510
PARTISAN REVIEW
and Professor Elton, who in such cases can always
be
depended upon
for grotesque triteness and bad gr,ammar, reverses the act and pe–
roxides the concubine:
at times a fresh young kiss bestowing
upon some blond and dark-eyed maid.
Pushkin's line
is,
by-the-by, an excellent illustration of what I
mean by "literalism, literality, literal interpretation." I take literalism
to mean "absolute accuracy."
If
such accuracy sometimes results
in
the strange allegoric scene suggested by the phrase "the letter has
killed the spirit," only one reason can be imagined: there must have
been something wrong either with the original letter or with the
original spirit, and this is not really a translator's concern. Pushkin
has literally (i.e. with absolute accuracy) rendered Chenier's
«une
blanche"
by
((belyanka"
and the English translator should reincarnate
here both Pushkin and Chenier. It would
be
false literalism to render
belyanka (une blanche)
as "a white one"--or, still worse, "a white
female"; and it would be ambiguous to say "fair-faced." The accu–
rate meaning is "a white-skinned female," certainly "young," hence
a "white-skinned girl," with dark eyes and, presumably, dark hair
enhancing by contrast the luminous fairness of unpigmented
skin.
Another good example of a particularly "untranslatable" stanza
is XXXIII in Chapter One:
I recollect the sea before a storm:
o
hew I envied
the waves that ran in turbulent succession
to lie down! at her feet with love!
1ra p6mnyu m6re pred groz6yu:
kak ya zavidoval volnam
beglishchim burnoy chered6yu
s lyuk6v'yu lech k ey6 nogam!
Russian readers discern in the original here two sets of beautifully
onomatopoeic alliterations:
begushchim burnoy
...
which renders
the turbulent rush of the surf, and
s lyubov'yu lech-the
liquid lisp
of the waves dying in adoration at the lady's feet. Whomsoever the
recollected feet belonged to (thirteen-year-old Marie Raevski pad–
dling near Taganrog, or her father's godchild, a young
dame de com-
(
