Percy's Nancy and Zhukovsky's Nina: a translation identified (1).

Ober, Kenneth H. ; Ober, Warren U.

In April 1808 the Moscow bi-monthly literary journal Vestnik Yevropy (no. 8, p. 272) contained a poem entitled "K Nine" (To Nina), with the notation "From the English," signed "V. Zh."--Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852). The English original of Zhukovsky's "K Nine" has until now remained unidentified, perhaps because of the conventionalized nature of the poem and because of Zhukovsky's repeated use of the stock name "Nina" in his poetry. We have now determined that Zhukovsky's original was "A Song" ("O Nancy, wilt thou go with me") by Thomas Percy (1729-1811). It will be our purpose here to consider Percy's "O Nancy" in its context, to juxtapose Zhukovsky's two versions of "K Nine"--his earlier, uncompleted version as well as the Vestnik Yevropy translation--with Percy's original, and briefly to compare the three.

Bishop Thomas Percy today is known primarily as one of the great figures of English pre-Romanticism. His greatest contribution to literature was his ballad collection, first published in 1765, entitled Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. As editor of this collection he performed "his greatest work, the enhancing of popular regard for early English ballads," even though in the three volumes of the Reliques he did not hesitate to mix the old ballads with contemporary ballads and political songs. (2)

Some years before the appearance of the Reliques, however, Percy wrote and published "O Nancy, wilt thou go with me." Written during his courtship of his future wife, Anne Gutteridge, the poem was first published in Volume V| of Robert (1703-64) and James (1724-97) Dodsley's A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes by Several Hands (3) and appeared in 1758, shortly before Percy's marriage in April 1759. (4) Partly as a result of Percy's charming tribute to his wife-to-be and partly as a result of his ability to tame his friend Dr Samuel Johnson, it has been suggested "that the leading characteristics that should be kept in view in dealing with the life of Thomas Percy are his power of achieving two well-nigh impossible feats, that of idealising his own wife and of bullying Dr Johnson." Mrs Percy proudly holds the MS of "O Nancy, wilt thou go with me" in the best-known portrait of her. (5)

We quote Percy's song in its entirety from Dodsley's Collection: A Song. By T. P***cy O Nancy, wilt thou go with me, Nor sigh to leave the flaunting town: Can silent glens have charms for thee, The lowly cot and russet gown ? No longer dress'd in silken sheen, No longer deck'd with jewels rare, Say can'st thou quit each courtly scene, Where thou wert fairest of the fair ? O Nancy! when thou'rt far away, Wilt thou not cast a wish behind? Say canst thou face the parching ray, Nor shrink before the wintry wind? O can that soft and gentle mien Extremes of bardship learn to bear, Nor sad regret each courtly scene, Where thou wert fairest of the fair? O Nancy! can'st thou love so true, Thro' perils keen with me to go, Or when thy swain mishap shall rue, To share with him the pang of woe? Say should discase or pain befal, Wilt thou assume the nurse's care, Nor wistful those gay scenes recall Where thou wert fairest of the fair? And when at last thy love shall die, Wilt thou receive his parting breath? Wilt thou repress each struggling sigh, And chear with smiles the bed of death? And wilt thou o'er his breathless clay Strew flow'rs, and drop the tender tear, Nor then regret those scenes so gay, Where thou wert fairest of the fair?

Like Dodsley's Collection itself, Percy's poem, with its theme of the constancy, selflessness, and profundity of a good woman's love, became immediately and enduringly popular. Though it consists of a series of questions, who can doubt that all of its questions are purely rhetorical? Of course Nancy's lasting love for the narrator will sustain her as, without a backward glance, she abandons the flaunting town and embraces the rigours of life in the lowly cot. Of course she will nurse the narrator in his last extremity and cheer with smiles the bed of death. Of course through it all she will feel no regret for the vanished courtly scene where she was fairest of the fair.

Percy's Song probably owes a considerable debt to a song in Nathaniel Lee's tragedy Theodosius and to Allan Ramsay's song The Young Laird and Edinburgh Katy. (6) The sentimental theme of "O Nancy, wilt thou go with me," however, assured its continuing popularity despite any charges of lack of originality that might be sustained against it. Robert Burns, indeed, found Percy's Song "perhaps, the most beautiful Ballad in the English language." (7) That the public agreed with Burn's assessment is evidenced by the fact that the song was imitated, "answered," rendered into Latin verse, and at least twice set to music. (8)

