Just as individual characters in The Captain’s Daughter anticipate individual characters in Tolstoy’s works—Captain Mironov, for example, is a prototype for Captain Tushin in War and Peace—so Pushkin (and Lyubarsky) anticipate Tolstoy’s entire philosophy of history.
Against this background, individual characters and voices stand out poignantly. Reading the History is like being carried through rapids and occasionally glimpsing a person on the bank or hearing their voice. Sometimes these voices are the voices of folk poetry, and they appear as suddenly as the black curls in the following lines:
Soon the spring thaw set in; the rivers began to flow again and the bodies of those killed at Tatishchev began to float past the fortresses. Wives and mothers stood by the bank, trying to recognize their husbands and sons. One old Cossack woman used to wander along the Yaik near Ozernaya every day, drawing the floating corpses to the bank with a walking stick and saying again and again, “Is that not you, my child? Is that not you my Stepushka? Are those not your black curls being washed by the fresh water?” Seeing a face she did not know, she would gently push the corpse away.[8]
Other voices are those of generals and politicians. We hear General Bibikov say that “Pugachov is no more than a scarecrow that these scoundrels, the Yaik Cossacks, are playing with. Pugachov does not matter; what matters is the general discontent.”Here Pushkin is making a political point. But he quotes other lines from Bibikov’s letters simply because they are so very vivid: “God knows how many more gray hairs there are in my beard now, and my bald patch is bigger than ever. Nevertheless, I go about in the frosts with no wig.” Now and again the reader hears Pushkin’s own laconic voice. The first chapter, for example, ends: “Secret consultations took place in remote steppe inns and hamlets. Everything foretold a new rebellion. They needed only a leader. A leader was found.” And before describing the courage shown by two Russian officers—Captain Kameshkov and Ensign Voronov—Pushkin writes, “History must preserve these humble names.”[9]
Even in this apparently dry and factual work Pushkin remains, as ever, a poet—and he repeatedly draws our attention to the importance of language. In chapter 3, after criticizing the “tangled and obscure style” of a manifesto about Pugachov published by Reinsdorp, the governor of Orenburg, he quotes the sentence: “It is rumored of the man engaged in villainous acts in the Yaik region that he is of an estate different from his real estate.” The governor would have done better, Pushkin is implying, to say straightforwardly that Pugachov was a liar and that his claim to be Tsar Peter III was false. And in his confidential notes, Pushkin wrote, “Pugachov’s first seditious appeal to the Yaik Cossacks is an astonishing example of popular eloquence, for all its faults of grammar. It was all the more effective given that Reinsdorp’s announcements, or rather publications, were written in a style as feeble as it was correct.”[10]
The Pugachov of the novel is idealized; the Pugachov of the History is weak and treacherous, unable or unwilling to protect either his favorite (the scribe Karmitsky) or his sweetheart (Kharlova) from the jealous enmity of other rebel leaders. The Pugachov of the novel is, at least in part, the Pugachov of legend; the Pugachov of the History is more real. In both works, however, Pushkin portrays him as something of a poet—and it is perhaps this aspect of Pugachov that best accounts for Pushkin’s fascination with him. When a subordinate tries to stop Pugachov from stepping within range of government cannon, Pugachov replies, with a vividness that is difficult to reproduce in translation, “Can a cannon be cast that can harm a Tsar?”[11] Most remarkable of all is the account, quoted from a contemporary memoir, of Pugachov being interrogated after his final defeat:
“Who are you?” he asked the pretender.
“Emelyan Ivanov Pugachov.”
“How did you dare, jailbird (vor), call yourself sovereign?”
“I’m no bird,” Pugachov replied, playing with words and adopting his usual allegorical manner. “I’m only a fledgling (voronyonok); the real bird (voron) is still flying about.”[12]
Much has been said about Pushkin’s Mozartian facility. It is sometimes forgotten that he was also capable of extreme diligence. The Bronze Horseman was the fruit not only of sudden inspiration but also of almost a decade’s study of Peter the Great; The Captain’s Daughter also has its origins in painstaking research.
