Translating Blok's Stormy Weather: High Symbolism

Blok was the greatest of the Symbolists, using metaphorical language of marked originality to convey spiritual and religious experiences, and with the images possessed of multiple meanings to express the link between the visible and invisible worlds. {4}

The notion is not difficult to understand. Words do not get their meaning from definitions or dictionaries but from their social purposes, Wittgenstein was to argue, from the practical context in which they are employed. Many nineteenth century also thinkers rejected the Enlightenment's notion of progress and abstract categories, and spoke instead of a Volk, a people — something that was not rationally grounded or justified, but grew from feelings and traditions previously overlooked. Social life was indeed analogous to organic growth, and aspects of social life were related to each other like functions of a living body. Herder developed this notion, relating earth to the cosmos, man to earth, man as a social and historical being. History was the growth of a single, marvellous tree whose branches were the cultures of mankind.  If all reality is fundamentally one, and the Divine is present in all its manifestations, then what occurs in history is Revelation. Individual conscience may be fallible, but it is the role of man's moral sense to penetrate deeper into the nature of all that exists. The sense of the dark and hidden, the feeling of dependence and awe, and a worshipful acceptance of the fullness of being, are the attitudes which put religious man in touch with the Divine. The Slavophils in Russia of the 1830s and 1840s also believed in the primacy of the moral and religious law, the ancestral tradition and the spontaneous sense of the right and just over the written laws and regulations of the state. {5}

Words were natural intermediaries in this process, and could yield their shadowy and larger meanings  if used appropriately. Blok saw art as an element in cultural history, and the latter also had a religious dimension — which in Blok's case was a mystical love for Divine Wisdom. He began to interweave love, art and dissident views into his duties as the high priest of Symbolism, engaging in affairs — which, when reciprocated by his wife, ended in disillusionment and wrecked his first marriage. The Beautiful Lady of his early poems gave way to correspondences taken from contemporary Russia, often with urban, everyday and dispiriting imagery, for which he had an innate sense of the appropriate. Blok first welcomed the Revolution but grew increasingly depressed and finally silent over its reality. The stern necessities of a communist regime fighting for its life with harsh decrees became very different from the artistic and highly-cultured society in which he was reared, and was worlds apart from the social realism it advocated. To the new democratic purposes of the common man, Symbolism had become a reactionary bourgeois art form. {6}

Russian Text

Пусть светит месяц - ночь темна.
Пусть жизнь приносит людям счастье,-
В моей душе любви весна
Не сменит бурного ненастья.

Ночь распростерлась надо мной
И отвечает мертвым взглядом
На тусклый взор души больной,
Облитой острым, сладким ядом.

И тщетно, страсти затая,
В холодной мгле передрассветной
Среди толпы блуждаю я
С одной лишь думою заветной:

Пусть светит месяц - ночь темна.
Пусть жизнь приносит людям счастье,-
В моей душе любви весна
Не сменит бурного ненастья.

1898

Analysis

The verse is close to iambic tetrameters, rhymed aBaB, but the occasional extra syllable means it's probably better seen as dol'nik verse:

Пусть све тит мес яц - ночь тем на.           4a
Пусть жизнь при но сит лю дям счасть е,   4B
В мо ей ду ше люб ви вес на                      4a
Не сме нит бур но го не насть я.                4B

Ночь рас прос тер лась на до мной             4c
И от ве ча ет мерт вым взг ля дом             4D
На туск лый взор ду ши бо ль ной,             4c
Об ли той ост рым, слад ким я дом.           4D

И тщет но, страсти за та я,                         4e
В хо лод ной мгле пе ред расс вет ной        4F
Сре ди тол пы блуж да ю я                         4e
С од ной лишь ду мо ю за вет ной:              4F

Пусть све тит мес яц - ночь тем на.             4g
Пусть жи знь при но сит люд ям счасть е,    4H
В мо ей ду ше люб ви вес на                       4g
Не сме нит бур но го не насть я.                  4H

A TTS Audio Recording of the opening stanzas:

Translation

Symbolism is the most difficult style to translate because the meanings that in one language produce a musical and evocative phrase will probably not do so in another, i.e. literal translation will generally lose the poetry. We also need to look at the second stanza, we could render as:

The night far out above the street
is hoisted to a dead man’s guise,
a poor sick man where poison, sweet
and perilous, still fills the eyes.

But that, I think, personifies the night too much, where the literal meaning is:

The night stretched out above me
And answers with a dead gaze
To the dull eyes of the sick man,
Poured with a sharp, sweet poison.

We don't really know if the poor sick man is the poet or just the night sky, and it seems better to keep that ambivalence:

Answering to a dead man's gaze,
the night extends above the street:
and dull the poor, sick eyes that blaze
with poison that is sharp and sweet.

We also have the Dol'nik question, but here it seems wise to let the verse have an idiomatic vitality, rather than introduce extra syllables. The poem is then:

Let the moon shine out and bring
a happiness to life together.
In my soul of love the spring
will not undo the stormy weather

Answering to a dead man's gaze,
the night is stretched above the street:
and dull the poor, sick eyes that blaze
with poison that is sharp and sweet.

Though vain is passion, in the frost
of crowds and early dawning mists
I wander as a soul half lost
but find one cherished thought persists.

Let the moon shine out and bring
a happiness to life together.
In my soul of love the spring
will not undo the stormy weather

If we take месяц as 'month', rather than the 'moon', which most translators sensibly assume, a rather more evocative translation appears.

Let the month shine out and bring
a happiness to life together.
In my soul of love the spring
will not undo the stormy weather

Answering to a dead man's gaze,
the night is stretched above the street:
and dull the poor, sick eyes that blaze
with poison that is sharp and sweet.

Though vain is passion, in the frost
of crowds and early dawning mists
I wander as a soul half lost
but find one cherished thought persists.

Let the month shine out and bring
a happiness to life together.
In my soul of love the spring
will not undo the stormy weather

Illustration

St. Petersburg by Osip Braz. c. 1915.

Osip Emmanuilovich Braz (1873-1936)  had a colourful life, much of it spent outside Russia. He studied painting in Odessa, and then in Munich (1891-1893), where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts. After Germany he went to Paris and the Netherlands, studying and collecting paintings, thence returning to Russia and studying in the workshop of Ilya Repin (1895-6). For the next thirty years, Braz turned out portraits of fellow artists, including the poets Leonid Pasternak and Sergey Ivanov, plus prominent figures of Russian culture.  There were also landscapes of France, the Crimea, and Finland, and from 1900 to 1905 he gave lessons in his studio on the Moyka River. {2}

References and Resources

References can now be found in a free pdf compilation of Ocaso Press's Russian pages.

Russian poem translations on this site: listing.