It is not surprising, then, that Vasily Zhukovsky was attracted to such an extraordinarily popular poem; certainly he would have had ample opportunity to come across it in one of the many reprintings of Dodsley's Collection or elsewhere. It seems certain that the version which Zhukovsky published in his journal Vestnik Yevropy was not his first attempt to translate Percy's song, for a completely different version, omitting the final stanza, exists in manuscript in the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad. This version was published, apparently for the first time, in 1939. Ts. Vol'pe, the editor, speaks of it as an early redaction and refers to another authority who tentatively assigns it a date of 1805. (9) The relative stiffness and awkwardness of this version, however, lead us to believe that it must have been written considerably earlier. Zhukovsky's translation of Thomas Gray's "Elegy" in 1802 had been "immediately acclaimed as a model of elegiac form; it was quoted in one breath with verses by the best Russian poets of the day." (10) Zhukovsky's early translation of Percy's "O Nancy" is scarcely the work of a man who had produced the sophisticated and polished "Elegy" three years before. It seems instead the work of an apprentice hand. We quote it below in its entirety:

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] (11)

If one thing is clear in Zhukovsky's translation, it is that he is struggling-struggling to remain faithful to the original and at the same time make his own voice heard. In comparison with Zhukovsky's best work, this version is, in places, stiff and stilted: for example, "In a no longer gold-adorned | Rustic attire, not rich" and "Under a peaceful, but forgotten, shelter." The translator is willing to capitalize on sentiment: "Will you endure a mother's sufferings." Moreover, Zhukovsky unwisely abandons Percy's eight-line stanza for one of the most common stanza forms in eighteenth-century Russian poetry, the four-foot ten-line stanza, rhyming ababccdeed. (His use of such a stanza form, incidentally, would seem to support the case that this version is a very early composition.) The exigencies of metre would seem to have prevented Zhukovsky from regularly beginning his stanzas with "O Nina" and thus to have forced him to sacrifice one of the attractive features of the original: the refrain-like "O Nancy" at the beginning of each of the first three stanzas. Apparently wary of the tsarist censor, Zhukovsky substitutes "gorod" (the city) for Percy's "courtly scene." In the first stanza Zhukovsky seems to mistranslate "russet" as "rustic." Finally, Zhukovsky's four-line refrain is repeated without variation, whereas the first line of Percy's two-line refrain is subtly varied from stanza to stanza. It is tempting to speculate that this work of Zhukovsky's in which he is so clearly feeling his way as a translator is the earliest of his translations from the English poets; certainly it appears to have been written earlier than 1805.

The Vestnik Yevropy version, which we here quote in full, is altogether superior in quality:

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] (12)

In the version published in Vestnik Yevropy, Zhukovsky gives to Percy's pretty song a pith and character lacking in the original, and in doing so he proves to be the better poet. Zhukovsky subtly transmutes the conventional diction of Percy's refrain into phrases that are at once suave, cool, and classical. Whereas one suspects that "courtly scene" and "fairest of the fair" were cliches even in the mid-eighteenth century, "v gorode tsvela" (in the city you bloomed) and "nesravnennoyu v krugu Prelest" (incomparable in the circle of Graces) are actual images. The latter is in fact a vast improvement over Zhukovsky's literal translation of Percy's "fairest of the fair" in the earlier version. Zhukovsky's striking description of Nina as the loveliest among the goddesses of charm and beauty evokes for us an image of Nina as the finest one in a group of superb female figures on a Greek or Roman frieze or urn. In the second version, as in the first, Zhukovsky avoids the double-quatrain stanza form and utilizes a more complex rhyme scheme: ababccdd. In most respects, however, Zhukovsky's second translation of "O Nancy," despite his subtle improvements, seems thoroughly in keeping with the letter and the spirit of Percy's original.

Thus Bishop Percy's Nancy--the fairest of the fair--survives in Russian literature as Zhukovsky's Nina--incomparable in the circle of Graces. By avoiding the easy and obvious phrase and choosing the sharp and fresh image, Zhukovsky the translator-as-maker once again in "To Nina" takes a promising original and gives it a new life.

KENNETH H. OBER

University of Alberta

WARREN U. OBER

University of Waterloo

Notes

(1) This article is reprinted here by kind permission of the editors of The Slavonic and East European Review, where it first appeared in The Slavonic and East European Review, 57 (1979): 396-402.

(2) Albert C. Baugh, ed., A Literary, History of England, 2nd edn., New York, 1967, III, p. 1017.

(3) Robert and James Dodsley, eds., A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes Several Hands, London, 1758, vol. VI, pp. 233-34.

(4) Henry B. Wheatley, ed., "General Introduction," Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, by Thomas Percy, 1885; rpt. London, 1927, 1, p. lxxii.

