PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION
501
I+II
II+III
I+III
And on that unforgotten shore
(Bottomly);
W hen icicles hang by the wall
(Shakespeare);
Or in the chambers of the sea
(Blake);
An incommunicable sleep
(Wordsworth).
It is important to mark that, probably in conjunction with,
characteristic 3, the half-accent in the third foot occurs three or four
times more frequently in Russian iambic tetrameters than in English
ones, and that the regular line is more than twice rarer.
If,
for in–
stance we examine Byron's
Mazeppa,
Scott's
The Lady of the Lake,
Keats's
The Eve of Saint Mark
and Tennyson's
In Memoriam,
we
find that the percentage of regular lines there is around 65, as against
only some 25 in
Onegin.
There is, however, one English poet whose
modulations, if not as rich in quantity and variety as Pushkin's, are
at least an approach to that richness. I refer to Andrew Marvell. It is
instructive to compare Byron's snip-snap monotonies such as
One shade the more one ray the less
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o'er her face
with any of the lines addressed by Marvell "To His Coy Mistress":
And you should if you please refuse,
Till the conversion of the Jews
My vegetable love should grow
V aster than empires and more slow,
-four lines in which there are six half-accents against Byron's single
one.
It
is
among such melodies that one should seek one's model
when translating Pushkin in verse.
III
I shall now make a statement for which I am ready to
incur the wrath of Russian patriots: Alexandr Sergeyevich Pushkin
( 1799-1837), the national poet of Russia, was as much a product of
French literature as of Russian culture; and what happened to be
