Zukovskij's early translations of the ballads of Robert Southey (1).

Ober, Kenneth H. ; Ober, Warren U.

It is generally recognized that Vasilij Andreevic Zukovskij, "the Columbus who discovered for Russian literature the America of Romanticism," (2) won a great part of his reputation through his superb achievement as a poet-translator. One aspect of Zukovskij's contribution to the Romantic movement in Russian literature which requires further investigation, however, is his treatment of the English Romantics, which cannot have failed to exert a significant influence upon the tastes of Russian lovers of poetry during the first three decades of the nineteenth century--and after.

Although we shall be concerned here only with Zukovskij's three earliest translations of the ballads of Robert Southey, it is interesting to follow Zukovskij as he works toward the discovery of the English Romantic poets as a group. In 1802 Zukovskij translated Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," in 1805 Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village," in 1806 works of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and in 1808 a poem of James Thomson. After translations of poems by Dryden and Goldsmith in 1812 and a poem by David Mallet in 1814, Zukovskij turned to the English Romantics. In 1813 he discovered Robert Southey, whose ballad "Rudiger" was the first work of English Romanticism that Zukovskij translated. The next year he translated two of Southey's ballads, "Lord William" and "The Old Woman of Berkeley." From Southey, Zukovskij moved on to Lord Byron, two of whose works ("Stanzas for Music--There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away" and "The Prisoner of Chillon") he translated in 1820 and 1821. In 1821 and 1822 Zukovskij translated works by Thomas Moore (the second part of Lalla Rookh) and Sir Walter Scott ("The Eve of St. John"). He returned to Scott's works in 1831 ("The Gray Brother") and 1832 (Canto II of Marmion), and to Robert Southey's in 1831 ("Donica," "Mary, the Maid of the Inn," "Jaspar," "God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop," and "Queen Orraca and the Five Martyrs of Morocco"). In 1833 he translated Thomas Campbell's "Ullin and His Daughter," and, finally, in 1839 he re-translated Gray's "Elegy." (3)

Robert Southey, like Zukovskij, was a founder of Romanticism. In 1796, two years before the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey's epic poem Joan of Arc had established him as a power to be reckoned with in English poetry. By 1802 Francis Jeffrey, the lion of the Edinburgh Review, had recognized him as one of the "chief champions and apostles" of the new "sect of poets": The Lake School. (4)

Though Southey himself regarded his epics (for example, Joan of Arc, Madoc, and Thalaba) as the works by which he would become immortal, he was also writing meditative lyrics, monodramas, eclogues, historical poems, and inscriptions--and even an incendiary play, Wat Tyler, that was to rise years later to haunt him as Tory Poet Laureate. But his greatest poems of this period were his ballads and metrical tales of the supernatural--sometimes wryly amusing and always macabre. An occasional one of Southey's ballads of the supernatural is marred by an unsteadiness--even a tastelessness--in the presentation of a particularly gruesome incident, but most of his ballads are characterized by the naive power, the laconic understatement, the economy of statement, and the genuine feeling for the supernatural that are the strengths of the folk ballad.

One of the universal characteristics of the Romantic temperament, whatever its incarnation, seems to be a fascination for the ballad. Southey himself was drawn to the ballad partly because of his great admiration for a translation into English of Gottfried August Burger's "Lenore" done in 1796 by William Taylor, who was to become a well-known German scholar and Southey's lifelong friend. It would appear that Zukovskij (who, incidentally, three times translated Burger's "Lenore" into Russian--in 1808, 1812, and 1831) was attracted to Southey both because of Southey's rising reputation and because of his own attraction to the ballad genre. Zukovskij must have found what he sought in Southey's ballads, for he returned to them late in his own life.

Zukovskij's 1813 and 1814 translations of Southey's ballads, while faithful translations, have a vividness, an elasticity, and a freshness that the originals do not possess. Ironically, Southey's versions, though at times marvelously effective, read almost like translations of Zukovskij's poems.