—R.C.
COATS AND TURNCOATS
Translating the Wit of The Captain’s Daughter
Translations are but as turn-coated things at best, specially among languages that have advantages one of the other.
—HOWELL, c. 1645 (from Oxford English Dictionary entry for “turncoat”)
A RUSSIAN friend, hearing that I was going to translate “The Queen of Spades,” said to me, “That will be very difficult, harder even than translating Andrey Platonov. You’ll find you can’t afford to change a single comma.” My friend proved only too right; even the slightest liberty I had allowed myself in the first draft came to seem unacceptable. I imagined, however, that The Captain’s Daughter would prove easier. I remembered it as being less deliberate, less precise in both style and structure, than “The Queen of Spades.” I could not have been more wrong. Like the novel’s young hero, Pyotr Grinyov, Pushkin is a trickster. The Captain’s Daughter, apparently a mere historical yarn, may well be the most subtly constructed of all nineteenth-century Russian novels. It took me a long time, however, to realize this—and still longer to render this subtlety in English.
My first task, after completing a rough draft, was to focus on reproducing the specific voices of the individual characters. At this stage I began to work more closely with my wife, Elizabeth. Elizabeth does not know Russian, but she has an unusually fine ear for tone and rhythm and her knowledge of English idioms is broader than my own. We work orally. I read a draft to her, sentence by sentence, and we discuss any phrases that either of us finds dull, false, or in any way unclear, batting different versions to and fro until we either resolve a problem or recognize that it is best left for another day.
Vasilisa Yegorovna, the wife of the captain who is the fortress commandant, speaks a folksy Russian saturated with biblical phrases and popular sayings. It was important to find English equivalents for these, and still more important to reproduce the unstoppable impetus of her speech, the unselfconsciousness with which she rushes from topic to topic:
We sat down to dinner. Vasilisa Yegorovna did not stop talking for a single moment. She showered me with questions: who were my parents? were they still alive? where did they live? what were their circumstances? On learning that my father had three hundred serfs, she said, “Well, fancy that! Who’d have thought there are people in the world with such wealth? And we, dear sir, have only our one maid, Palashka. Still, thank the Lord, we manage to make ends meet. Our only sorrow is Masha: the girl should be marrying by now, but what does she have for a dowry? A fine-tooth comb, a besom broom and a three-kopek coin (God forgive me!) so she can go to the bathhouse. All very well if a good man comes her way, but otherwise she’ll remain an old maid till kingdom come.”
No single sentence here was especially difficult, but it takes a great deal of attentive listening to make a speech like this sound convincing. And even when a phrase sounds acceptable, it can often still be improved. At one stage, this speech ended: “She’ll remain an eternal old maid. ” I would never have thought to change this had not a student in one of my translation classes come up with the far more expressive “till kingdom come.”
In the case of Vasilisa Yegorovna’s husband, Ivan Kuzmich Mironov, the biggest stumbling block was not the overall rhythm of his speech but a single short phrase, “Slysh ty”—literally “Hear, you!”—that he comes out with again and again, in situations that move gradually from the most casual to the most tragic. John Bayley memorably refers to this phrase as “the Captain’s invariable and unavailing exhortation to his wife.”[1] It was easy enough to find a satisfactory translation for each individual occurrence of the phrase but d
ifficult to find a translation that worked for all of them. Both “Hear, you!” and the slightly less literal “Do you hear me?” sound too aggressive. In the end we came up with “Yes indeed!” Like the original, this suggests that the captain feels that his wife may not be taking in what he says and that he must struggle to make himself heard. It fits easily into the comedy of the earlier chapters and is appropriately incongruous in the darker chapters, after the outbreak of the rebellion:
“The soup’s been on the table for ages, but you seem to have gone quite deaf.” “Vasilisa Yegorovna!” replied Ivan Kuzmich. “I do have my duties, yes indeed! I was drilling my old boys.”
Ivan Kuzmich, of course, agreed with his wife. He kept repeating, “Yes indeed, Vasilisa Yegorovna is right. Dueling is expressly forbidden by the Code of War Articles.”
