Selected Poetry (Penguin)

by Alexander Pushkin

  37 ‘Lumen coelum, sancta Rosa!’: Latin: ‘Light of the heavens, holy Rose!’

  51 courted: Pushkin uses an everyday term, volochilsya, which has a shocking effect in the context of the iconic image before which the humble knight kneels in devotion; the word usually has a connotation of sexual attraction, ‘running after’ a love object.

  ‘The mists of night enfold the Georgian hills’ (1829)

  Written in the spring of 1829 on a visit to the North Caucasus, where Pushkin was reminded of his idyllic stay in the region nine years before in the company of the Rayevsky family. The first draft had four four-line stanzas, with a first line setting the poem, true to his memories, in ‘the Caucasus’ and with the last two stanzas devoted to the memory of Mariya Rayevskaya (see note to ‘My beauty, sing to me no more’, 1828), although he announced that the poem expressed his new love for Natalya Goncharova, to whom he was already but uncertainly engaged. The last two stanzas on the overwhelming memories of a previous love were removed and the first two lines rewritten, substituting the more generalised ‘Georgian hills’ for the giveaway mention of ‘the Caucasus’. The poem’s emotional charge, whatever its source or sources, is maximised in its shorter final form.

  Mariya married the Decembrist Major-General Prince Sergey Volkonsky (1788–1865), whom she followed to Siberia and had a son who died at the age of two; at General Rayevsky’s request, Pushkin wrote an epigraph for the gravestone, and in a letter to her brother Nikolay, a close friend of Pushkin’s, Mariya expressed her gratitude for his moving words.

  The metre of the original is alternating hexameters and tetrameters.

  From Hafiz (1829)

  Not a translation of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz but a stylisation, written during Pushkin’s trip to the Caucasus in the summer of 1829, when he took part in a skirmish with the Russian army against the Turks. In the general enthusiasm for Russian expansion in the South, there was disappointment that Pushkin did not glorify Russian arms. This poem with a camp setting is addressed to a Caucasian soldier serving in a Muslim cavalry regiment in the Russian army.

  The original is in trochaic tetrameters throughout.

  3 Karabakh: A region in the southern Caucasus renowned for its breed of horses.

  6 Azrael: The Islamic angel of death.

  ‘The drums of reveille sound …’ (1829)

  Written during or after Pushkin’s time with the Russian army in the Caucasus in the summer of 1829. The sound of reveille prompts memories of a similar sound he used to hear regularly at the Lycée, situated in the tsar’s palace complex in Tsarskoye Selo next to the barracks. In the present, Pushkin can be imagined reading Dante’s Divine Comedy in a sixteenth-century French verse translation that he possessed.

  The original is in trochaic tetrameters throughout. First published in Annenkov, 1855.

  The Monastery on Mount Kazbek (1829)

  What Pushkin actually saw on his travels through the Caucasus in 1829 was probably the Tsminda Sameba (Holy Trinity) church on a peak near Mount Kazbek, the highest mountain in Georgia. He describes this sight in the same terms in Journey to Arzrum, written in the same year.

  Pushkin’s unusual rhyme scheme is approximated in this translation.

  ‘Winter. The country’ (1829)

  Written on one of the estates of a friend’s family in the province of Tver in a break from a winter journey from Moscow to St Petersburg. Pushkin’s alexandrines (iambic hexameters; pentameters in this translation) set up an oppressively dull tone and language (underlined by the date, ‘2nd November’, given at the head of the poem), with enjambements from time to time that seem to be trying to break the monotony, until life enters the scene and the poem with the sudden arrival of unexpected female company. Briggs devotes a chapter of close reading to this exemplar of Pushkin’s essential characteristics as a poet.

  The original is in couplets, its formality loosened by occasional enjambement, strikingly in the first line; and the last line is playfully left unrhymed.

  Winter Morning (1829)

  The composition date of this poem, 3 November 1829, the day following that of the previous poem, ‘Winter. The country’, and the convincing realism of both poems have actually prompted some critical debate on whether a sexual encounter has taken place between the two occasions.