"Rudiger," the first of Southey's poems that Zukovskij translated, posed something of a problem for the Russian poet. At the time he translated the poem, a certain General Fedor Vasil'evic Rudiger, at that time (1813) twenty-nine years old, had just been promoted to the rank of major general for his bravery at the battle of Polock the year before. During 1813 he also was taking part in the campaign in Germany and France. (5) It would have been perhaps indiscreet for Zukovskij to retain the name Rudiger for Southey's hero; hence Zukovskij's substitution of Adel'stan, a properly archaic Anglo-Saxon name. The idea for Southey's "Rudiger," written in 1798, was drawn from Thomas Heywood's notes to his The Hierarchies of the Blessed Angels (1635). (6) In the ballad, strollers along the Rhine are surprised one evening to see a stately swan sail up the river drawing a little boat by a silver chain. In the boat reclines a handsome knight: Was never a knight in Waldhurst's walls Could with stranger vie, Was never a youth at aught esteem'd When Rudiger was by (p. 17).

After being deposited on the shore by the swan, Rudiger speedily wins the hand of Margaret in marriage: Was never a maid in Waldhurst's walls Might match with Margaret; Her cheek was fair, her eyes were dark, Her silken locks like jet (p. 17).

Despite occasional moments of preoccupation, Rudiger is happy with his wife. And onward roll'd the waning months, The hour appointed came, And Margaret her Rudiger Hail'd with a father's name (p. 19).

Refusing to have the child baptized, Rudiger, accompanied by Margaret, takes it to the shore of the Rhine, where he is met by his swan. After a boat trip down the Rhine, the passengers alight and Rudiger takes the baby to the mouth of a cave. Two giant arms appear to receive the child. Margaret seizes the baby from Rudiger: The mother holds her precious babe: But the black arms clasp'd him round, And dragg'd the wretched Rudiger Adown the dark profound (p. 24).

As Southey explains in his headnote, the swan knight "had purchased prosperity from a malevolent being, by the promised sacrifice of his firstborn child" (p. 16).

Zukovskij rightly saw in the poem a subject worth translating into his native tongue. Southey's ballad has power, power deriving from the abrupt juxtaposition of the sunshine on the Rhine shore with Hell-Mouth, black and gaping--power deriving from the horror in Margaret as she, symbolic of all the blooming good health of the countryside, sees her Faustian husband succumb to the hell within him by preparing to sacrifice his--and her--babe to Moloch. The great weakness of Southey's poem is the pervasive weakness of many of his poems: a failure to create the concrete image when the context demands it. Zukovskij, in translating Southey's "Rudiger," unhesitatingly turns Southey's abstractions into sharply defined images. A comparison of Zukovskij's final stanza with that of Southey (quoted above) demonstrates this difference between the two poets. Zukovskij's version follows:

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Just as dramatic is the contrast between the two poets' versions of an earlier stanza. Southey: When o'er the many-tinted sky He saw the day decline, He called upon his Margaret To walk beside the Rhine (p. 19). [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].

Zukovskij is constantly making the poem more concrete: In his translation twilight becomes purple, the walls of the castle are jagged, and the damp mist grows gray. Only once does Zukovskij's feeling for preciseness and concreteness betray him: Where Southey's Margaret "Hail'd [Rudiger] with a father's name," Zukovskij's Lora with delicious bathos "smilingly announces ... 'You are a father!'" (II, 31, 33, and 34.)

Southey's "Lord William," written in 1798, is a better poem than his "Rudiger," chiefly because he was able in "Lord William" to recreate more effectively the nightmare atmosphere of the ballad of the supernatural, the indefinable something that only the unsophisticated makers of the old ballads were able to achieve in full perfection. Southey's tale concerns William, who swears to his dying brother to protect his brother's son and heir. Instead, he schemes to inherit his brother's lands and title. The ballad begins impressively in medias res: No eye beheld when William plunged Young Edmund in the stream, No human ear but William's heard Young Edmund's drowning scream (p. 33).

But William "by restless conscience driven" wanders the face of the earth attempting to escape the memory of Edmund's scream. He is drawn back to the ancestral house of Erlingford on the banks of the Severn. On the anniversary of the murder Lord William is rescued by a mysterious boatman from his flooded castle. William and the boatman hear the cry of a child in the darkness: The shriek again was heard: it came More deep, more piercing loud; That instant o'er the flood the moon Shone through a broken cloud; And near them they beheld a child: Upon a crag he stood, A little crag, and all around Was spread the rising flood (p. 38).

At the urging of the boatman William stretches out his hand to the child: Then William shriek'd; the hands he felt Were cold and damp and dead! He held young Edmund in his arms A heavier weight than lead. The boat sunk down, the murderer sunk Beneath the avenging stream; He rose, he shriek'd, no human ear Heard William's drowning scream (p. 39).

