The Captain's Daughter

by Alexander Pushkin

  As well as repeating phrases from earlier scenes, characters also sometimes either repeat or contradict phrases from the chapter epigraphs and other poems. During the snowstorm in the second chapter Pugachov says to Pyotr, “I know this land well enough.” As Viktor Shklovsky has pointed out, [3] these words directly contradict a line from the epigraph to that chapter, “Land unknown to me!” Pugachov is as at home in the steppe as Pyotr is lost in it. In the original the echo is stronger; storona mne znakomaya (land to me known) echoes storona neznakomaya (land not known). This particular effect, dependent as it is on sound, is one that we were unable to reproduce.

  Although Pyotr does not, like Pugachov, speak in riddles or extravagant metaphors, he uses language with no less skill. This is apparent, above all, in his response to Pugachov’s question “Do you not believe that I am the great sovereign?” To answer “No” would mean death; to answer “Yes” would be an unthinkable betrayal. Instead, Pyotr makes brilliant use of allusion and equivocation. First, he enters into Pugachov’s world; his opening words, “Listen. I shall tell you the whole truth,” are an almost exact quotation from a song—a dialogue between a Tsar and a thief—that Pugachov loves and that he and his companions have just sung. The implicit parallel between, on the one hand, Pugachov and Pyotr and, on the other hand, the “true sovereign” and the “true thief” of the song is, of course, flattering to Pugachov. Second, with the words “Judge for yourself: how can I acknowledge you as my sovereign?,” Pyotr invites Pugachov to enter into his world, to see things from his point of view. Third, Pyotr flatters Pugachov once again with “You’re no fool—you’d see straight through me.” All three of these points were lost in our earlier drafts. Struggling to bring Pugachov’s song to life in English, I had greatly shortened the crucial sentence about truth. I realized I need to translate it in full: “And I shall tell you, my Lord, I shall tell you, my Tsar, / I shall tell you the whole truth.” We had translated “Rassudi!” (Reason!) as “Think for yourself!” rather than the weightier “Judge for yourself!” And rather than “you’d see straight through me,” we had “you’d see I was lying”—which is dangerously explicit. One can only reproduce writing as finely textured as this if one has taken in every detail of the original. In this case I had missed a great deal and would have torn several threads of Pushkin’s delicate fabric had not the American Slavicist Polina Rikoun generously sent me an advance copy of her outstanding article about Pyotr as a trickster.[4]

  My appreciation of The Captain’s Daughter has moved through several stages. At first, as I have said, I saw the novel as rather casually structured—a patchwork quilt, a collage of fictional letters, historical detail, and poems in a variety of styles. Then I became aware of such larger-scale symmetries as the parallels between Pyotr’s first meeting with Pugachov and Masha’s meeting with Catherine the Great (Pyotr does not know Pugachov’s identity when they first meet in the snowstorm, nor does Masha know Catherine’s identity when they meet in the park—and neither Pugachov nor Catherine has a true claim to the Russian throne). There are many other such symmetries (the two gifts of coats, the two attempted gifts of half a ruble, the two occasions, in the first and last chapter, when the elder Grinyov reads the Court Almanac). Next I became aware of the repeated phrases I have already discussed. Last of all, I began to notice the way Pushkin plays with repetitions of individual sounds.

  Some of Pushkin’s effects of alliteration extend only the length of a single sentence. These leave a translator with little room to maneuver. Our original version of the first sentence of chapter 9, Pyotr’s account of the morning immediately after the fall of Belogorsk, was as follows: “Early in the morning I was woken by the sound of a drum.” The Russian, however, is an unobtrusive but perfect example of onomatopoeia: “Rano utrom razbudil menya baraban.” We tried, naturally, to reproduce this, but there was little we could do. Our final version, “Around dawn I was woken by the sound of a drum,” has the merit of concision and contains some play on the sounds d, n, and r; nevertheless, it falls far short of the original.