(5) Alice C.C. Gaussen, Pelate: Prelate and Poet, London, 1908, pp. 21, 29. Gaussen credits the comment to Sir George Douglas. The portrait is reproduced in Gaussen opposite page 22.

(6) Nathaniel Lee, Theodosius: or, The Force of Love in Bell "s British Theatre, London, 1776-78, vol. VII, pp. 17-18 (separate pagination); The Works q/'Allan Ramsay, London, 1848, vol. II, pp. 226-27. Ramsay's song appeared originally in his Tea-Table Miscellany. See G. L. Kittredge, "Percy and His Nancy," The Manly Anniversary Studies in Language and Literature, Chicago, 1923, rpt. Freeport, N.Y., 1968 (hereafter Kittredge), pp. 213-15.

(7) The Letters of Robert Burns, ed. J. De Lancey Ferguson, Oxford, 1931; rpt. St Clair Shores, Michigan, 1971, vol. II, p. 126.

(8) See, for example, Henrietta Rhodes's imitation and her "answer" in the Gentleman's Magazine, LIII, London, 1783, p. 696. For a Latin translation, see ibid., p. 605. Both Charles Thomas Carter and Joseph Baildon composed music for the song, which was sung at both Ranelagh and Vauxhall, the fashionable London amusement resorts. In discussing Carter's Vauxhall version Grove's Dictionary of Music, 5th ed., ed. Eric Blom, London, 1954, vol. II, p. 97, quotes the title as "O Nanny wilt thou fly from the." See also Kittredge, pp. 208-09, 211.

(9) V.A. Zhukovsky, Stikhotvoreniya, ed. Ts. Vol'pe, I, Leningrad, 1939, pp. 341-42, 370.

(10) I.M. Semenko, Vasily Zhukovsky, Boston, Mass., 1976, p. 17.

(11) Our translation of Zhukovsky's early version follows: Will you take leave without regret, / 0 Nina, of the life of the city? / Will you give up worldly delights / for happiness in a simple hut! / In a no longer gold-adorned / rustic attire, not rich, / won't you recall those beautiful days, / when everything breathed of you, / when you adorned the city / and were the fairest of the fair! Abandoning the luxurious palaces, / won't you look at them with yearning? / Of earlier happinesses dreaming, / will you endure the cold, will you endure the heat'? / Under a peaceful, but forgotten, shelter? / With your enraptured spouse / won't you recall those beautiful days, / when everything breathed of you, / when you adorned the city / and were the fairest of the lair! O Nina, do you love so passionately / that you will share grief with me, / disdain dreadful poverty / and transform sorrow into sweetness! / Will you endure a mother's sufferings, / and in the hour of torment of the heart / won't you recall those beautiful days, / when everything breathed of you, / when you adorned the city / and were the fairest of the fair!

(12) The Vestnik Yevropy version was reprinted in Vol'pe, vol. I, p. 54, and in Zhukovsky's Sobraniye sochineniy, v chetyryokh tomakh, vol. I, ed. V.P. Petushkov, Moscow and Leningrad, 1959. pp. 78-79. Petushkov's edition is quoted here. Our translation of the Vestnik Yevropy version follows: O Nina, o my friend! Can it be that without regret / you are abandoning for me the world and the splendid city? / And in a poor hut, the abode of humility, / having exchanged your brilliant attire for a rural one, / adorned neither by gold nor brocade, / shining for the wilderness with unseen beauty, / won't you remember former years, how in the city you bloomed / and were incomparable in the circle of Graces? Can it be that. directing your way to a remote valley, / you won't turn your eyes back with yearning? / Are you ready to endure the wretchedness of fate, / the cruel cold of winter, the flaming heat of summer? / O you. born to be the loveliness of nature! / Can it be that, a recluse, in the spring of your life / you won't remember the sweet days, how in the city you bloomed / and were incomparable in the circle of Graces? Ah! will you be a true friend to me in my misfortunes? / Will you dare to share dangers with me? / And, in a bitter hour of life, the sorrowful spouse /with a smile of love will you come to revive? / Can it be that, in the depth of your soul concealing sufferings, / O Nina! In the terrible moment of torment / you won't remember former years, how in the city you bloomed / and were incomparable in the circle of Graces? In the last moment of love and happiness, / when my eyes no longer make out Nina, / will your blessing comfort me / and sweeten my deathbed? / Will you come to adorn my peaceful coffin with flowers? / Can it be that, bent over my ashes with tears, / you won't remember former years, how in the city you bloomed / and were incomparable in the circle of Graces?