Slot: 28B-6 Dec.
28, 10:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Panel: M. L. Gasparov and the Poetics of
Translation
Chair: Irina Reyfman, Columbia University
Title: Mikhail Gasparov on the Art of
Translation
Author: Barry Scherr, Dartmouth College
In addition to his contributions to verse
theory and to his studies of individual poets and poems, Mikhail Gasparov was
both a scholar and a major translator of Classical literature, providing
Russian versions of works by Aristotle,
Pindar, Horace, Ovid, and Cicero, among others. His range of interests naturally led
him to explore the nature of translation. While he never articulated a complete
theory, in numerous articles he had occasion to explore the issues involved in
rendering a poem from one language into another.
The goal of this
paper is to examine representative instances when Gasparov looks at the art of
translation into Russian, with the purpose of specifying the criteria he used
for analyzing translated works and to piece together the theoretical
considerations that informed his approach. One criterion was his “index of exactness” (see “Briusov i
podstrochnik,” in Izbrannye trudy,
vol. 2 [Moscow, 1997]), which measures the percentage of times that a
translation retains — rather than changing, dropping or adding — significant
words (nouns, verb, adjectives and adverbs). This admittedly crude measure
nonetheless allows him to characterize certain translators as more exact, and
others as freer in their approach.
As
it turns out, he comments unfavorably on the success of simple “literalism” as
an approach. No one translation, no matter how exact, can truly convey
everything that is in a poem; therefore there are no ideal translations, no
translations for all time. Every translator makes choices; when the choices
express the taste of an era, and when the translator’s own taste results in a
consistency of approach and style that convey key qualities of the original
with true mastery, the result is a translation that will speak to a generation
of readers. (“Sonety Shekspira —
perevody Marshaka,” Voprosy literartury, 1969, no. 2; written with N. S. Avtonomova).
Title: Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov as “stikhoved”
and “stikhotvorets”
Author: Michael Wachtel, Princeton University
Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov was one of the
great literary scholars of the twentieth century, and his recent death forces
us to consider his vast and varied legacy. The title of my paper is drawn from
essays Gasparov wrote about Belyi and Briusov, in which he analyzed the
relationship of the theoretician of verse to the practicing poet.
Gasparov himself
was not a poet in the ordinary sense of the word, but, as his Zapisi i
vypiski indicate, he
possessed a poet’s sensibility and style. In his scholarship he often looked at
poetry from the perspective of a poet. This is especially true in his
voluminous work on translation. As a scholar of verse form, Gasparov of
necessity studied the way translation (whether equimetrical or not) affected
the meaning of the original poem and the identities of both poet and
translator.
Given his
fascination with verse form, it is not surprising that Gasparov was distinctly
uncomfortable with the idea of free verse. Partially this was a reflection of
Russian poetic practice, where free verse has always existed on the margins and
where poetic translation (often done by the foremost poets) made claims for
itself as poetry in its own right. In this context Gasparov’s book Eksperimental′nyi perevod (SPb, 2003) came as a complete surprise.
In it, Gasparov not only translated almost exclusively in free verse; he also
allowed himself freedoms that would horrify most scholars (in particular, by
shortening the texts, in his phrase, “sadistically”).
Though Gasparov’s book contains texts
come from Western poetry ranging from antiquity to European modernism, my paper
will focus on the most notorious section: the translations of Russian elegies
(e.g. Pushkin, Lermontov) into free verse. Looking closely at these renderings,
I will demonstrate that they do not quite support Gasparov’s own contention
that in them “mnogo ubavleno, no nichego ne pribavleno.” Ultimately, I will show that Gasparov’s
work provides a fascinating polemic to the famous (in American scholarship)
notion of the “heresy of paraphrase.”
In fact, paraphrase is one of the most essential qualities not only of
these experimental translations, but also of Gasparov’s strictly scholarly publications.
