Паганини
Лера Янышева
Набился слушать Паганини полный зал.
Вдруг видит он, что струны оборвали.
Одна осталась. Но маэстро так сыграл!
Что струны порваны, никто не понял в зале…
Словами небогат язык цыганский.
На тыщу русских слов — у нас всего одно.
Но коли ты стихи писать собрался,
О Паганини вспомнишь всё равно.
Notes:
The story the poem draws from is not actually true. Paganini never played on only a single string. He did however play with broken strings on occasion. But this was because he broke them intentionally, the better to display his virtuosity on stage. The metaphor still works however you slice it, though, if you consider that no Romani-speaker is monolingual (and probably few if any have ever been, since the arrival of the Roms in Europe); every poet who does compose in Romani does so by choice, since they could well have simply used the majority language.
Yanysheva's decision (or rather the implementation of her decision) to write in Romani, and then adapt her poems to Russian, brings out extraordinary virtuosity on several levels. Here she completely subverts and undercuts part of the overt statement of the poem, about the poverty of Romani. Činel means "cut down, mow down" as well as "write", and "play (an instrument.)" It is related to the word čindlî "violin" — Paganini's instrument. A single word ties the act of writing Romani to the cutting of strings, to evoke the metaphor of versewright as craftsman chipping away at a work, to highlight the link between poetry and music, and in so doing subverts the idea that merely a large vocabulary (and of a particular type at that) can be equated with how rich a language is. For here the richness and texture of the poem comes not from having multiple words meaning closely related but different things, but rather from having a single word mean so many extremely different things at once — each of which adds a different shade of sense to the poem. Many notes are wrung out of a single word, much like Paganini's single string. The material she deploys for her master-stroke is a specific resource afforded by Romani. If Romani were really so poor and so unsuited to linguistic art, the poem suggests, then its very existence would not be possible.
It does seem to me that polysemy is an especial richness at the Romani-writing poet's disposal. Using words (e.g. čhinel, them, doš) with wide semantic ranges in ways that bring different parts of that semantic range to light at different times is not something exclusive to Romani writers, obviously, but it does seem — in my unabashedly and almost comically non-expert and amateur opinion — to be somewhat more characteristic of Romani poetry compared with the literatures with which it is in contact. But I can't say anything beyond that. There is still much I have yet to understand, and I don't want to get carried away.
In my translation, I thought about using a loan from Angloromani "chiv", to do the same sort of heavy duty as činel does in Yanysheva's poem. Angloromani "chiv" is the merged reflex of a number of different Romani etyma, with meanings as various as live, tongue, language, cut, put, knife and write. (Serendipitously, one of the merged roots it represents is actually related to Romani činel. It's where we get the word "shiv" meaning "improvised stabbing weapon, shank" as well as the Northern English dialectal verb "to chib" used in my translation.) However, I ultimately decided against it. With some regret. It felt too much like a really great joke that would be ruined by having to explain it to everybody afterward.
Still, I felt it worthwhile to use some words of Romani origin (such as gadgie "man, fellow", and chib meaning "slash, stab") which have made their way into dialectal English.
The original is a Romani poem addressed to a fellow Rom; it is advice given to a good friend (drúgico miro), telling him — or rather demonstrating to him — that the perceived "lexical poverty" of Romani should not deter him from writing in that language, perhaps also reminding him — with the image of the string-slashers — that it is others who would set limits on what Roms and their language can do. She shows him that the importance of the difference is more apparent than actual, that if he writes in Romani, and is up to the challenge, he can even take those seeming weaknesses and show them — as she shows them — to be potential points of strength.
I have given Yanysheva's Russian version of the poem after the Romani text though the Romani text is obviously the basis for my translation.
If the Romani poem is addressed to a Rom, the Russian translation seems to me to be addressed to an ethnic Russian, or at least somebody who does not know Romani. It expresses itself in terms assimilable to the outsider. It seems to assume the addressee writes (or might hypothetically write) poems in Russian, rather than Romani. In the Russian there are no nalače gadže "vile (non-Rom) men" who cut the strings — rather Paganini just notices that "they", whoever they are, have cut them. The point is that Russian-speakers have no business on the high horse, but the vileness of the gadje is toned down.
Where the Romani poem has iambic lines varying between pentameter, hexameter and heptameter, the Russian version cuts itself down to just pentameters and hexameters, the two that are more acceptable in the Russian tradition (Russian poetry has not taken much to iambic lines longer than six feet, unlike English where heptameters or "fourteeners" have a long and fêted tradition from Chapman to Tennyson to A.E. Stallings.) In addressing itself specifically to Russians (it translates the second instance of the word gadže with the word for "Russian") it points out that Romani may indeed have a smaller passive vocabulary, but the issue isn't how many dictionary entries your language has, let alone whether "your language doesn't have many words of its own" (a common dismissal leveled at Romani by people too numerous even to name, let alone punch in the throat.) Even if you (i.e. a Russian) try to write poetry, you'll remember Paganini. It won't be easy for you either, more words won't do you much good. The last two lines in Russian read semi-literally "And if you ever set yourself to write verses / you'll remember Paganini in any case."
The Russian version for all that it differs from the Romani in its dynamics, has the same point at its core. The trappings and epiphenomena of long and varied written use aren't the end-all. It is something else, apart from merely the size of the passive vocabulary, that makes a language great, rich or evocative. It is something else that makes for great or rich poetry, or a great poet, in it.
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