Masha Gessen: “To Russia, With Tough Love”

2014/11/26 13:35:35

Two decades passed. Things got so rough that I knew I had to leave. And yet I thought that after leaving you for New York, I would, like Onegin’s Tatiana, say to you (in Spalding’s translation),

 

I love you — to what end

 

deceive? —

 

But I am now another’s bride —

 

For ever-faithful will abide.

 

Then, one day last summer, I spent a night walking the center the way I used to. Everything was gone, damaged or faked. You had become a stranger. Goodbye, Moscow. I don’t love you anymore.


By Masha Gessen for the Sunday Book Review of the Int’l New York Times:

 

Dear Moscow,

 

This is a “Dear John” letter. You have had so little interest in the outside world for so long that you probably don’t even know what that is. I will explain.

 

It begins with love. In my case, it was a desperate kind of love with overtones of a sacred bond and the aftertaste of a false note. It was a bit like Aleksandr Pushkin’s ode to you, which all Russian children memorize in the middle grades, usually oblivious to the fact that it is plucked from “Eugene Onegin”

 

Moscow . . . How many strains are fusing

 

in that one sound, for Russian hearts!

 

What store of riches it imparts!

 

This translation by Charles H. Johnston, first published in 1977, unfortunately introduces images absent in the original Russian, which, rather than “fusing” and “strains,” contains “muchness” and “echoing.”

 

An 1881 English translation accurately uses the word “much,” but then

 

Moscow! How much is in the phrase

 

For every loyal Russian breast!

 

How much is in that word expressed!

 

Here, “loyal” was absent in the original, though very much present in the way these lines have been crammed down children’s throats. This translator — the first known to complete the work of relaying “Onegin” in English — was one Henry Spalding, a lieutenant colonel in the British military, which may explain the errant “loyal.” A bigger issue with his translation is that its language is stultifyingly 19th-century British (the work first appeared in 1881 in London), while the language of the original continues to read modern today. Whether this testifies to Pushkin’s genius or to the glacial change of development of Russian language and culture, I do not know.

 

But if a reader wanted a literal translation of “Onegin,” she would turn to the one executed by Vladimir Nabokov, so worth reading for its footnotes — and for the review Edmund Wilson wrote of it for The New York Review of Books in 1965. Unlike the translation itself, it is full of beautiful phrases, such as “What we get here, however, from Nabokov is an egregious example of his style at its most perversepedantic impossible.” Nabokov renders the lines as follows

 

Moscow! . . . How much within that sound

 

is blended for the Russian heart!

 

How much is echoed there!

 

You might note that for all his literalness Nabokov took liberties with the iambic tetrameter to which Pushkin managed to bend his Russian gently and naturally. Children in Moscow schools used to learn poetry meters and rhyming patterns and could tell an iamb from an anapest, but a couple of years ago the government decided to cut the number of instruction hours devoted to Russian — and the study of feet and beats all but vanished.

 

Context had disappeared so much earlier. When children learned these lines in isolation from the rest of “Onegin,” they had no idea that they were from the chapter in which Tatiana, the novel’s forlorn heroine, is forced to leave her comfortable country home and travel to the “bridal fair” that is Moscow. She is crudely appraised by men and women alike, and ultimately taken by an old general. Moscow in this chapter is a messy, uncouth marketplace, which robs virgins of hope and purity.

 

All that is shed when the three lines appear alone, as they do, for example, on a giant sheet of bronze on the marble wall of the Pushkinskaya metro station in the very center of the city — as though these lines were meant to celebrate the city. Moscow, you are a liar and a cheat.

 

For complete text, link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/boo ... ssia-with-tough-love.html

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