  21 Cracks and spits: Original: ‘treskom / Treshchit’. Typical Pushkinian onomatopoeia.

  ‘I loved you: in my heart, perhaps’ (1829)

  This famous poem, seeming to conceal more than it reveals, published in Pushkin’s friend Delvig’s almanac Northern Flowers at the end of 1829, used to be thought inspired by his love for Anna Olenina, to whom he had proposed but been rejected (see note to ‘Thou and You’, 1828). But it has now begun to be thought that the brilliant, dangerous figure of Karolina Sobanskaya lies behind it, and that Pushkin was rekindling feelings from the past; he had just met Sobanskaya for the third time following a brief but intense friendship in 1821. Five years older than Pushkin, Sobanskaya was married to a powerful military commander with secret-intelligence responsibilities (which it was rumoured she shared). At the beginning of February 1830, at a time when his courtship of Natalya Goncharova was meeting with a cool reception from her family, Pushkin drafted a letter to Sobanskaya in French (not known to have been sent) containing four of the five key words, here italicised, in the two penultimate lines of the poem: ‘To you I owe all I have known of what is most convulsive and torturing in the intoxication of love, and all that is most incapacitating. Out of this, all I am left with is the feebleness of a convalescent, a single attachment, very tender, and true – and not a little shyness, which I cannot overcome’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 9, p. 307, note).

  The present translator found it impossible to match Pushkin’s pentameters – that seemed to require too many words in English; the attempt is the subject of a short article (Wood).

  ‘I walk the crowded thoroughfare’ (1829)

  A poem that Pushkin began to write entirely with thoughts about death ends on the theme of the equal inevitability of continuing young life. Striking in his draft is the strict precision with which he records the time of its completion – ‘26 Dec 1829 St. P.B. [St Petersburg] 3 o’clock 5 m.’ (Wachtel, p. 159) – reminiscent of the acute consciousness of the passing moment in ‘It’s time, my love, it’s time!’ (1834). One feature of the original impossible to take over in translation is the weighty, ringing a sound in nearly half the rhymes, having the effect perhaps of a tolling bell. What can be rendered, however, is the great preponderance of the first-person pronoun through the first five stanzas, sinking into the possessive and dative in the next two stanzas, and finally the disappearance of any personal pronoun with the extinction of the self.

  ‘Inscribe my name? What good –’ (1830)

  Written in response to Karolina Sobanskaya’s request to Pushkin to inscribe his name in her album, next to such signatories as Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Adam Mickiewicz, Madame de Staël, William Pitt the Younger and the Duke of Wellington. On Sobanskaya, see note to ‘I loved you’ (1829).

  Pushkin appears to have borrowed the idea for this album poem from Byron’s eight lines ‘As o’er the cold sepulchral stone’ (1809) on the thought of his name being read on a page; if Pushkin had read this poem, it would probably have been in a French prose translation of 1822.

  The original metre is iambic tetrameter.

  15–16 I’ve not left wholly / One heart, one memory: The addressee (the ‘I’ of line 15) refers to the ‘heart’ and ‘memory’ of the poet.

  ‘No, I have lost the taste for stormy pleasure’ (1830)

  No surprise that Pushkin could not publish ‘this extraordinary poem [apparently dedicated to his future wife], a technical tour-de-force in which one woman is described almost entirely through nouns, the other through verbs, in view of its unabashed mimicry of two sexual climaxes’ (Binyon, p. 359).

  The original is in hexameter couplets (alexandrines). First publ
ished in 1858.

  To the Poet (1830)

  In this sonnet, written after increasingly negative public and critical reactions to his work since his early popularity, Pushkin develops the theme of popular misunderstanding of and hostility to poetic originality treated in ‘The Poet and the Crowd’ (1828).

  The original is in iambic hexameters with varying rhyme pattern.

  14 your tripod: On which the priestess at the ancient Greek shrine of Apollo at Delphi sat to deliver oracular words.

