Subsequent to the recent presentation of Pushkin at the Poetry Café on 23 June (see Events and Meetings) the three translators, Robert Chandler, Stanley Mitchell and Antony Wood,  have offered  the following excerpts  from the work of Russia’s most renowned poet :

‘Poem Addressed to Pushkin’s Decembrist
Friend, Ivan Pushchin’

First friend, friend beyond price,
One morning I blessed fate
When sleigh bells, your sleigh bells
Sang out and filled my lonely home
Lost in its drifts of snow.

May my voice now, please God,
Gladden your soul
In that same way
And lighten your exile
With light from our Lycée’s clear day.

Translated by Robert Chandler

‘From Pindemonte’*

I don’t much care for those resounding rights
That take so many heads to dizzy heights.
I won’t complain. I’ll just admit, the fact is,
The gods debarred me from contending taxes
Or parleying with emperors at loggerheads;
To me it makes no difference whether blockheads
Are hoodwinked by the freedom of the press
Or sharpnosed censorship snuffs out excess.
All this, I have to say, is words, words, words.
To rights of this kind I have grown averse,
Freedom of this kind is to me quite feeble:
Subject to the sovereign or the people –
What does it matter? Let it be.
To owe
Account to no one, serve oneself alone,
And please oneself, and breathe without delivering
One’s conscience, thoughts or neck to power or livery;
To gaze at Nature’s beauty at one’s will,
Feast eyes on works of art, take in one’s fill:
These things are happiness, rights …

1836

*Pushkin’s title pretending that the poem was a translation in order to hoodwink the censors.

Translated by Antony Wood

From Eugene Onegin

[Young Tatiana, romantically in love with Onegin, visits his house in his absence and discovers the real man in his library:]

22

Although, as we’re aware, Onegin
Had long abandoned reading, still
There were some books he’d not forsaken
That earned a place in his goodwill:
The bard of Juan and the Giaour
And two, three novels of the hour,
In which the epoch was displayed
And modern man put on parade
And fairly faithfully depicted:
With his depraved, immoral soul,
Dried up and egotistical,
To dreaming endlessly addicted,
With his embittered, seething mind
To futile enterprise consigned.

23

There were preserved on many pages
The trenchant mark of fingernails,
With them the watchful girl engages
As if she were deciphering spells.
Tatiana saw with trepidation
What thought it was or observation
Had struck Onegin, what they meant,
To which he’d given mute consent.
And in the margins she encountered
His pencil marks by certain lines.
Throughout, his soul was by such signs,
Without his knowing it, expounded,
Whether by cross, by succinct word,
Or question mark, as they occurred.

translated by Stanley Mitchell.