Ivan Kuzmich looked at his wife and said, “Yes indeed, my dear, hadn’t I better send the two of you out of the way while we sort out these rebels?”
Pugachov looked at the old man sternly and said, “How dare you defy me, your sovereign?” Ivan Kuzmich, weak from his wound, summoned up his last strength and said, “You are no sovereign to me; you are a thief and an impostor. Yes indeed!”
Pushkin’s skill in finding a distinct tone of voice and linguistic register for each character was brought home to me especially clearly when I asked a class of students in their last year at university to translate a passage of dialogue between the young aristocrat Pyotr and the rebel leader Pugachov. They translated Pyotr’s clear, correct speech almost faultlessly but were floored by Pugachov’s succinct, idiomatic, riddling knowingness:
Pugachov gave me a sharp look. “So you don’t believe,” he said, “that I am Tsar Pyotr Fyodorovich? Very well. But does not fortune favor the bold? Did not Grishka Otrepyev reign long ago? Think what you like about me, but stay by my side. Why trouble your head over this, that and the other? Whoever the priest be, we call him Father. Serve me in good faith, serve me truly—and I shall make you a prince and a field marshal. What say you, your Honor?”
Almost every sentence of the original was misunderstood by at least one of the students. People often imagine that it is rare or complicated words that give a translator most trouble. Usually, however, it is apparently simple phrases like “Slysh ty” or, in the passage above, “Kto ni pop, tot bat'ka” (literally: “Whoever be priest, he father”) that prove hardest. Elizabeth and I had particular difficulty with the three simple words with which Pugachov ends both the passage above and another speech to Pyotr at an equally critical moment: “Kak ty dumaesh?” The literal translation, “What do you think?”, seemed flat. In the end, we decided to translate these words, on both occasions, as “What say you, your Honor?” The second passage thus reads:
Pugachov noticed my apprehension. “Well?” he said with a wink. “My field marshal, it seems, is talking good sense. What say you, your Honor?”
Pugachov’s sly humor gave me back my courage.
To convey Pugachov’s tone of voice in a way that would justify the reference to “his sly humor” it was necessary to make several departures from the literal. We changed “think” to “say,” we inverted the verb and pronoun, and we added the words “your Honor.” In the original, Pugachov addresses Pyotr as “your Honor” on other occasions, but not at this point.
Much of the novel’s wit derives from Pushkin’s deft juxtaposition of the linguistic registers associated with the different characters and social strata. Some of these effects are simple. The following sentence, from just before the third meeting between Pyotr and Pugachov, posed no problem. Our translation is literal: “I entered the hut or—as the peasants called it—the palace.” But the following exchange, which occurs towards the end of Pyotr’s first meal in the commandant’s house, was more difficult. It was hard to strike the right balance, to find a way to bring out the clash of linguistic registers without slipping into caricature. Shvabrin is false and pompous but not outrageously so; Ivan Kuzmich speaks very simply, but he must not be made to sound like a fool:
“Vasilisa Yegorovna is a lady of exceptional courage,” Shvabrin declared solemnly. “Ivan Kuzmich can testify to that.”
“Yes indeed,” said Ivan Kuzmich, “the woman’s no faint-heart.”
An actor in a stage farce usually needs to keep a straight face. Similarly, the speech of Pushkin’s comic characters must not be translated in such a way as to make them seem like clowns:
After briefly explaining that Alexey Ivanich and I had quarrelled, I requested Ivan Ignatich to act as my second. Ivan Ignatich listened, eying me intently with his one eye. “So what you are so kindly telling me,” he replied, “is that you want to run Alexey Ivanich through and that you would like me to witness this? Is that so, may I ask?”
The humor is Pushkin’s, not Ivan Ignatich’s. As Bayley has written, “the old lieutenant does not even understand the function of a second, and the duel is reduced to the status of a farce by (his and the family’s) impenetrable good sense.”[2] It is Ivan Ignatich’s absolute seriousness, his clarity and straightforwardness, that make the duel appear so absurd; our first drafts, however, gave the impression that he was simply playing the fool.