  Madonna (1830)

  Like the previous poem, this is another sonnet in hexameters, again varyingly rhymed, written the day after ‘To the Poet’ in July 1830. A painting by Raphael (The Virgin and Child, also known as ‘The Bridgewater Madonna’, c.1507) had gone on sale in Moscow. In a letter to his future wife from St Petersburg, Pushkin wrote (in French) shortly after composing this poem: ‘The fine ladies ask to see your portrait, and won’t forgive me for not having one. I console myself by spending hours on end in front of a blonde madonna who is as similar to you as one drop of water to another, and I would have bought it if it didn’t cost 40,000 roubles’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 2, p. 720, note).

  This poem was published three times in Pushkin’s lifetime; the censor was not concerned by the merging of the sacred with the profane since the double subject involved not an icon but Natalya and a Western painting.

  Demons (1830)

  Written, like ‘Arion’ (1827) and ‘The Upas Tree’ (1828), at a time of increased tensions between the regime and educated society and some national debate about the future of the nation following the suppression of the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Pushkin began to write the poem a few months after his friend the radical philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev had written him a letter (March/April 1829) in which he had expressed the hope that Pushkin would play an important part in the debate: ‘I am convinced that you can bring infinite good to unhappy Russia, which has lost its way’ (Gorodetsky, p. 377). The poem took a year, an unusually long time for Pushkin, to reach its final form late in 1830, during the most famously productive of his autumns spent alone on his father’s estate of Boldino. A significant subtext is the well-known poem ‘Evening Meditation on God’s Greatness’ (1743) by Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–65) taking the aurora borealis as an indication of God’s benevolent design, with Pushkin ‘replacing Lomonosov’s Enlightenment belief in cosmic order with a Romantic view of demonic nature’ (Wachtel, p. 187).

  This ballad abounds in folkloric touches – colloquialisms, personifications and repetitions, and is in the appropriate trochaic metre, continuous tetrameters in the original. The immediate realistic situation – the experience of being lost in a blizzard – can be read with dark undertones on the future course of both Russia and Pushkin’s own life. In successive redrafting, he changed his narrative from third person to first, ending the poem resoundingly in first person.

  2 Moon plays hide and seek: Pushkin plays with a phrase that gives the idea of putting on an invisible hat.

  9 Hey there: A colloquialism (Ey) in advance of its time and place.

  13–16 and 45–48 These lines form the first of two epigraphs to Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons (1871–2); the second is from Luke 8: 32–6 (the miracle of the Gadarene swine).

  18 Blowing, spitting fiend: According to traditional Russian belief, one blows and spits to banish the Devil; here the situation is reversed with sinister mockery.

  44 Like November leaves: This comparison draws on an epic tradition going back to Homer and Dante likening fallen leaves to dead people.

  47–8 burial rite […] witch-bride: These lines touch on two of Pushkin’s central concerns at this time: death from the cholera epidemic that prolonged his autumn stay at Boldino and mixed feelings about his impending marriage (see note to next poem).

  56 Tears and tears: Pushkin’s term (as a noun, nadryv, laceration), is central to Dostoyevsky’s Demons.

  Elegy (1830)

  This poem was written in sombre mood on 8 September 1830, the day after Pushkin completed ‘Demons’. ‘Sadness is not unexpected to me,’ he wrote to a friend on the eve of his marriage; ‘it’s in my household reckoning. Any happiness will be a surprise for me’ (A. S. Pushkin, vol. 10, p. 20, note). Pushkin looks almost a generation back in terms of genre as well as autobiographically in writing an ‘elegy’, in the formal pentameters with caesura and melancholy tone fashionable during that earlier period. At the same time it is natural to him to bring in a jarringly informal term like ‘drunken haze’, pokhmel’ye (line 2).

  The original is in rhyming couplets.

  To the Bust of a Conqueror (1830)

  The bust is that of Alexander I by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), commissioned by the tsar in 1820.

  First published in Annenkov, 1855.

  Rhyme (1830)

  Following Nikolay Gnedich’s completion of his translation of the Iliad into hexameters in 1829, Pushkin took an interest in Classical metres, and wrote three other short poems also in elegiac couplets – hexameters alternating with (also) six-stress lines with a spondee (two consecutive stresses) on either side of the central caesura. This metre is preserved in the present translation.

