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Litera
Reference:
Zykova G.V., Tszou S.
Three translations of one poem by Ai Qing as representations of the three epochs in Russian poetry
// Litera.
2024. ¹ 9.
P. 33-43.
DOI: 10.25136/2409-8698.2024.9.71734 EDN: DKOAJY URL: https://en.nbpublish.com/library_read_article.php?id=71734
Three translations of one poem by Ai Qing as representations of the three epochs in Russian poetry
DOI: 10.25136/2409-8698.2024.9.71734EDN: DKOAJYReceived: 14-09-2024Published: 21-09-2024Abstract: The subject of the study are Russian poetic translations of the Soviet era as a phenomenon of Russian literature, their dependence on the dominant ideological and aesthetic attitudes, as well as – in some cases – on the artistic trends. The object of the analysis is the poem "I Love this Land" (1938) by Ai Qing, that belongs to Chinese cultural canon, as well as three Russian translations of it made by representatives of different generations: poet A. I. Gitovich (the text was published in 1952), sinologist L. E. Cherkassky (1978) and psycholinguist Yu. A. Sorokin (1981). The translations are compared with the original text and with each other; the nature and extent of the transformation of the original text are evaluated; the translations themselves are considered in the cultural context of their time. A comparative analysis has showed how modernist features of poetics are smoothed out in the 1952 translation (by Gitovich) (verlibre is rendered by rhythmized verse, some cause-and-effect relationships are clarified, etc.), Chinese poem is "domesticated" by introducing cliches; some elements of the original content are eliminated as not corresponding to the "correct" picture of the world. Cherkassky's translation, which is closest to the original, reveals the results of the translator's consistent and creative attention to modernist Chinese poetry, that became possible during the "Thaw". Sorokin's translation, polemically opposed to the traditions of translating Chinese poetry, turns out to be the most radical, which makes it possible to see in it a reflection of the aesthetic trends of the "second avant-garde". In the works devoted to Ai Qing's poetry rendering in Russia, some transformations to which his poems were subjected have been already noted; in our article, an attempt is made not only to to describe such transformations consistently, but also to offer their explanation. Keywords: Ai Qing, vers libre, problems of poetic translation, modernism, Russian poetry, A. I. Gitovich, Yu. V. Sorokin, L. E. Cherkassky, Chinese poetry, literary contactsThis article is automatically translated. Russian Russian poems by Ai Qing (1910-1996), a classic of new Chinese poetry, a man of leftist political beliefs (a member of the CPC since 1941), have been translated into Russian since the 1940s, and have been written about him, including in recent decades, when Russian-Chinese literary ties have become especially intense (for an overview, see: [1]). In the late 1920s–1930s. Ai Qing was significantly influenced by European modernist poetry, including, according to some researchers, the influence of Mayakovsky. Ai Qing's popularity in the USSR was also facilitated by his personal visit to Russia (in 1950; soon, in 1952, the first collection of his poems in Russian translations by A. I. Gitovich was published ([2]); see also [3-4]). The multiplicity of existing translations and the need for new ones lead to the appearance of scientific works devoted to the comparative analysis of different versions of the same poem by a Chinese poet in Russian interpretation, description and explanation of the translators' deviations from the original text ([5]). There are studies on the personalities of individual translators and their methods of work; in recent years, when native Chinese speakers have become actively involved in Russian-Chinese literary contacts, the analysis of translations has become especially detailed (see, for example: [6]). Some significant tasks, however, remain, as it seems to us, not yet solved and not even fully set. Translators belonging to different generations are often compared with each other as if they existed outside of time and specific literary and ideological conditions. Meanwhile, poetic translations in the twentieth century were part of the national literary process, and the translators themselves, including those who turned to Ai Qing's poems, were poets with their own individual creative manner (for example, A. I. Gitovich) and a distinct aesthetic position ([7-8]). Disputes about how to read and translate could acquire, in addition to academic, a completely literary character ([8-9]). We will allow ourselves to turn to the translations of one of Ai Qing's most famous poems, "I Love this Land", which has been translated into Russian at least three times: by A. I. Gitovich, L. E. Cherkassky and Yu. A. Sorokin; the translations of Gitovich and Cherkassky have already been compared with the original in some aspects ([5]) We will try to note those features of translations that make these poems a fact of Russian literature of their time. In China, the poem "I love this land" is taught by every student, and a lot is written about it ([10-18]). It was created at the end of 1938 and published in Guilin, where Ai Qing was forced to leave after the Japanese captured Wuhan. Since the visual appearance of these poems is important (which is typical for modernist poetry), we will present them in the original: 我爱这土地 假如我是一只鸟， 我也应该用嘶哑的喉咙歌唱： 这被暴风雨所打击着的土地， 这永远汹涌着我们的悲愤的河流， 这无止息地吹刮着的激怒的风， 和那来自林间的无比温柔的黎明…… ―然后我死了， 连羽毛也腐烂在土地里面。
为什么我的眼里常含泪水？ 因为我对这土地爱得深沉…… Here is our subscript (of course, it simplifies the verses):
I love this land
If I were a bird, I would also sing with a torn throat: This storm-battered land, The rivers that are always bubbling with our grief, The wind that endlessly blows our anger, And an unbearably gentle sunrise because of the forests......
