaic statement that Lucy spun flax.

"A slumber did my spirit seal" is the last of the "Lucy" poems translated by Marshak and the only one in which the name of Lucy is not mentioned. The poem's "temporal structure," as Paul De Man has observed, involves "the successive description of two stages of consciousness, one belonging to the past ... ["She seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years"], the other to the now of the poem ... ["No motion has she now, no force; / She neither hears nor sees"]; the 'slumber' is a condition of non-awareness. The event that separates the two states is the radical discontinuity of a death...." (15) Marshak's translation is seriously flawed by his failure to note in the original the two states separated by death and signalled by the shift from the past tense ("seemed") in the first stanza to the present tense ("has ... hears ... sees") in the second stanza. But the slumber in Marshak is not a condition of non-awareness: The speaker "thought in sleep / That the racing years have [emphasis ours] / Over her ... / Henceforth no power." Marshak seems to say in his first stanza that she is not subject to the power of "the racing years," because she is already dead, and not because of the speaker's non-awareness. Marshak's second stanza is similarly disappointing. In Wordsworth's second stanza, as Woodring says, "Naturalism is ... compressed into sublimity.... Loss of Lucy is pure loss." (16) Wordsworth's Lucy is plainly and simply dead. Marshak's version of this stanza disappointingly blurs the hard reality of pure loss by making Lucy's coffin into a cradle and by softening Wordsworth's sharply etched "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees" into "With the mountains, sea and grass / To revolve in unison."

Over the years many English poets, including Goldsmith, Gray, Byron, Southey, Crabbe, Percy, and Thomas Campbell, have been competently-sometimes magnificently--translated into the Russian language. Samuil Marshak, whose own "dignified, sensitive, and graceful" lyrics were "mainly on nature, life and death, art, and time" and whose translations of Shakespeare's sonnets received the Stalin Prize, (17) would seem to have been an especially empathic translator of Wordsworth. But, for whatever reason, Marshak's translations are at worst wooden failures and at best painstaking and conscientious but uneven and sometimes imperceptive versions of Wordsworth's beloved "Lucy" poems. Can it be that the lyrical ballads of Wordsworth, in their unadorned simplicity and their essential Englishness, are not really translatable?

Appendix A 1 STRANGE fits of passion have [ known: And I will dare to tell, But in the Lover's ear alone, What once to me befell. When she I loved looked every day Fresh as a rose in June, I to her cottage bent my way, Beneath an evening-moon. Upon the moon I fixed my eye, All over the wide lea; With quickening pace my horse drew nigh Those paths so dear to me. And now we reached the orchard-plot; And, as we climbed the hill, The sinking moon to Lucy's cot Came near, and nearer still. In one of those sweet dreams I slept, Kind Nature's gentlest boon! And all the while my eyes I kept On the descending moon. My horse moved on; hoof after hoof He raised, and never stopped: When down behind the cottage roof, At once, the bright moon dropped. What fond and wayward thoughts will slide. Into a Lover's head! "O mercy!" to myself I cried, "If Lucy should be dead!" 2 SHE dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me! 3 I TRAVELLED among unknown men, In lands beyond the sea: Nor, England! did I know till then What love I bore to thee. 'Tis past, that melancholy dream! Nor will I quit thy shore A second time; for still 1 seem To love thee more and more. Among thy mountains did 1 feel The joy of my desire: And she I cherished turned her wheel Beside an English fire. Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed, The bowers where Lucy played; And thine too is the last green field That Lucy's eyes surveyed. 4 A SLUMBER did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could no! feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Appendix B

