Pu&shachek;kin in Ukrainian: Russian
and Ukrainian
Literary Modes at the End of the Pu&shachek;kin Age
Nicole
Boudreau
Pu&shachek;kin's poem Zimnij ve&chachek;er (1825),
like many other poems of his oeuvre, has been subjected to the three
types of translation defined by Jakobson (Jakobson,
Linguistic Aspects of Translation,
1987). Debreczeny writes that the poem spread to lower and middle
class readers as a folk song, or a form of intersemiotic translation,
soon after its initial publication (Paul Debreczeny, Social
Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture,
p. 98). Levko Borovykovs&soft;kyj completes his interlingual Ukrainian
translation of the poem, Zymnij ve&chachek;ir, in 1834
and publishes it in the almanac Lastivka(1841). In
Russian and Soviet criticism the poem has been the subject of a
canonic reading: it is one of the texts in which the lyric persona,
who is taken to be Pu&shachek;kin himself, spiritually fuses with the
narod. This reading, though perhaps an unwitting translation,
nonetheless serves as an example of rewording as
translation.
In Soviet criticism devoted to Ukrainian
translations of Pu&shachek;kin the canonic reading is privileged as
being the most faithful to the original, whereas those translations
which depart from the original are cited as evidence of the
incompetence of the poet-translator or the limitations of his nascent
literary tradition. (F. Neborjachok, O.S. Pu&shachek;kin
Ukrajinsk'oju Movoju, 1958, p. 29–32)
In this paper I offer a rereading of Pu&shachek;kin's poem in the
context of Borovykovs&soft;skyj's interlingual translation and the
intralingual translation of the canonic reading to show how features
of the original are lost in translation in highly specific and
significant ways. Borovykovs&soft;skyj most likely encounters
Pu&shachek;kin
as a name attached to a text, in this
case specifically within the generic frame of the stylized folk song
rather than as an interlocutor/member of elite salon or metropole
culture. He consciously and deliberately Ukrainianizes
Pu&shachek;kin's poem in order to address it to a primarily bilingual
Ukrainian audience. Russian and Soviet critics, on the other hand,
read Pu&shachek;kin's lyric through the prism of his biography, as if
the poem were a versified diary entry. I will use stylistic analysis
of Borovykovs&soft;kyj's Zymnij ve&chachek;ir and
Pu&shachek;kin's Zimnij ve&chachek;er coupled with an
examination of contemporary literary modes such as the significance of
the generic frames of ballads and folk songs, models of authorship and
readership to show that Borovykovs&soft;skyj's version is the poetic
original
of the canonic reading. The communication
which is achieved in Zymnij ve&chachek;ir highlights the
irony and vertiginous levels of discourse which preclude the same kind
of communication in Zimnij ve&chachek;er. It is my
central thesis that translations of Pu&shachek;kin reveal the extent
to which Pu&shachek;kinian, post-Pu&shachek;kinian Russian, and
Ukrainian literary modes coincide and diverge.