— Then I would have died, Even my feathers have rotted in the ground.
Why are there tears in my eyes? Because I love this land so much...... We should immediately note that some key images — birds, sunrise — have a comparable symbolic meaning in Chinese and European cultures. Thus, the screaming bird that the poet imagines here, according to Chinese interpreters, goes back to the mythological story of the Cuckoo Prince Wang di, longing for his lost homeland; the cases of identification of the poet and the bird in European and, in particular, in Russian literature are numerous (first of all, of course, Goethe's formula is recalled). It is no coincidence that among the scientific publications devoted to this topic in recent years there are works by Chinese Russian scholars who notice a familiar imagery in Russian poetry (see, for example, an article on the lyrical image of a bird longing for its homeland and embodying the feelings of the poet, Valery Pereleshin is a Russian poet who was formed under the influence of Chinese culture: [19]). The words "about the incomparable gentle dawn coming from beyond the forest" can be understood as an expression of hope for a better future for the motherland; in Chinese culture, as in European, the dawn is a symbol of a new life. Punctuation marks in Chinese poetry are an innovation of the twentieth century, introduced after European models: they are not found in classical poems. Ai Qing uses a colon, ellipsis, question mark and dash, which indicates a turning point in the lyrical plot. Let's turn to the translations. The earliest of them belongs to A. I. Gitovich (1909-1966), in the 1920s-1930s – an interesting and still unexplored poet, partly close to the Oberiutes (see for example: [20]), the memory of whose daring experiments was still alive in the Leningrad underground of the "Bronze Age". Since the late 1940s. Gitovich is engaged in translations from Korean and Chinese (he did not know the languages, but used the footnotes and advice of sinologist friends (G. O. Monzelera, B. I. Pankratova, V. V. Petrova, O. L. Fishman, E. A. Serebryakova). Assessments of the quality of Gitovich's translations are very different: they have been republished many times, but they could also cause reproaches for poetic lethargy, inaccuracy, excessive Russification (see, for example, E. Vitkovsky's harsh review: "how in vain I rammed along all the mistakes of Monzeler" (comment in livejournal, 07.11.2010: https://lucas-v-leyden.livejournal.com/129754.html ) Like some of his contemporaries (for example, Pasternak and Zabolotsky), the manner of Gitovich's original poems changed in the postwar period, he "fell" into "unheard-of simplicity"; the brevity and artistic asceticism of Gitovich's later poems looks (and is interpreted by the author himself) as a result of the influence of the Chinese poets whom he translated, primarily the ancients. The modernist features of Ai Qing's poetics in the 1950s - and it was then that his work, including for political reasons, attracted the attention of Soviet publishers — were alien to the principles dominant in the Soviet press, and the translator, apparently, was forced to take this into account. Gitovich transforms both the poetics of the original (for example, the verbiage is translated into rhythmized verse) and the content: If I were a bird – I would have sung just as sadly: I would sing about our native, The storm pitted the ground, I would sing about the eternally bubbling the flow of people's grief, And about the angry wind, blowing without interruption, And about a pleasant one for the heart early morning dawn.
They'll ask me: "Why Are there tears hidden in your eyes? I will answer them: "I love the land of my homeland." The semantics of epithets are changing (for example, what can most accurately be translated into Russian by the word "heartbreaking" is conveyed by the significantly less expressive "sad"). The nature of the connection between the parts of the poem is also changing. In the finale of the original text, there is a sharp change in tone: the monologue is interrupted (the pause in the original is conveyed by an ellipsis and an increased line spacing), it is said about the death of the lyrical hero; after another long pause, the hero turns to himself with a question and answers it ("Why are there tears in my eyes? / Because I love this land so much......"). Gitovich eliminates words about death, probably as unnecessarily pessimistic, and turns a conversation with himself into a more "understandable" conversation of the poet with someone else ("Ask me… I will answer them..."); the redundancy of these additions has already been noted, although it has not been explained in any way ([5:353]). The increased line spacing and individualized ellipses that are important for Ai Qing (corresponding to the general desire of modernist poetry for visual expressiveness of the text) Gitovich is not transmitting. In 1978, a translation by L. E. Cherkassky (1925-2003) ([21]) appeared, which, unlike Gitovich, who preferred ancient texts (although he began at the turn of the 1940s-1950s with translations of a completely modern, "ideologically in demand" pose), systematically turned to modernist, "new", Chinese lyrics during the thaw era: If I were a bird – I would have sung my heart out. About a land scarred by rains, About the rumbling angry stream, About the tirelessly blowing wind, About incomparable forest sunrises, And then I would have died from the song, And the feathers would rot in the ground.