We encountered similar difficulties with the last paragraph of chapter 9, when Pyotr and Savelich are setting out on their way from Fort Belogorsk to Orenburg. Pugachov has just sent Pyotr a gift of a horse and a sheepskin coat:
I put on the sheepskin coat and mounted the horse. Savelich sat behind me. “See, master,” said the old man. “I was right to hand the rascal my petition. His heart knows shame after all—not that a spindle-shanked Bashkir nag and a sheepskin coat are worth half of what the bandits stole and what you were pleased to give the rascal yourself. Still something’s better than nothing—and there’s worse than a tuft of fur to be had from a mad dog.”
The last sentence could be translated more literally as “but it still will be useful, and from a wicked/bold dog even a tuft of wool!” The second half of this is a Russian saying, often translated as “something is better than nothing” or “half a loaf is better than no bread.” It is only rarely, however, that a translator of Pushkin can get away with such approximate equivalents. The literal meaning here is important; Pugachov has more than once been seen as wolflike, and can therefore be identified with the “wicked dog,” and Pyotr has just received from him a gift of a sheepskin coat—that is, of a tuft of wool. At one point we had “Still, something’s better than nothing—and there’s worse to be had from a wicked dog than a tuft of fur.” This creates the impression that Savelich, entirely uncharacteristically, is trying to be funny. Once again we had to find a way of making it clear that it is Pushkin, rather than one of his characters, who is making a joke. The solution was simple, but it took us time to find it. Changing the word order to bring the emphasis onto “mad dog”—“and there’s worse than a tuft of fur to be had from a mad dog”—makes Savelich appear to be moved more by anger and less by the desire to be witty. It also somehow makes the phrase sound more like a preexisting idiom and less like something that Savelich has just come up with himself.
Less obvious than the clashes of register are the many occasions, some of them moving, when one character unconsciously echoes the words of another. The main difficulty here lay simply in recognizing these often delicate echoes. Had I failed to hear them in the original, we would probably not have translated the phrases identically and so would have torn some of the threads that bind the novel together. Both Pugachov and Savelich, for example, use an identical phrase in important conversations with Pyotr. After sparing Pyotr’s life in Belogorsk, Pugachov says, “Go free to all four corners of the earth, and do what you will.” And when Pyotr declares that he wants to ride through country held by the rebels, Savelich says, “Just wait a little. Reinforcements will be coming soon. They’ll round up these rascals—then you can ride to all four corners of the earth.” Both Pugachov and Savelich, in their different ways, are fathers to Pyotr; they educate him in R
ussian ways and, like true fathers, are willing to release him into freedom when the time is right.
Pushkin’s webs of repetition are as complex as they are delicate. When Pugachov says, “So be it! When I hang a man, I hang him; when I pardon a man, I pardon. That’s the way I am. Take your sweetheart, go with her where you will and God grant you love and concord!,” he is not only echoing the sense of the speech we have just been looking at; he is also unwittingly repeating Ivan Kuzmich’s parting words to Masha: “Well, Masha, may you be happy. Pray to God: he will not forsake you. If a good man comes your way, God grant you love and concord. Live with him as Vasilisa Yegorovna and I have lived together.” This repetition is moving—Pugachov is taking the place of the young couple’s absent fathers—but the generosity masks a poignant irony: had Pugachov not executed Ivan Kuzmich, there would be no call for him to be playing the role of surrogate father.
It is possible to tease out still more of these threads. Ivan Kuzmich’s “If a good man comes your way” is itself a repetition of Vasilisa Yegorovna’s words in a speech we have already looked at: “All very well if a good man comes her way, but otherwise she’ll remain an old maid till kingdom come.” Ivan Kuzmich’s unconscious echoing of his wife’s words confirms the reality of the “love and concord” between them. Here, of course, there is not a trace of irony; Pushkin’s attitude towards the captain and his wife is always respectful and affectionate.
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