  Other examples of Pushkin’s sound play are more extended. Pyotr’s French tutor, Beaupré, carries with him his own sound world, centered on two of the consonants from his own name. Pushkin’s first description of him begins as follows: “Beaupré v otechestve svoem byl parikmakherom, potom v Prussii soldatom, potom priekhal v Rossiyu pour être outchitel.” This aura of pr proved oddly easy to reproduce; for the main part, in fact, we reproduced it unwittingly, before I had even consciously noticed it in the original. Only after coming up with the word “pronouncing” for a sentence about Beaupré’s love of vodka cordials—“even came to prefer them to the wines of his fatherland, pronouncing them incomparably better for the digestion”—did I realize that at least part of the word’s appropriateness came from the way it harmonized with such words as “Prussia,” “prefer,” “prod,” and above all with Savelich’s scornful repetition of Beaupré’s repeated requests to the housekeeper for vodka: “Madam, zhe vu pri, vodkoo.”

  The second paragraph of chapter 8 contains a supremely moving example of alliteration. Pugachov has just captured Fort Belogorsk. Pyotr’s life has been spared, but he has no idea what has happened to Masha. He enters her home to find that “It had been laid waste. Chairs, tables and chests had been broken up; crockery had been smashed; everything else pillaged. [. . .] Her bedclothes had been ripped and her wardrobe broken open and ransacked [. . . .] But where was the mistress of this humble, virginal cell? A terrible thought flashed through my mind; I pictured her in the hands of the brigands. My heart clenched tight. I wept bitter, bitter tears and called out the name of my beloved.”

  The first ten lines of the original sound staccato and harsh. There is much assonance and alliteration and some syllables are repeated several times: “pere . . . pere . . . ras . . . perer . . . razb . . . razl . . . grabl . . . braz . . . razb . . . gor . . . gor . . . grom . . . roiz . . .” Then the harsher consonants drop away and are replaced by repeated p, l, and sh sounds at the moment that Palasha, the maid, as if reborn out of the consonants of her own name, suddenly takes center stage: “At that moment there was a soft rustling and from behind the wardrobe appeared Palasha, pale and trembling” (poslyshalsya legky shum, i iz-za shkapa poyavilas' Palasha, blednaya i trepeshchushaya). Until this moment, the narrator has consistently referred to her as Palashka, using a familiar form of her name that fits her lowly status; a mere serf, she has, at least to some degree, been a figure of fun. Now for the first time she appears as Palasha, and the narrator will continue to use this more dignified form of her name for the rest of the novel. Her owners have been killed and she is free to act in her own right; she will show both courage and initiative and will play a crucial role in enabling Pyotr to rescue Masha from the hands of Shvabrin.[5]

  Alliteration is often a surface effect, a veneer. I know of no novel where the sound patterning is so integral, where thought, sound, and feeling are so closely interwoven. The most remarkable of Pushkin’s sound patterns extends throughout the novel and gathers all its central themes together. An astonishing number of the most important words in the novel are made up of permutations of the letters p, l, and t. Clothes are platye and a coat is tulup or pal'to; a crowd is tolpa, a noose is petlya, a handkerchief (Pugachov waves a white handkerchief as a signal for his executioners to hang someone) is platok, and a raft (at one point Pyotr encounters a gallows on a raft) is plot; to pay is platit and half a ruble (another item that plays an important role in the plot) is poltina; a rascal is plut and a crime is prestuplenie. Patronage is pokrovitel'stvo and to show mercy is pomilovat'. I doubt if anagrams have ever been used more subtly and with deeper meaning.[6] Every element of sound and plot metamorphoses into another. The coat Pyotr gave to Pugachov saves him from having a noose put around his neck in front of a crowd of rebels; the coat Pyotr receives from Pugachov leads to him being arrested by the Tsarist authorities. The entire story turns on these coats—and on the ensuing allegatio
n that Pyotr is a turncoat. This is not Pushkin’s pun; I like to think of it, however, not as my own discovery but as a small gift from the English language that a translator would be churlish to spurn.

  Pushkin’s novel is about giving and forgiving.[7] Translating it has been a joy and it would be graceless not to acknowledge not only the help offered by friends and colleagues but also the giving and forgiving qualities of language itself. We talk all too readily of “what is lost in translation” and I may have dwelt too much on passages we found difficult to re-create. What is more remarkable is how welcoming the English language has been towards much of The Captain’s Daughter. The following chapter epigraph, for example, slipped into English as if of itself:

  Our lovely apple tree

  Has no young shoots and no fine crown;

  Our lovely bride

  Has no dear father and no dear mother.

