Translation of Poem by IVAN BUNIN, "RHYTHM" "Ритм"

                                                         Bunin Statue in Grasse, France

 150 ЛЕТ СО ДНЯ РОЖДЕНИЯ ИВАНА АЛЕКСЕЕВИЧА БУНИНА: 1870-2020

Ivan Bunin

(1870-1953)

 

 

Ритм

Часы, шипя, двенадцать раз пробили
В соседней зале, темной и пустой,
Мгновения, бегущие чредой
К безвестности, к забвению, к могиле,

На краткий срок свой бег остановили
И вновь узор чеканят золотой:
Заворожен ритмической мечтой,
Вновь отдаюсь меня стремящей силе.

Раскрыв глаза, гляжу на яркий свет
И слышу сердца ровное биенье,
И этих строк размеренное пенье,
И мыслимую музыку планет.

Все ритм и бег. Бесцельное стремленье!
Но страшен миг, когда стремленья нет.

 9.VIII.12

                                                                                d

 

Literal Translation

Rhythm

 The clock, wheezing, struck twelve times

In the room next door, dark and empty,

The seconds, each in succession running along

Toward anonymity, forgetfulness, the grave,

 

Stopped their race for a brief interval,

And rapped out their golden tracery anew.

Captivated by a rhythmic dream,

I yield anew to that striving power.

 

Opening wide my eyes, I gaze at the bright light

And listen to the even beating of my heart,

And to the measured singing of these lines,

And the conceivable music of the planets.

 

All is rhythm and flight. Aimless striving!

But terrible is that second when striving is no more.

August 9, 1912

 

d

 

Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie

                                                                           Rhythm

 In room next door, all swathed in empty murk,

The clock first wheezed, then struck its twelve long beats,

And, taking turns, each second sans surcease,

Went pounding on to where death’s angels lurk,

 

Then (precious interval) they called a sudden halt,

Before resuming coining golden time.

I lay in thrall to strivings-on sublime,

While rapt in rhythmic dreamland’s pulsing vault.

 

With eyes wide open I at brightness peer,

I harken to the pounding of my heart,

And to the measured beat I’ve lent this art,

And to the song of planets’ whirl so drear.

 

All’s aimless flight and rhythm’s stop and start!

But dread the day of stasis, when iambs disappear.

         August 9, 1912

Date of translation: August 9, 2020

d

Translator’s Notes

 “Rhythm” is a sonnet, with three stanzas of four lines each, then a final two lines, to make a total of fourteen. The binary meter is iambic pentameter (da DAH, da DAH, da DAH, da DAH, da DAH), and the rhyme scheme is abba, abba, abba, and ba. Vladimir Nabokov called Bunin’s sonnets the best in Russian poetry. Here are a few of his comments on Bunin’s verse, which he, unlike most other Russian writers, appreciated more than his prose writings.

 “Bunin’s poems are the best the Russian muse has created for several decades. Once, in Petersburg’s loud years, the radiant rattle of modish lyres drowned them out, but that poetic brouhaha passed without a trace and those ‘blasphemous creators of words’ [the less talented Decadents and Symbolists] have been dethroned or forgotten.

 “Bunin’s greatness as a poet lies precisely in the fact that he finds these sounds, and his poems not only breathe with that special poetic thirst—to encompass everything, express everything, preserve everything—but also quench that thirst.

 “Bunin has an amazing mastery of every poetic meter and every kind of poetry. His sonnets, in the brilliance and naturalness of their rhymes, in the lightness and imperceptibility with which he clothes his thought in such complex harmony—Bunin’s sonnets are the best in Russian poetry. His unusual eyesight notices the edge of a black shadow on a moonlit street, the special density of blue sky through leaves, the spots of sun slipping like lace across the backs of horses . . .”

Nabokov, book review of Ivan Bunin, Selected Poems, 1929; translated in Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak (edited, with translations by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, [Knopf, NY: 2019]), p. 84-87.

 The verb chekanit’ in the second line of the second stanza is associated with rapping something out, or using a chisel. This line describes the way the seconds of a clock beat out a golden tracery in the air. The verb also means “to coin,” and the line reminds me somehow of the next-to-last line in a poem by A.E. Housman about death and dying young: “The Lads in Their Hundreds.” Here’s the final stanza.

 But now you may stare as you like and there’s nothing to scan;

And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told

They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,

The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

 The last line of Bunin’s sonnet, the reminder of the time when all “goings forward” in rhythmic intervals will stop, also alludes to death, but the poem is mainly about the iambic (binary) march ever forward. Housman, on the other hand, loves to do his tripping along through a poem in ternary meter. As above, with the march through this world of the lads who will never grow old. Anapestic in the line I just used, but in Housman’s poem their march is amphabraic: da DAH da, da DAH da, da DAH da, da DAH da, da DAH.