Meeting Poets

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry includes work by 70 writers, including the nineteenth century poet (and friend of Leo Tolstoy), Afanasy Fet. In one of his condensed and lyrical poems, Fet imagines a young woman, after his death, reading his verses; the poem ends, in Robert Chandler’s translation:

We two shall breathe a life outside of time; and we shall meet—here—as you read.

This thoughtful, new anthology keeps at its heart the sense of poetry’s ability to transcend time and to make emotional connections between writer, translator and reader.

Biographical details and historical background precede each set of poems. (Fet’s German mother eloped with a Russian nobleman; his girlfriend set fire to herself—probably on purpose—and died). These shifting contexts, and Chandler’s powerful introduction stressing the enduring importance of poetry in Russia, are always interesting, but the volume’s glory lies—as it should—in the poetry itself.

Chandler’s acclaimed translations of Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman helped introduce these previously-neglected, Soviet writers to western audiences. Chandler has spent years collaborating on the new anthology, which includes one of his own poems in a brief final chapter of works by non-Russians. Co-editors, Boris Drayluk and Irina Mashinski, are also both poets and translators and have tackled authors from Tolstoy to Nikolay Zabolotsky. The impossibly difficult task of selecting 500 pages of poetry from an entire literary heritage has been guided as much by aesthetic criteria as by academic or historical ones: “…our aim,” writes Chandler, “has been to include only translations that work as poems in English.” This painstaking process has made the volume a monument to the translator’s art.

Many Russian poets were themselves also translators. Fet translated Schopenhauer, Virgil, Goethe; Boris Pasternak’s versions of Shakespeare are still well known in Russia. Marina Boroditskaya compares a poem in translation to “an alien spaceman” trying to “breathe the harsh local air.” The power of her metaphor, translated by Ruth Fainlight, shows that some poems can indeed “live” in a foreign language, even if, in other cases “the sacred honey” refuses “to be poured into strange vessels.”

Poet and translator Willis Barnstone wrote in his treatise The Poetics of Translation (1995): “A translation dwells in imperfection, using equivalents and shunning mechanical replicas.” Much of Barnstone’s wisdom is made flesh in the new Penguin anthology; he wrote about “moving between tongues,” inevitably acquiring “difference” because “the words and grammar of each language differ from every other language.” But the Penguin Book’s editors also recognise that sometimes meter is part of meaning and rhyme, although much harder to achieve with the less inflected endings of English words, often cannot be ignored altogether. “Form, I believe, matters,” writes Chandler.

The questing, necessarily-approximate nature of translation is underlined in the anthology by including two very different versions of Fyodor Tyutchev’s famous lines about the baffling enigma that is Russia. Chandler’s version of Tyutchev’s much-translated “Silentium” is, appropriately, a model of lyrical economy; the refrain “—and be still” that closes each verse resonates more than verbose, earlier translations.

The scale of the editors’ work is impressive: 50 translators of nearly 400 poems, ranged in chronological order, celebrate 230 years of verse. The selection starts in the eighteenth century, moving swiftly to Pushkin and contemporaries, followed by an almost unprecedented focus on the twentieth century and a taste of more recent poetry. The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry addresses huge and perennial themes: love and death, poetry itself, what it means to be Russian.

Some poems are so fraught with significance in the Russian national consciousness they take on a monumental quality. Antony Wood’s translation of Pushkin’s Exegi Monumentum (itself a version of a poem by Horace) captures this:

Long will there be a place for me in people’s hearts,because in my harsh age I sang of Liberty…

The Russian lines are inscribed on the base of...