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Appendix C

(1) What secrets knows passion! / But only to those of you, / Who yourselves of love have experienced the power, / I entrust my story. I When, like the rose of spring days, / My love bloomed, / I to a rendezvous rushed to her./ With me the moon sailed. | The moon I with my glance accompanied / Through the bright heavens. / And my horse gaily ran--/ He knew the way himself. | There at last the orchard, / Running up the slope. / The familiar smooth slope of the roof / By the moon illuminated. | Seized by the sweet power of sleep [or, dream], / I did not hear the hooves / And only saw that the moon / on the hut stands. | Hoof after hoof, the horse / Up the slope stepped, / But suddenly the light of the moon was extinguished, / Behind the roof it disappeared. | Anguish clutched my heart, / As soon as the light went out. / "What if Lucy has died?"--/ I said for the first time. || (2) Among untrodden ways, / Where an icy-cold spring gushed, / No one could recognize her / And few loved. | A violet was hidden in the woods, / Under a rock hardly visible. / A star twinkled in the heavens / Alone, always alone. | It will not sadden anyone, / That Lucy is no more, / But Lucy is gone--and that is why / The world has changed so. || (3) To strangers [or foreigners], to distant lands / Abandoned by fate, / I did not know, my fatherland, / How bound I am to you. | Now I have awakened from a sleep [or dream] / And I will not leave again / You, native land--/[My] last love. | In your mountains snuggled a house. / There a girl lived. / In front of an English hearth / Your flax she spun. | Your day caressed, your darkness hid / Her green garden. / And along your hills wandered / Her farewell glance. || (4) Losing consciousness, I thought in sleep [or dream], / That the racing years have / Over her who is the dearest of all to me / Henceforth no power. | She in the cradle of the coffin [or grave] / Is forever fated / With the mountains, sea and grass / To revolve in unison.

KENNETH H. OBER

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

WARREN U. OBER

University of Waterloo

Notes

(1) This article is reprinted here by kind permission of the editors of Germano-Slavica, where it first appeared in Germano-Slavica 8 (1994): 29-37.

(2) Carl Woodring, Wordsworth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 211.

(3) See Johannes Holthusen, Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (New York: Ungar, 1972), p. 185; George Reavey, Soviet Literature Today (New York: Greenwood, 1969 [1947]), pp. 43, 68, 132-33, 136; Evelyn Bristol, A History of Russian Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1991), pp. 261-62; Deming Brown, Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1978), pp. 37-38; Ernest J. Simmons, Through the Glass of Soviet Literature (New York: Columbia Univ Press, 1953), pp. 187-89; Jakub Blum, "Soviet Russian Literature," in The Image of the Jew in Soviet Literature: The Post-Stalin Period (New York: Ktav, 1984), pp. 6-7, 11.

(4) E. De Selincourt, ed., The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 2nd ed., 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), pp. 29-31, 214-16. Hugh Sykes Davies makes it clear in "Another New Poem by Wordsworth" (Essays in Criticism 15 (1965), p. 148) that the Victorians Francis Turner Palgrave and Matthew Arnold, rather than Wordsworth himself, are largely responsible for grouping the five poems as the "Lucy" poems. Marshak's omission of the fifth poem, "Three years she grew in sun and shower," is understandable: it consists of seven six-line stanzas and hence in length and stanza form differs markedly from the other four.

(5) Geoffrey Durrant, William Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1969), p. 61.

(6) Francis B. Gummere, ed., Old English Ballads (Boston: Ginn, 1894), pp. 263, 226.

(7) William Knight, ed., Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (London: Macmillan, 1925 [1897]), p. 27.

(8) Woodring, pp. 44, 48.

(9) Dudley Fitts, trans., Poems from the Greek Anthology (New York: New Directions, 1956), p. 18.

(10) F.W. Bateson, Wordsworth: A Re-interpretation. 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, 1956), pp. 153-54.

(11) De Selincourt, pp. 472, 506-7.

(12) S. Marshak, Sochineniia v chetyrekh tomakh. III. Izbrannye perevody (Moscow: GIKhL, 1959), pp. 430-33.

(13) Durrant, p. 70.

(14) Durrant, p.75.

(15) Paul De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," Interpretation." Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 1969), p. 205.

(16) Woodring, p.47.

(17) Brown, p. 38; Max Hayward, Writers in Russia: 1917-1978 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1983), p. 207n.