Translation of Shakespeare Sonnet 66 from Marshak's Russian Back Into English

 

УИЛЬЯМ ШЕКСПИР
Сонет 66
Перевод Самуила Яковлевича Маршака

 

                         Сонет 66

Зову я смерть. Мне видеть невтерпёж
Достоинство, что просит подаянья,
Над простотой глумящуюся ложь,
Ничтожество в роскошном одеяньи,
И совершенству ложный приговор,
И девственность, поруганную грубо,
И неуместной почести позор,
И мощь в плену у немощи беззубой,
И прямоту, что глупостью слывёт,
И глупость в маске мудреца, пророка,
И вдохновения зажатый рот,
И праведность на службе у порока.
Всё мерзостно, что вижу я вокруг…
Но как тебя покинуть, милый друг!

 <1590-е годы>, 1947

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Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie

                                  Sonnet 66
 
Come take me, death. I cannot bear the bleakness 
Of dignity reduced to beg for alms,
Of lies that sneer at unassuming meekness,
Nonentity in vestments grand sans qualms,
False judgments made against sublime perfection,
Pure chastity defamed by crude vile slurs,
And misplaced honor rendered to abjection,
And power captive held by toothless curs,
And rectitude that comes to be called folly,
And folly playing sage, while tossing dice,
And inspiration’s mouth clamped, melancholy,
And righteousness in service to stark vice.
All’s odious, despicable, below me and above,
But can I leave you on your own, dear love!

 

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William Shakespeare

                        Sonnet 66
 
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

 

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From Website “No Sweat Shakespeare,” Sonnet 66 in Modern English
 
Exhausted with the following things I cry out for releasing death:
for example, seeing a deserving person who has been born into poverty;
and an undeserving one dressed in the finest clothes;
and someone who shows trustworthiness wretchedly betrayed;
and public honour shamefully bestowed on the unfit;
and unblemished goodness forced into bad ways;
and genuine perfection unjustly disgraced;
and conviction crippled by corruption;
and skill suppressed by those with the power to do it;
and stupidity restraining the advance of knowledge;
and simple truth being dismissed as simplistic;
and good taking orders from evil.
Exhausted with all these things I want to escape,
except that by dying I would be abandoning my love.
 

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Translator’s Note One
(U.R. Bowie: On the Translation Back Into English)
 

I’ve already done several of Shakespeare’s sonnets from Russian translations back into English. Primarily it’s a sort of game, to see what I come up with and then look at the original and see how far I’ve departed from Shakespeare’s text. The distance between the Bard’s version and mine, of course, is astounding. Part of this may be attributed to the fact that we are writing in two different variants of English (see next note, below). Then again, I follow the Russian text, which has already taken a lot of liberties with the original, and when I render that text into modern English I myself take some liberties. One thing that I do not do is sneak around behind Marshak’s back to look at the original, then ask the Bard for help in making my translation stay closer to what he has. I don’t look at the original until I’m finished translating Marshak—since my aim is to go from modern Russian into modern English, not from an older English into modern English.

To take just one example (there are many I could choose), in consulting the original, line 8 (“And strength by limping sway disabled”)—after checking one more time the annotations to see what the hell this line even means—I notice that Marshak uses imagery not there in Shakespeare. His line 8, translated literally, reads, “And power in captivity to toothless unpower [weakness, powerlessness].” There is, of course, nothing in the Bard’s line here suggesting toothless old men in authority. My line, by the way, comes out as, “And power captive held by toothless curs.” Those curs who come barking, sans teeth, into my text, you might note, aren’t there either in Marshak or in Shakespeare. I need them for a rhyme with my line 6, “Pure chastity defamed by crude vile slurs.” Rhyme, treacherous rhyme, makes for a plethora of traducements.

Shakespeare has trumpeting out quite the nice line here, “And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted.” But when was the last time anyone was “strumpeted” in the English language? A long time ago. The annotators of text in my paperback leave this line alone. I can only assume that Shakespeare took a word for whore in his time (strumpet), which in his time was also used as a verb. He applied that verb in his sonnet as a past participle. If Marshak wanted to get really creative here he could try something like, “И девственность, облядованную грубо.”
 
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Translator’s Note Two
(U.R. Bowie: On the Peculiarities of Reading Shakespeare Five Hundred Years After His Time)
 

You wonder to what extent any Russian reading a translation of Shakespeare into Russian believes he is reading Shakespeare. First comes the problem of any literary translation, especially of a poem in which the translator attempts to keep the rhyme and meter. All sorts of manipulations of the original text are necessary, finaglings around. So that, to put it mildly, the meanings of words in the original have to be bent, changed, even traduced. Modern literalist translators attempt to solve this problem by giving up on the meter and rhyme, but this creates other problems. The “pony” translation they come up with is, most often, barely a poem at all in the target language, and the problem of inexactness remains, since words from one language can be rendered over into a different language with various degrees of inexactitude—but most of the time not with complete exactitude.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66 is quite simple and comprehensible in its theme. The poet is chagrined by the workings of the world he lives in, disillusioned by the hypocrisy and corruption that he sees all around him. In a word, he’s fed up with the behavior of his fellow man. He feels depressed enough at the start to even beckon for healing death, but in the final line he changes his mind, since he realizes that if he dies he must leave his loved one behind alone. Marshak manages to make a serviceable poem out of this theme, doing a lot of the finagling mentioned above. His poem is written in twentieth-century Russian. My translation of his translation—with the usual manipulations and traducements to keep the rhyme and meter—is also written in a modern language, today’s English.

But what is most distinctive about Shakespeare’s sonnet? Surely not the theme, which is little more than pedestrian. What is distinctive is Shakespeare’s language, his style, which is anchored in sixteenth-century English, the way English was spoken and written in England five hundred years ago. No matter how well-educated we modern native speakers of English, we cannot read this sonnet without the help of notes that elucidate the lines, some of which are totally incomprehensible. This makes for a unique experience for the reader, almost as if reading a poem in a completely different language. Today’s Russian reader of the translations of Shakespeare by Marshak, or Pasternak, or anyone else, does not have that experience of muddling his/her way through difficult text.

But no Russian translator—as far as I’m aware—has attempted providing the modern Russian reader with a translation truly indicative of what Shakespeare sounds like. To do this the translator would have to come up with a poem written in the Russian spoken and written in the time of Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584). Is anyone competent to make such an attempt? Probably not. There are sixteen-century texts—some written by Tsar Ivan himself—so that examples of the Russian used five hundred years ago are available. Surely there are linguists who specialize in Old Russian, even the Russian of the sixteenth century. But who has the facility to work in a language that he/she does not use actively and barely knows? Nobody.

It would be interesting, however, to see someone make the attempt. Notes could be provided along with the text, the same elucidations that Shakespeare scholars provide modern English-speaking readers of the Bard. Such a translation would get the Russian reader, for the first time, much closer to Shakespeare. But, of course, not all the way to Shakespeare. For that the reader would have to go to the original Sonnet 66, as written by the master. And, of course, to the explications of the text.

I defy anyone not a Shakespeare scholar to tell my what line 8 means: “And strength by limping sway disabled.” The annotator in my paperback explains that “limping sway” here means “incompetent authority,” and No Sweat Shakespeare says the line means “and conviction crippled by corruption.” Okay. Marshak (see note above) has taken that obscure line and clarified it in the modern Russian he uses. He makes the obscure Bard into a Bard writing with total clarity. So give me a translator who can take that line, work with it, then render it into an equally obscure, nebulous but aesthetically pleasing line in Russian.