The poet has come full circle; the repetition in the last lines emphasizes the justice of William's fate, while the poet himself, in the best ballad tradition, maintains an icy detachment. Southey's ballad, however, could never be mistaken for a folk ballad; it smacks of the study rather than the alehouse or the open field. But Zukovskij's translation is something else entirely. Once again the Russian poet capitalizes on the virtues of his original and unobtrusively eliminates its weaknesses. First of all, Zukovskij disposes of the lackluster name William; his villain bears no less distinguished an English name than Warwick. To any of Zukovskij's readers familiar at all with English history Warwick would come freighted with memories of that famous house, castle, and city. Having committed himself to the name Warwick, Zukovskij substitutes for Southey's Severn the Avon River, which flows past the grounds of Warwick Castle and which, because of its associations with Shakespeare, would probably be familiar to a Russian audience.

In his rendering of the poem Zukovskij proves that his technical knowledge of the ballad is equal to Southey's and that his hand is much steadier in the execution. Here, for instance, are four of Southey's stanzas: "Haste ... haste ... ply swift and strong the oar; "Haste ... haste across the stream!" Again Lord William heard a cry Like Edmund's drowning scream. "I heard a child's distressful voice," The boatman cried again. "Nay, hasten on ... the night is dark ... And we should search in vain." "O God! Lord William, dost thou know How dreadful 't is to die'? And canst thou without pity hear A child's expiring cry? How horrible it is to sink Beneath the closing stream, To stretch the powerless arms in vain, In vain for help to scream!" (pp. 37-38).

If the writer of the English ballad "Edward," for example, had done these stanzas, how differently he would have handled the dialogue! He would, in fact, probably have treated it very much as Zukovskij does:

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The Russian poet-translator is unerring here. His use of repetition is especially effective. Note, for instance, his conversion of Southey's undistinguished dialogue into refrains: "Steer, boatman, steer" and "Warwick, Warwick." Zukovskij also greatly improves Southey's lines "To stretch the powerless arms in vain, / In vain for help to scream!" Where Southey, in effect, tells the reader about the horrors of drowning, Zukovskij evokes the terror experienced by a person who is drowning with help in sight: "We do not see him yet; / But he ... sees our boat!"

A comparison of the last stanzas of the two versions reveals, once again, Zukovskij's constant awareness of the concrete image. Compare the Russian poet's last stanza with that of Southey quoted above:

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Zukovskij takes the hint in Southey's lines "... no human ear / Heard William's drowning scream" and uses it as the basis for a most impressive final stanza. Zukovskij does not mention a human ear; instead, he uses oppressive silence--the silence of the sky, of the waves, and of the shore--to thrust the drowning scream of the murderer into the ears of the reader. As the reader finally turns away from the poem, Warwick's cry continues to ring in his ears.

The last of the three poems of Southey that Zukovskij translated in 1813 and 1814 is "The Old Woman of Berkeley, A Ballad Shewing How an Old Woman Rode Double, and Who Rode Before Her." This ballad, like so much of Southey's poetry, is based on his reading in out-of-the-way sources. In 1798 Southey was going through old volumes in the Hereford Cathedral library when he chanced upon a work in Latin by Matthew of Westminster. "There, and thus," he says, "I first read the story of the Old Woman of Berkeley ... and transcribed it into a pocket-book.... The circumstantial details in the monkish Chronicle impressed me so strongly, that I began to versify them that very evening" (p. xiii).

The story that Southey found in Matthew of Westminster is one made to order for a ballad-maker. The old woman, a witch, is on her death bed. She has her two children, a monk and a nun, swear to keep her body safe in the church for three days and three nights after her death. For, she says, "I have 'nointed myself with infant's fat, The fiends have been my slaves, From sleeping babes I have suck'd the breath, And breaking by charms the sleep of death, I have call'd the dead from their graves. And the Devil will fetch me now in fire, My witchcrafts to atone; And I who have troubled the dead man's grave Shall never have rest in my own." (p. 177).