Title: Zhabotinskii and the Hendecasyllabic Line
Author: Ruth Solomon Rischin, Independent Scholar
In the article on the tendencies toward
tonicity in the Italian use of the hendecasyllabic line, “Ital′ianskii stikh:
sillabika ili sillabo-tonika?” (Problemy strukturnoi lingvistiki, 1978; “Nauka,” 1981; “Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie,” 1995), Mikhail Gasparov explores works in Italian letters from medieval Sicily
and Tuscany to twentieth-century Modernist poetry as models for the adapability
of the hendecasyllabic as a prosodic genre to Russian letters. Within the
context of Italian models of the eleven-syllable line, after surveying the
employment of the eleven-syllable line in Russian poetry from the seventeenth through the nineteenth-centuries,
Gasparov postulates four models or patterns in its Russian adaptation. He then brings together as a set four examples of its use by
twentieth-century Russian poets: the translation by Sergei Solov’ev of Mickiewicz’s
Konrad Wallenrod, two
renderings by A. Iliushin of the
Ugolino episode from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the translation by Vladimir
Zhabotinskii of Chaim Nakhman Bialik’s poema, “Megillah Ha-Esh” [Scroll of
Fire]). Based on this comparison he then attests to Zhabotinskii’s use of a
line that combines features of the Dante hendecasyllabic and of that employed
by the twentieth-century novelist
and playwright, Gabriele D’Annunzio. Methodologically quantitative, Gasparov’s
article affirms a tendency toward tonicity as characteristic of the Russian
adaptation of the Italian verse form.
In its comparisons, in its almost tender survey of the Italian models
down through the centuries, in its look at the Modernist Russian users of this
borrowed form, Gasparov makes a
statement about literary cultures.
Most provocatively for this literary
scholar, in analyzing the hendecasyllabic line that Zhabotinskii sustains, in a
translation of well over one thousand lines, M. L. Gasparov inadvertently
identifies a key to the poetics of this remarkable translation. A magisterial
work in Modernist letters on the theme of a defunct messianism, Bialik’s
“Megillah-Ha-Esh” (1905) bore the subtitle, “Be-Megillot Ha-Hurban” [“From the
Scrolls of the Catastrophe”] and allegedly was composed in response to the
defunct messianism that the author felt to be the situation of his co-believers
in the wake of the aborted 1905 Revolution. A deft retelling of Talmudic
legends combines with the use of
transparently Fall of Man epic devices in the classical shapeliness of
the Hebrew original.
Nowhere does the
translator mention D’Annunzio.
Rather, in the Preface, he
states: “‘Svitok o plameni’ v podlinnike napisan prozoi. Perevodchik ne risknul peredat′ etu izumitel′no ritmicheskuiu
i garmonichnuiu prozu inache kak belym stikhom, postroennym po obraztsu
ital′ianskogo endekasillabo—s ob′′iazatel′nym udareniem na 4-ili 6-m sloge;
raznoobraznyi, meniaiushchiisia ritm etogo razmera, mozhet byt′, do nekotoroi
stepeni peredast tonicheskoe padenie originala” (Gasparov,1989, p. 30. citing
Zhabotinskii). Indeed, a reading
of the stylized dramas of Gabriele D’Annunzio, especially of the 1904 Daughter
of Jorio, written in
hendecasyllabics, has led this scholar to suggest that D’Annunzio’s hendecasyllabic
line pointed the way for
Zhabotinskii to bring
Bialik’s poema out of the Miltonic
Paradise Lost mode of
the original Hebrew into the Modernist theater of collective sacrifice, ritual,
recollection in the life of a people. And that has been represented preeminently by Gabriele
D’Annunzio. There was a veritable
D’Annunzio cult prominent in Russia that extended from the theater of Vera
Kommissarzhevskaia to Ivan Bunin’s stories of the 1910s (the ascent of the
Abruzzi mountaineers in Bunin’s “Gentleman from San Francisco” is one of
its later registerings). In his discussion of
Zhabotinskii’s contribution to the revival of the hendecasyllabic line in
Russian letters, Gasparov comments on the translator’s “excellent ear. ” Here,
one may point to the Hebraic-Slavonic syncresis of place names, of the many
names for the poema’s Protagonist (Sabaoth) and Antagonist (Satan), of the metaphorical use of animals (Sera Zari for the morning star—literally, Gazelle
of the Dawn), and of their real appearance, which throughout contribute to the
psychological instrumentation of the eleven-syllable line. Finally, the
translator’s use of the free-standing
hemistich especially to demarcate narrative juncture, adds a theatricality
that confirms the translator’s attentiveness to the theater of D’Annunzio and
its relevance to his project.
Diversifying his
many analyses of metrical genres in Russian letters, Gasparov, reintroduced the
Zhabotinskii translation, so that again in a 1993 anthology (Russkie stikhi
1890s-1925-go godov [M.,
Vysshaia shkola], pp. 145-146), the opening lines of “Svitok plameni” appear as
an example of a sillabicheskoe stikhoslozhenie s udarnoi konstantoi
[ital′ianskii tip] and again with the commentary, “original, kak eto ni
stranno, napisan prozoi.”