Elegy 1
(Alexander Vvedensky, 1940; English translation © G. Veles, 2021)
What follows is an elegy I wrote
About my travels in a chariot. 2
Riding along the mountain ranges,
Their soaring peaks and endless stretches,
The jugs of wine on rocky ledges,
The world, like snow, was gracious.
I saw the streams cascade aground,
The stormy sky that crossly frowned,
The wind that played a soothing sound,
A death without purpose. 3
A fighter swims through stormy clamor,
He’s filled with all-important valor,
As with the brutal foaming squalor
He fights his deadly struggle.
The stallion charges forth with ire,
His blazing quest caressed by fire,
Far in a dim and shady mire
The murky horses ramble. 4
As forests stare at verdant spaces
To night’s inaudible embraces,
So we direct our soulless gazes
Towards the graven image.
We hide our hearts in empty fears,
We spend our nights in wakeful tears,
Our purpose less than it appears,
We choose a life of bondage. 5
We can no longer be delighted,
We feel confined and heavy-hearted,
Our friends we have betrayed and spited,
Our faith in God so feeble.
We plant the seeds of devastation,
We grant our own exoneration, 6
We have preferred the red carnation,
And have denied the eagle. 7
I watch the beast with jealous wonder,
In words and thoughts there is no candor,
The minds have undergone a plunder,
No point in resistance. 8
Everything is akin to losing,
The day, the shade, the dreamful snoozing,
Even the humming of the music
Will vanish from existence.
In restive oceans’ savage rollers,
In searing deserts’ sands and boulders,
In vulgar women’s tawdry quarters,
We never found gladness.
We’ve lost out seamless self-possession,
We praise corruption and repression,
We treat remembrance as transgression,
For this we’ve earned our penance. 9
Celestial birds dive through the cloud,
Their dreadlocks fluttering about,
Strobing, like spokes, each lustrous shroud,
In flight there is no mercy.
They tally time with rhythmic chuckle,
They test the firmness of the shackle,
Let the abandoned stirrups rattle,
No reason to go crazy. 10
Will stream the river, crystal clear,
The gleaming stallion will rear,
Breathe in the tuneful atmosphere,
Breathe in the scent of rotting.
O feeble and unfriendly coachman,
With daybreak sleepily approaching,
Keep speeding forward, do not botch it,
Proceed without stopping. 11
Triumphant feasts are now guestless,
Swans don’t adorn the festive trestles,
The clarion is silent, breathless,
No herald here to blow it.
There’s hardly any indication
Of our former inspiration,
Death, death is your new destination,
You poor horse-riding poet. 12
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1. Elegy is considered to be Alexander Vvedensky’s crowning achievement. Written in 1940 (a year before his arrest and death), the poem is a look back at the author’s life, a chronicle of his journey from the early days marked by youthful, revolutionary idealism, through the disappointment with what turned out to be a ruthless, oppressive state, and finally to the realization of his impending martyrdom. It is this interpretation of the poem that has guided my translation (there is no shortage of very convoluted and at times esoteric interpretations in works of many scholars, but I believe that, as is often the case, the simplest explanation is the best one here, and the poem should be seen as having inditement of the Stalinist state at its core).
Elegy is Vvedensky’s most “normal” poem, lacking the “nonsense verse” found in An Inmate Who Became a Wave and other works. And yet it is also extremely complex, full of rich metaphors which lend themselves to varying interpretations. My philosophy of translating poetry into English has always been to attempt to preserve the meaning, the meter, the rhyme and the “musicality” of the source. Elegy’s iambic tetrameter with feminine rhymes and the complex rhyming scheme clearly present a challenge to such an approach. I will let the reader be the judge of whether I have succeeded to any degree at all (Nabokov would have almost certainly derided me as a periphrast, and I by no means wish to spark another "Onegin controversy". There is no good answer; this is just what I do. I completely respect the opposite approach of translating literally and attempting to preserve the original meaning in its entirety at the expense of the rhyme and the meter, and I realize there is a lot of me in my translations in addition to the original author. I highly admire Eugene Ostashevsky’s more literal translation of Elegy, and I urge the reader to study it alongside my version).