For two nights the dead woman's children manage to keep her body secure in its coffin inside the church, even though the fiends scream and cry outside. But on the third night the church door gives way: And in He came with eyes of flame, The Devil to fetch the dead, And all the church with his presence glow'd Like a fiery furnace red. He laid his hand on the iron chains, And like flax they moulder'd asunder, And the coffin lid, which was barr'd so firm, He burst with his voice of thunder. And he bade the Old Woman of Berkeley rise, And come with her master away; A cold sweat started on that cold corpse, At the voice she was forced to obey. (pp. 182-183).

The old woman follows the devil outside. After flinging her onto the back of a black horse with "eyes like a meteor's glare," the old woman's master mounts in front of her and they gallop away. For tour miles around, the old witch's cries are heard. "And children at rest at their mothers' breast / Started, and scream'd with fear" (p. 183).

Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's own "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "The Old Woman of Berkeley" has been endowed by its author with the power that Coleridge speaks of in Chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria, the power of procuring "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." No more than does Matthew of Westminster does the reader of Southey's poem doubt--for the moment that the old woman actually was stolen from the church and forced to ride to-hell with the devil himself. This ballad of Southey's, in short, is an excellent poem of its kind.

Zukovskij, as usual, is remarkably true to the spirit of the original. However, he eliminates the nun from the story and focuses upon the witch's son, the monk. Moreover, Zukovskij converts the church into a Russian Orthodox one. For example, he speaks of the holy gates which separate the altar from the congregation, and he emphasizes the icons illuminated by the flickering light of the candles. Where Southey occasionally alters the traditional four-line stanza by adding an extra line or two, Zukovskij never varies from the traditional four-line ballad stanza. Once again, Zukovskij insists upon concreteness. Consider, for example, the difference in the two poets' versions of the following stanza. Southey: And yells and cries without arise That the stoutest heart might shock, And a deafening roaring like a cataract pouring Over a mountain rock (p. 181). Zukovskij: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]

Zukovskij manages to convey more of the nameless horror lurking outside the church through the words "The lock is gnawed" than Southey does in all four lines of the stanza. One of the best stanzas in Zukovskij's version is entirely original with the Russian poet:

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The Tsarist censor would not permit Zukovskij to have his devil enter the church. Consequently, in the first published version of his translation, the devil waits outside and summons the corpse to him (II, 456). The definitive version of the translation, however, closely follows Southey's story. According to Southey himself, the Russian translation was prohibited because "children were said to be frightened by it. This I was told by a Russian traveller who called upon me at Keswick." (p. xvi.) After the completion of his translation of "The Old Woman of Berkeley," Zukovskij declared (20 October 1814), "It's always either devils or coffins. Don't think that I want to be carried down to posterity on devils alone." (Cited from a letter to A. I. Turgenev, II, 456.) Zukovskij, therefore, did not return to Robert Southey's ballads until 1831, when once again he found Southey's devils and coffins to his taste.

Of himself as a poet-translator Zukovskij once said, "Almost everything I have is someone else's, and yet everything is my own." Elsewhere Zukovskij said of Krylov: "A poet-translator can be an original author, even though he has written nothing of his own. A translator in prose is a slave; a translator in verse is a rival." (7) These two statements capture Zukovskij's relationship to Southey in his translations of "Rudiger," "Lord William," and "The Old Woman of Berkeley." Zukovskij never betrays his obligation, as translator, to keep faith with his fellow poet. But his insistence upon concreteness, his unerring choice of the right phrase, the right word, and especially the right image, and his sure handling of ballad themes contribute to making his translations of Southey's ballads better poems than the originals. Zukovskij was a maker in his own right.

KENNETH H. OBER

Illinois State University

WARREN U. OBER

Northern Illinois University

Notes

(1) This article is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editors of The Slavic and East European Journal, where it first appeared in SEEJ 9, 2 (1965): 181-190.

(2) V. G. Belinskij as quoted by A. H. COKOJIOB, <<[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]> (M., 1957), 25.

(3) For the list of Zukovskij's translations, with dates of writing, see B. A., [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]>> (M., JI., 1960), III, 556-560. Citations to Zukovskij's works in this article, giving volume and page number, are to this edition.

(4) Review of Thalaba, The Destroyer, in Edinburgh Review, I (1802-1803), 63.

(5) Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe Siecle (Paris, 1875), XIII, 1504.

(6) Robert Southey, The Poetical Works (London, 1837-1838), VI, 10 and 16. Further citations of Southey's works in this article are to this edition.

(7) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]>> I (M., 1960). 89.