Translations: the Bestest of the Best, NINETEEN, Aleksandr Pushkin, "На холмах Грузии лежит ночная мгла," THE HILLS OF GEORGIA LIE QUIESCENT

                                                                     Tallulah Gorge

Aleksandr Pushkin

(1799-1837)

 

На холмах Грузии лежит ночная мгла;
Шумит Арагва предо мною.
Мне грустно и легко; печаль моя светла;
Печаль моя полна тобою,
Тобой, одной тобой… Унынья моего
Ничто не мучит, не тревожит,
И сердце вновь горит и любит — оттого,
Что не любить оно не может.

1829

                                                                             d

                      Literal Translation

 Upon the hills of Georgia lies the murk of night;

Before my eyes the Aragva River roars.

I feel sad and at ease; my sorrow is bright;

My sorrow is full of you,

Of you, you alone . . . Nothing torments

Nor troubles my melancholy,

And my heart burns and loves anew—because

It cannot help loving.

 

d

 Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie

 The hills of Georgia lie quiescent, swathed in night;

Tallulah River’s rapids in the gorge below are raging.

I feel at ease with anguish; my melancholy’s bright,

Suffused with you, the anguish is engaging.

So full of you and you alone that sorrow

Seems not the least aggrieved by pain or woes;

My love flames up, will burn still on the morrow, 

For hearts cannot but burn when in love’s throes.                                                                                        

                                                                                            Date of translation: March, 2022

 

Translator’s Note

 I took the liberty of translating not only the poem, but also the setting, from the Georgian Republic in the Caucasus Mountains to the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Georgia, U.S.A.  

 

PUSHKIN'S BIRTHDAY June 4, 1799--June 4, 2019; Drawings by YEVGENIA DVOSKINA

                                                       In Honor of Pushkin's Birthday


                       Witty Drawings on How Pushkin Would Fare in the Twenty-First Century
                                                               by Yevgenia Dvoskina

                                                 Flat Tire on the Road to Mikhailovskoe

                 Pushkin on the Way Not to the Summer Gardens, But to the Kindergarten

                         Pushkin and Gogol in a Beer Bar, Thinking Up New Plots for Their Fiction

                                                             

                                                                 Pushkin Reads Brodsky

Signing Books At the Local Library

                                           So Who's Going to Help with the Dishes? Pushkin?

All drawings published in "Russian Life," May/June, 2019, p. 40-42.

LERMONTOV AND GOGOL

The year 2014 marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Mikhail Lermontov's birth. So all over the Russian-speaking world people are getting together to commemorate his short life and to read his poetry.


It is always interesting to contemplate meetings between great writers, to consider what they may have said to one another. In 1878 Tolstoy and Dostoevsky sat in the same lecture hall, listening to a talk by Solovyov. They never met, not that day or any other, but if they had the fur surely would have flown.

Here are three great Russian writers, Lermontov, Pushkin, and Gogol, pictured in confabulation, as part of the mammoth Monument to A Thousand Years of Russian History, in Great Novgorod. Such a confabulation never took place, as the three of them never got together. Gogol and Pushkin, however, did know each other, although they were not great friends, and Pushkin provided Gogol with the plots for some of his most famous works.

Lermontov and Gogol met only twice, on two successive days in Moscow, May 9 and May 10, 1840. Lermontov showed up for a party commemorating Gogol's nameday on May 9. It was held in the gardens of the historian and publicist Pogodin, with whom Gogol was lodging at the time. The next day they met again, at a gathering hosted by E.A. Sverbeeva.

On that spring in 1840 Gogol was the most renowned Russian writer of the time, and Lermontov, already highly respected for his verse, had just published the best early realistic novel in Russian literature (A Hero of Our Time).

Each of them was on the way somewhere else at the time they met. Gogol was soon off back to his beloved Rome, while Lermontov, still in the army and exiled from St. Petersburg for his unruly ways, was bound for the Caucasus, where he would be killed in a duel a year later.

What did they say to each other when they met? Nobody knows. Apparently nothing of much interest, since neither of the two writers recorded a single word of that conversation.

Дар напрасный, дар случайный,
Жизнь, зачем ты мне дана?
Иль зачем судьбою тайной
Ты на казнь осуждена?

Кто меня враждебной властью
Из ничтожества воззвал,
Душу мне наполнил страстью
Ум сомненьем взволновал?

Цели нет передо мною:
Сердце пусто, празден ум,
И томит меня тоскою
Однозвучный жизни шум.

This week is Pushkin's birthday. The above poem is one of my favorites. Of course, Pushkin is essentially untranslatable, but here is the rough sense of the original:

Useless gift, this chance gift called life--why have you been given to me? And then why did some mysterious fate sentence you to death? What inimical force summoned me forth out of nothingness, filled up my soul with passions, disturbed my mind with doubt? I see no goal ahead of me, I'm empty-hearted, idle-minded, and the monotone hum of life runs grieving through my soul.