  No one to dress her

  In a wedding gown,

  No one to bless her.

  It was as if English were a perfectly fitting garment waiting to receive this poem. The line “In a wedding gown” is not in the original, but it begged to be added; without it, our version seemed incomplete. Russian trees have peaks rather than crowns, and so the pun on “crown of a tree” and “wedding crown” is also absent from the original. And the English language welcomed the novel with still more gifts. The way the word “honor” functions both as an abstract noun and as a form of address (“your Honor”) made it all the easier to emphasize one of the novel’s central themes; were a translator to backtranslate our version into Russian, he might well feel frustrated at having to use two words (“chest’” and “blagorodie”) where English has one. And the word “turncoat,” of course, is extraordinarily apt—so much so that it did not enter my head until the last stages of revision. After belatedly realizing how perfectly it encapsulates the central theme of the novel, I thought for a long time about how often to use it. In the end I chose to exercise restraint; as Pushkin shows us, the acceptance of gifts can lead to accusations of betrayal. In our final version the word occurs only twice. Both times it is the father who uses it—in the first chapter, when he is sending Petrusha off to serve in the army, [8] and in the last chapter, when he believes his son has failed in his service.[9] The symmetry of this is, I believe, Pushkinian.

  There is one last thread to hold up to the light. As an epigraph to this essay I chose a sentence quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary as an example of the use of the word “turncoated.” This scornful view of translations, this feeling that they are “turncoated things at best,” has persisted over the centuries—and not only in the English-speaking world. About half of the articles I read about translation in nonacademic publications mention either the Italian pun on traduttore and traditore (translator and traitor), the French idea of les belles infidèles (that translations are like women—either beautiful or faithful, but never both), or the irritating dictum, often ascribed to Robert Frost, that “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” My hunch is that this hostility towards translators and their work arises not from the entirely justified view that most translations are imperfect but from a suspicion of translators per se. Translators are, by definition, at least relatively at home in two or more cultures and their loyalty to any single one of them can therefore seem questionable. It may be significant that Pushkin tells us, apparently somewhat irrelevantly, that Pyotr Grinyov is himself something of a translator. Not only does he, as a child, teach Beaupré to speak Russian; not only does he mediate between the world of the aristocracy and that of the Cossacks and peasants; he even, while serving in a remote steppe fortress, chooses to study French and—most surprisingly of all—does regular translation exercises. It would be unlike Pushkin to throw in a detail like this for no reason.

  Translators are always vulnerable to criticism. If they do not make full use of their creative imagination, they will betray not only themselves but also the life and spirit of the original. If they do let their imaginations play, they may be accused of presumption. Fidelity, however, is never simply a mechanical matter; to be faithful to a person, a belief, a cause, or a work of literature, we must do more than simply obey a set of rules. There will always be times when we need to think more deeply, to ask ourselves what we most want to be faithful to and why. The best we could do by way of being faithful to Pushkin’s p-t-l logogram was to use the word “turncoat” at two significant moments. Like Pyotr Grinyov, translators may sometimes need to be tricksters; perhaps, rather than worrying about being called turncoats, we should simply try to be more accomplished tricksters.

  I have followed the text given in Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desyati tomakh. I found the most helpful previous translation to be Ivy Litvinov’s; my version of the epigraph to chapter 3 borrows freely from hers. Sergej Davydov, Caryl Emerson, Polina Rikoun, Andrey Sinyavsky, Viktor Shklovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva have all written brilliantly on The Captain’s Daughter; I have incorporated their understandings both in my introduction and in the translation itself. I am grateful to all my translation students at Queen Mary, University of London; Olga Ackroyd, Stefan Baker, Marina Chelysheva, Shona Howes, Josefine Olsen, and Irina Zolotaryova all came up with phrases I have adopted. Among the friends and colleagues who have made useful suggestions are Peter Carson, Olive Classe, Musya Dmitrovskaya, Michael Finke, Sophie Leighton, Sophia Lubensky, Olga Meerson, Mark Miller, Stanley Mitchell, Natalya Poltavtseva, Alison Quayle, Vania Schittenhelm, Andreas Schonle, Trista Selous, Timothy Sergay, Vladimir Shatsev, and members of the SEELANGS e-mail discussion group. My thanks, above all, to Michele Berdy, Olia Grebenyuk, Katerina Hryharuk, Polina Rikoun, and Stuart Williams. My wife, Elizabeth, has heard every sentence of the translation at least twice, every line of dialogue at least three times, and has discussed many passages with me day after day and week after week. Countless phrases in the final version are hers.