2. Vvedensky opens his poem with a silly-sounding composite rhyme (actually borrowed from an earlier poem by Igor Bakhterev) “элегия / телеге я” which I have approximated in English as “elegy I wrote / in a chariot”. Such “hudibrastic” rhymes are no less frowned upon in Russian than they are in English and are usually reserved for comical verse or to convey unseriousness on the part of the narrator. The poet is at the beginning of his life journey, symbolized as a trip in a horse drawn carriage. He is optimistic and youthfully naïve - almost childlike, as the rhyme suggests.
3. The poet recalls his youth, and the stanza exudes optimism and wonderment, despite the fact that the Revolution is already at hand, and deaths “without purpose” have not been avoided. Vvedensky creates a strong connection with the past and with Russia’s timeless cultural values by paying homage to Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s favorite theme of the Caucasus mountains. Pushkinian themes abound throughout the poem. The carriage symbolizes life itself, as in Pushkin’s poem The Carriage of Life.
4. I think with this battlefield imagery Vvedensky is now looking back at the Civil War that erupted after the Revolution. The optimism of the previous stanza is gone; things are a little “murky” now.
5. The Civil War is over, the Soviet state has prevailed. Idealism has been replaced with a life of servitude, with wakeful nights spent in fear of reprisals. In the original, the gazes are directed at a “soulless star”, which to me is the five-pointed red star symbol of Communism - a new graven image for the people to worship.
6. People have lost their spiritual and moral values; they have become godless and disloyal to one another, turning in friends and neighbors to be arrested and persecuted by the state and finding ways to justify themselves in the newly established ideology.
7. Even though Elegy is Vvedesky’s most “straightforward” poem, some of the imagery has been debated over endlessly in the academic circles, and this whole business of the carnation and the eagle is a good example. Many interpretations can be found in works of criticism. We have chosen earthly, materialistic values (symbolized by the carnation, for whatever reason) over spiritual ones (the eagle). Or we have chosen death (the carnation being a traditional funeral flower in many cultures) over freedom (the soaring eagle). I think, once again, that the meaning here is rather simple. The red carnation has been a symbol of socialist revolutionary movements since their inception, even predating the red star. Vladimir Lenin would wear one occasionally in his lapel and was often so depicted in the official Soviet iconography (in almost all the paintings by the artist Ivan Bondar, for example). A well-known poem The Carnation by Joseph Brodsky alludes to this same imagery. The eagle, on the other hand, symbolizes the pre-Revolutionary Russia (the two-headed eagle was the main symbol of the Russian Empire, as featured on its coat of arms). So Vvedensky is simply stating that his generation has chosen the new Communist ideology over the old values. I have, therefore, opted for a literal translation here.
8. Again, some scholars have conjectured, for instance, that the poet is jealous of the beast because animals are pure and innocent, while he feels his own soul has been corrupted. But if you are with me so far, then allow me also to suggest that The Beast is the new Soviet man, the brainwashed model citizen fashioned by the State. They no longer think for themselves. They see no need to resist the system. Vvedensky - somewhat perversely - envies such people, for life as an unquestioning “yes man” can be easy and carefree. This is a recurring theme for Vvedensky, as exemplified by another poem of his, Мне жалко что я не зверь (I’m Sorry I’m Not a Beast).
9. I have kept rather close to the source in this stanza, and I think it is pretty self-explanatory.
10. Allusion to angels of death and final judgement. The countdown towards demise is in progress, it cannot be stopped. The Russian word for “shroud” that Vvedensky uses is the same as the word for medical scrubs, conjuring up images of forced treatments in psychiatric clinics often used against political dissidents.
11. Vvedensky is looking back at the beginning of his journey, revisiting the themes of the streams and the stallion from the second and third stanzas. The path – idealistically chosen – has ended in disappointment. The tuneful, “musical” air has become inseparable from the smell of death and decomposition. The driver of the carriage is Fate itself. The poet has accepted his tragic destiny.
12. The theme of disappointment with the chosen path reaches its crescendo. The victorious triumph of the Revolution has turned out to be a pipe dream. The poet now explicitly predicts his untimely death.