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PARTISAN REVIEW
with thine easie streams that glide
.," or by Anne Bradstreet
in
"Contemplations": "a [River] where gliding streams" etc.), while
the other meaning is an attempt on Pushkin's part to express the
French
"andes,"
waters; for it should be clear to Pushkin's trans–
lator that the line
the sylvan shade, the bubbling of the streams
...
(or as an old English rhyrnster might have put it "the green-wood
shade, the purling rillets") deliberately reflects an idyllic ideal dear
to the Arcadian poets. The wood and the water,
ules ruisseaux et les
bois,"
can be found _together in countless
Ueloges de Ia campagne"
praising the "green retreats" that were theoretically favored by
eighteenth-century French and English poets. Antoine Bertin's
ule
silence des bois, le murmure de l'onde" (Etegie XXII)
or Evariste
Parny's
<"(dans I'epaisseur du bois, au doux bruit des ruisseaux"
(Fragment d'AIde )
are typical commonplaces of this kind.
With the assistance of these minor French poets, we have now
translated the first two lines of the stanza. Its entire first quatrain
runs:
Rambles, and reading, and sound sleep,
the sylvan shade, the bubbling of the streams;
sometimes a white-skinned dark-eyed girl's
young and fresh kiss.
Poroy belyanki cherno-okoy
Mladoy i svezhiy potzeluy
The translator is confronted here by something quite special.
Pushkin masks an autobiographical allusion under the disguise of a
literal translation from Andre Chenier, whom however he does not
mention in ,any appended note. I am against stressing the human–
interest angle in the discussion of literary works; and such emphasis
would be especially incongruous in the case of Pushkin's novel where
a stylized, and thus fantastic, Pushkin is one of the main characters.
However there is little doubt that our author camouflaged in the
present stanza, by means of a device which in 1825 was unique in
the annals of literary art,
his
own experience: namely a brief in–
trigue he was having that summer on his estate in the Province of
Pskov with Olga Kalashnikov, a meek, delicate-looking slave girl,
