Переводчик Бунина, Роберт Буи, сидит на коленях мастера. Автор смотрит искоса, "А кто же этот типчик?"
Translator of Ivan Bunin, U.R. Bowie, Sitting in the Lap of Bunin, While the Author Looks Askance (Who is this guy, anyway?)
Памятник Бунину, Елец
Statue of Ivan Bunin by Sculptor Yury Grishko, in Yelets, Russia; Photo taken in Sept., 2000
Tortoiseshell Butterfly
Ivan Bunin
(1870-1953)
Настанет день — исчезну я,
А в этой комнате пустой
Все то же будет: стол, скамья
Да образ, древний и простой.
И так же будет залетать
Цветная бабочка в шелку —
Порхать, шуршать и трепетать
По голубому потолку.
И так же будет неба дно
Смотреть в открытое окно
И море ровной синевой
Манить в простор пустынный свой.
August 10, 1916
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Upon its first publication the poem had a title: “Без меня (Without Me).” In his Speak, Memory (p. 128), the lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov mentions “Bunin’s impeccable evocation of what is certainly a Tortoiseshell [butterfly].” Nabokov translates the second stanza literally as follows:
And there will fly into the room
A colored butterfly in silk
To flutter, rustle and pit-pat
On the blue ceiling . . .
Here the poet Bunin, age forty-five, imagined his death by conceiving of the way things would be (exactly the same but with himself missing) in the same Russian room where he wrote the poem.
In his wildest dreams he could not have imagined how his life was soon to change: the Russian Revolution and the Civil War; the establishment of the U.S.S.R., which embodied everything Bunin loathed.
His forced emigration from Russia only a few short years after this poem was written, the long emigre life in France, where he would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933), where he would die, in Paris, in 1953--in a room probably quite different from the one he conjures up in his poem, and most likely with different butterflies in attendance.
Here the poet Bunin, age forty-five, imagined his death by conceiving of the way things would be (exactly the same but with himself missing) in the same Russian room where he wrote the poem.
In his wildest dreams he could not have imagined how his life was soon to change: the Russian Revolution and the Civil War; the establishment of the U.S.S.R., which embodied everything Bunin loathed.
His forced emigration from Russia only a few short years after this poem was written, the long emigre life in France, where he would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933), where he would die, in Paris, in 1953--in a room probably quite different from the one he conjures up in his poem, and most likely with different butterflies in attendance.
LITERAL TRANSLATION
(by U.R. Bowie)
The day will come; I will disappear,
And in this empty room
Everything will be the same: the table, bench,
The icon, ancient and stark.
And in just the same way will fly in
That colored butterfly in silk,
To flit, to rustle, to pitter-pat
Against the light-blue ceiling.
And in just the same way will the bottom of the sky
Gaze into the open window,
And the steady blue of the sea
Will beckon into its empty expanse.
RHYMED AND METERED
TRANSLATION
The day will come; I’ll disappear,
While in this selfsame empty room,
That table, bench, icon austere
The same contours of space consume.
And just as now will flutter in
That silken butterfly serene,
To rustle, palpitate and ding
Against the ceiling’s bluish-green.
And the sky’s horizon, cerulean glow
Will peer in, gaze through this window,
While the steady unruffled blue of the sea
Beckons toward emptiness: “Come. Follow me.”
(translated by U.R. Bowie, May, 2018)
Poem declaimed by Boris Vetrov; music by Rachel Portman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSBBrEuXi_A
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