  Earlier versions of these translations, introductions, and notes have been published in The Captain’s Daughter (Hesperus, 2007) and in the Bow-Wow Shop, The Literary Encyclopedia, Modern Poetry in Translation, openDemocracy, and The Times Literary Supplement; and also in the journal Cardinal Points: http://www.stosvet.net/cp2.html.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. The Letters of Alexander Pushkin, translated by J. Thomas Shaw (Indiana University Press, 1963), vol. 1, 187–89.

  CHAPTER 1, “A SERGEANT OF THE GUARDS”

  1. Yakov Knyazhnin (1742–91) was a poet and dramatist. These lines are from his comedy The Braggart. The first speaker pretends to be in a position to make Zamir, his rival in love, a captain of the Guards; he does not realize that the second speaker is Zamir’s father and that he genuinely, for the best of motives, wants his son to serve in the regular army rather than live the dissipated life of an elite Guards officer in Petersburg.

  2. Count Münnich (1683–1767) was recruited for service in the Russian Army by Peter the Great. Exiled in 1741 by the Empress Elizabeth, he returned to favor under Tsar Peter III, the grandson of Peter the Great. Münnich remained loyal to Peter III even after the latter was overthrown by his German wife—whom we now know as Catherine the Great. Crowned in January 1762, Peter III abdicated in July 1762 and was strangled by one of Catherine’s admirers. Andrey Grinyov, like Count Münnich, probably remained loyal to Peter III, thus losing any chance of promotion or a place at court. In this he resembles not only the elder Dubrovsky, father of the hero of Pushkin’s unfinished Dubrovsky, but also Pushkin’s own grandfather, Lev Pushkin; both Dubrovsky and Lev Pushkin retired from military service in 1762. In an earlier draft Pushkin gives 1762 as the date of Andrey Grinyov’s retirement.

  3. The Semyonov regiment was founded by Peter the Great. Sons of the nobility were often enrolled in a prestigious regiment in infancy; this enabled a young man to have completed enough years of “service” by his late teens to be entitled to join up as an officer.

  4. A senior huntsman’s role was to look afte
r the Siberian wolfhounds, also known as “borzois.”

  5. The first of several allusions to The Ignoramus, a satirical comedy (also known as The Minor) by the eighteenth-century dramatist Denis Fonvizin. Prostakova, the wife of a country landowner, boasts that a foreign tutor is teaching “French and every one of the sciences” to her adolescent son, Mitrofanushka, a lazy and infantile ignoramus. In the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin writes:

  “Enchanting world! There shone Fonvizin,

  Bold king of the satiric scene,

  A friend of liberty and reason.” (tr. Stanley Mitchell)

  6. Bast—the inner bark of birch trees—was used to make a variety of items, from footwear to baskets and, as we shall see on page 8, the sails of windmills.

  7. Another allusion to The Ignoramus (see note 5 to this chapter). By comparing himself to an ignoramus from literature, Pyotr establishes that he did not long remain an ignoramus himself (see Polina Rikoun, “Grinev the Trickster,” The Slavic and East European Studies Journal, 51. 1, 2007, p. 12).

  8. Published yearly from 1735 until 1917, this contained information about all promotions, civil and military, as well as honors and appointments at court.

  9. At the time, the highest rank in the Russian Army.

  10. That is, he had been awarded both the Cross of St. Andrew and that of Alexandr Nevsky.

  11. Andrey Grinyov may be remembering the readiness with which the Guards regiments transferred their allegiance to Catherine when she usurped the throne. See note 2 to this chapter.

  12. Here the word passport refers to the document that would have been drawn up by the commanding officer of the Semyonov regiment, granting Andrey Grinyov’s young son leave of absence until he became adult.