This poem was written in the album (signature book) of the Polish countess Karolina Sobańska in response to a request to sign it. The countess was a notorious collector of great minds and mistress to one of Tsar Nicholas' administrators. The album had already been immortalized by Mickiewicz's signature.
"What's in my name for you?
By Alexander Pushkin
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original Russian
What’s in my name for you? What good?
It will but die: a wave’s sad sound
On sands where it has splashed aground,
A cry in a benighted wood.
Its traces will lie dead among
these album pages: the design
of someone's epitaphic line
in some unfathomable tongue.
What is it, then? Lost to the past
in new emotion's insurrection,
upon your soul it will not cast
the tender rays of recollection.
But on a day of hushed regret
pronounce it with a sigh of pain,
and tell the cold: “There's memory yet!
There is one heart where I remain.”
The Original:
Что в имени тебе моём?
Оно умрёт, как шум печальный
Волны, плеснувшей в берег дальный,
Как звук ночной в лесу глухом.
Оно на памятном листке
Оставит мёртвый след, подобный
Узору надписи надгробной
На непонятном языке.
Что в нём? Забытое давно
В волненьях новых и мятежных,
Твоей душе не даст оно
Воспоминаний чистых, нежных.
Но в день печали, в тишине,
Произнеси его тоскуя;
Скажи: есть память обо мне,
Есть в мире сердце, где живу я…
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Thank you for this. I used this translation and sound file (beautifully read, by the way) in a high school English class I teach. Most of my students are Russian and Ukrainian Americans, by the way.
ReplyDeleteOn sands where it has splashed aground,
ReplyDeleteA cry in a benighted wood.You are not using the word 'benighted' correctly. All Indo-Aryan languages have a concept of Darkness as different from Night and Night as different from Darkness, both by this 'muhabila' divorce becoming propitious.The essence of a poet's vocation is attentiveness to such 'distinctions without a difference'.But, big baby, you say to me 'drink my cum'.It seems you know every language save your own. But, 'drink my cum' cunt, Poets do Regime Change in their own fucking countries.You are worthless shite.
But on a day of hushed regret
ReplyDeletepronounce it with a sigh of pain,
and tell the cold: “There's memory yet!
There is one heart where I remain.”
Why is this bad? 'Hushed regret' is Auden, its a suburban English Doctor's son's English, not Russian.
Also you dont rhyme regret with yet. They don't have equal valency.
But, look at whom I'm talking to!
Yo, blood, drink my cum. You're shit and you know it.
You could do- but you can't, you're crap- do you actually understand what Venuti was saying you risible purveyor of but your own rancid smegma?
ReplyDeleteOn a snow muffled day of frost and fire
All breath, smoke, and smoke but ire
Memory is yet its tree
In the lungs or Regret, yet we.
That's English. What you wrote aint. It's shite.
Bet you don't understand why.
The only way to translate a poem is by writing a poem. You can't do that. Why? Coz u don't know English.