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On the Heights of Creation: The Lyrics of Fedor Tyutchev
English (translation)Original Russian
196 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1993
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About the author
Anatoly Liberman
23 books17 followersAnatoly Liberman is a philologist and professor at the University of Minnesota.
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March 3, 2008
A Melancholy Ride: Response to On the Heights of Creation: The Lyrics of Fedor Tyutchev
Reading Tyutchev has been a bewildering excursion into translated poetry that is brightened by moments of sudden recognition and pleasure (when a couple clumsy lines in stilted English seem to part and something genuinely lovely peeps through and I think, ah, so that’s why people liked him so much.) I have even found a Tyutchev poem that describes how I feel reading On the Heights of Creation: The Lyrics of Fedor Tyutchev:
Incessant sand throughout the country…
We ride along---it’s late---it’s dusk.
The shadows of the many pine trees
Are as one shadow around us.
The wood is getting bleaker, blacker---
O, what a melancholy ride!
Each gloomy bush, like an attacker,
Peers from the darkness---hundred eyed!
I like this poem, although I recognize that part of my liking is the way it is translated, I like the consonance of “incessant sand,” I like the alliteration of “getting bleaker, blacker” and the hard clattering rhyme with “attacker.” The translation is obviously faulty though, I do not like that “dusk” is used to rhyme with “us” and I imagine that the ominous elements in the poem were more ominous in the original. In translation though even what I don’t like is suspect: I trip over too many moons, seas, sands, shadows, stars etc. strewn liberally throughout these poems, and yet these are some of the very things I love in the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca.
I want so badly to see my way more clearly and yet here is this translator, Anatoly Liberman, supposedly my guide filling everything up with sand, casting his intrusive shadow all over everything, as I read on and on in an attempt to reach Tyutchev, not knowing if I ever will, “O, what a melancholy ride!” And there are probably many other translators, a whole mass of them, hundred eyed, who translate the “gloomy bush” in many other ways, so that if I become too attached to this or that line, or develop a fondness for certain traits I think I find in Tyutchev, and then read a different translation “like an attacker” the new translator will challenge the landmarks I thought I knew, and I will find that what I had previously been so fond of was not a glimpse of the poet at all but just a mirage in the shifting sand of the translation.
It is impossible; I cannot decide what I think about Tyutchev after reading only one translation of his poems. I read along---it’s late---it’s dusk, but I’ll never reach him.
Reading Tyutchev has been a bewildering excursion into translated poetry that is brightened by moments of sudden recognition and pleasure (when a couple clumsy lines in stilted English seem to part and something genuinely lovely peeps through and I think, ah, so that’s why people liked him so much.) I have even found a Tyutchev poem that describes how I feel reading On the Heights of Creation: The Lyrics of Fedor Tyutchev:
Incessant sand throughout the country…
We ride along---it’s late---it’s dusk.
The shadows of the many pine trees
Are as one shadow around us.
The wood is getting bleaker, blacker---
O, what a melancholy ride!
Each gloomy bush, like an attacker,
Peers from the darkness---hundred eyed!
I like this poem, although I recognize that part of my liking is the way it is translated, I like the consonance of “incessant sand,” I like the alliteration of “getting bleaker, blacker” and the hard clattering rhyme with “attacker.” The translation is obviously faulty though, I do not like that “dusk” is used to rhyme with “us” and I imagine that the ominous elements in the poem were more ominous in the original. In translation though even what I don’t like is suspect: I trip over too many moons, seas, sands, shadows, stars etc. strewn liberally throughout these poems, and yet these are some of the very things I love in the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca.
I want so badly to see my way more clearly and yet here is this translator, Anatoly Liberman, supposedly my guide filling everything up with sand, casting his intrusive shadow all over everything, as I read on and on in an attempt to reach Tyutchev, not knowing if I ever will, “O, what a melancholy ride!” And there are probably many other translators, a whole mass of them, hundred eyed, who translate the “gloomy bush” in many other ways, so that if I become too attached to this or that line, or develop a fondness for certain traits I think I find in Tyutchev, and then read a different translation “like an attacker” the new translator will challenge the landmarks I thought I knew, and I will find that what I had previously been so fond of was not a glimpse of the poet at all but just a mirage in the shifting sand of the translation.
It is impossible; I cannot decide what I think about Tyutchev after reading only one translation of his poems. I read along---it’s late---it’s dusk, but I’ll never reach him.
Displaying 1 of 1 review