  Making rhyme a nymph, Pushkin creates a convincing legend of his own out of the world of Greek mythology. The wasting, lovesick nymph Echo is memorably presented as ‘unsleeping’ (line 1). It is appropriate that Rhyme should be her daughter and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, the midwife for the birth of that daughter; and it has perfect aesthetic logic that a poem about the birth of rhyme should be unrhymed – though in the original the final line contains a resounding internal rhyme or near-rhyme with the word Rifmoy (Rhyme) echoing nimfa (nymph) in the first line.

  1 Peneus: A river near Mount Olympus, and the name of a river god, father of the nymph Daphne, who was also pursued by Phoebus Apollo.

  2 Phoebus: i.e. Phoebus Apollo, sun god and patron of music, poetry and the arts.

  Invocation (1830)

  The concept of this poem came from an English poet known by his pseudonym Barry Cornwall (real name Bryan Procter, 1787–1874), whose poems Pushkin read, alone on the family estate of Boldino in the autumn of 1830 not long before his marriage, in an English edition recently published in Paris. Three or four lines of Pushkin’s poem have echoes of Cornwall’s graveyard poem of the same title that are typical of its mood. Pushkin was thinking back over past relationships, and in particular of the Austrian-Italian Amalia Riznich, with whom he had become obsessed in Odessa before she departed with her husband to Italy (see note to ‘Bound for your distant homeland’, 1830).

  The aim of this translation of a ‘speech to a ghost’ was to keep closely to the sense of the original, which is in three eight-line stanzas of tetrameters. Considering that soon after he wrote this poem Pushkin turned to the pentameter in his blank verse ‘Little Tragedies’, also inspired by Cornwall’s example, this metre might be found not inappropriate in the present translation. First published in Zhukovsky, 1841.

  4 Leila: The name of the central female figure in Byron’s The Giaour (1813) who appears to the hero as a shade.

  11 Those whose evil malice killed my love: Amalia Riznich’s husband seems to have been unsympathetic towards his wife, which might have hastened her death from consumption five years previously.

  Mary’s song from A Feast during the Plague (1830)

  This and the following poem are Pushkin’s two original compositions incorporated into his free translation (from the original) of a fragment from the rambling verse drama The City of the Plague (1816) by John Wilson (1785–1854), set in fourteenth-century London at the time of the Black Death, which he made into one of his ‘Little Tragedies’ (see note to previous poem). The sorrowful Mary is one of the two prostitute characters. She sings this ‘sad and slow’ song at the request of Walsingham, Master of the Revels (an incidental character in the broad canvas of Wilson’s play).

  This translation keeps the folk-style trochaic metre b
ut shortens the original tetrameter to trimeter.

  29 Jenny: Probably a fictitious name.

  Master of the Revels’ song from A Feast during the Plague (1830)

  After hearing Mary’s song (see previous poem) the Master of the Revels sings a celebratory song of his own. Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) was fascinated by this poem, writing of it as expressive of ‘Bliss, with no equal in all the world’s poetry. Bliss of complete surrender to the elemental – be it Love, or Plague, or whatever else we may call it’ (Tsvetaeva, p. 154).

  The original is in six-line stanzas of iambic tetrameters.

  24 Of the breath of the Maid of the Rose: Reference to the signs of deadly infection, dark red and black spots on the skin of plague victims.

  ‘Bound for your distant homeland’ (1830)

  Another poem in memory of Amalia Riznich – on whom see notes above to ‘Night’ (1823) and ‘Invocation’ (1830). To Pushkin she was a mesmerising image of Italy, and the idea of being with her in that country, her ‘homeland’, had long been his impossible dream. Bayley finds this lyric ‘the finest of Pushkin’s love poems’ and also comments: ‘The simple vocabulary of blue skies is as moving as a popular song […]’ (Bayley, pp. 300 and 301).

  The original is in alternately rhyming iambic tetrameters throughout; in the last two stanzas the same rhyme is used in three of the four pairs of odd-numbered lines, falling on key words. First published in Zhukovsky, 1841.