PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION
507
egin's life in the summer of 1820 on his country estate situated some
three hundred miles west of Moscow:
Proglilki, chten'e, son glub6koy,
Lesnaya ten', zhurchan'e struy,
Por6y belyanki cherno-6koy
Mlad6y i svezhiy potzeluy
In the first line,
progulki, chten'e, son glubokoy
(which Turgenev-Viardot translated correctly as
((la promenade, la
lecture, un somneil profond et salutaire»), progulki
cannot be ren–
dered by the obvious "walks" since the Russian term includes the
additional idea of riding for exercise or pleasure. I did not care for
"promenades" and settled for "rambles" since one can ramble
about on horseback as well as on foot. The next word means "read–
ing," and then comes a teaser:
glubokoy son
means not only "deep
sleep" but also "sound sleep" (hence the double epithet in the French
translation) and of course implies "sleep by night." One
is
tempted
to use "slumber," which would nicely echo in another key the allitera–
tions of the text
(progulki-glubokoy,
rambles-slumber), but of these
elegancies the translator should beware. The most direct rendering
of the line seems to be:
rambles, and reading, and sound sleep .
..
1
In the next line
lesnaya ten', zhurchan'e struy ...
lesnaya ten'
is "the forest's shade," or, in better concord "the sylvan
shade" (and I confess to have toyed with (Byron's) "the umbrage of
the wood"); and now comes another difficulty: the catch in
zhur–
chan'e struy,
which I finally rendered as "the bubbling of the
streams," is that
strui
(nominative plural) has two meanings: its or–
dinary one
is
the old sense of the English. "streams" designating not
bodies of water but rather limbs of water, the shafts of a running
river (for example as used by Kyd in "Cornelia":
"0
beautious Tyber
1 Cpo Pope's "sound sleep by night, study and ease," in "Solitude," or James
Thomson's "retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books," in "The Seasons: Spring."