Why are there tears in my eyes? I love this land immensely... L. E. Cherkassky not only translated Ai Qing's poems, but also researched his work ([22]); in 1986 He managed to have a personal conversation with his hero at the Forum of Chinese Modern Literature. Cherkassky's works as a sinologist were recognized in China, where translations of his scientific works and articles dedicated to him were published (see more details: [23]). Only Yu. A. Sorokin (1936-2009) decided to consistently show the modernist nature of the poetics of the original text in translation in a translation published three years after the publication of Cherkassky's version ([3]) and polemically opposed to what his predecessors had done: I'm a bird There's a scream in my song About a land pierced by a hurricane About our constantly crying rivers About the relentlessly angry wind And about the quietest forest dawn… — Death will interrupt the song A bird will rot in the ground
Why are tears pouring out of my eyes? I love you, earth, wholeheartedly…… Yu.A. Sorokin spoke Chinese, translated, but "destroyed his translations of Chinese poetry twice, since his attempts to publish in Moscow were unsuccessful" ([7:49]. Sorokin's literary position was of a principled nature and was not only manifested in his translation style, but also directly declared ([8]). Sorokin considered the Soviet practice of translating Chinese lyrics, both ancient, classical, and poetry of the twentieth century, burdened with significant shortcomings: translators, according to Sorokin, tended to ignore the nature of grammatical connections and a different degree of semantic certainty of utterance in the Chinese poetic text, therefore simplifying the meaning of poems, imposing straightforward cause-and-effect relationships; in addition, they gave Chinese poems an unusual verbosity (especially ancient ones), burdened them with European (Russian) literary cliches, introduced banal and anachronistic images, tropes, etc. that were absent from the original and often banal and anachronistic. As for the actual translations from Ai Qing, Soviet translators, as Sorokin believed, under the influence of the dominant tastes of their time, obscured the modernist features of his work. Sorokin's own translations from Ai Qing seemed too radical (and inaccurate), and provoked criticism from an authoritative sinologist and L. Z. Aidlin, who insisted on his understanding of Ai Qing's poetry: "Ai Qing is open and clear. <...> Ai Qing's poetry is ordinary" ([9:187]). Sorokin objected, and his objections suggested a different understanding not only of Ai Qing's work, but also of modern poetry in general: "There is no unambiguous correspondence between poetic speech and the speech of everyday life, these worlds do not duplicate each other, but interact in a difficult way" ([8:]). Striving to reproduce the poetics of Ai Qing, Sorokin, however, admits some inaccuracies, departs from the literal meaning of the original already in the first line: "I am a bird..." — in the original, the author only assumes that he would sing if he were a bird. It is possible that this transformation of imagery was influenced by A. Voznesensky's famous poem "I am Goya" (1959). Gitovich and Cherkassky were more precise when they used the subjunctive mood ("If I were a bird...", "If I were a bird..."). Sorokin's ideas that Chinese poetry, which depends on the properties of Chinese syntax, operates with rigid cause-and-effect relationships to a much lesser extent than European speech, also lead to a departure from the original: for example, instead of "singing with a broken throat," Sorokin has only one word: "scream"; from a grammatical point of view it looks like a rejection of verbs (here Gitovich differs from both the original and Sorokin's translation: "I would sing sadly", Cherkassky is closest to Ai Qing: "I would sing hard"). Note that the image of the "throat" present in the Chinese original keeps our attention on the bird itself (the poet), who is in pain to scream; in all Russian poems, attention shifts to the sound produced (screaming or singing), that is, how the poems can be perceived by the listener. The following image in Sorokin, as it seems to us, is as close as possible to the original: "the earth pierced by a hurricane"; in Gitovich, in this place, "our native, storm-torn earth" (that is, additional tautological epithets appear, apparently related to domestic journalistic cliches: "our native"), in Cherkassky's less expressive than in the original, the image of "the earth, dissected by rains." Sorokin has no correspondences to what we have roughly conveyed in our subscript with the words "unbearable" and "gentle" (dawn): Sorokin has it "quietest" and "forest". The latter seems to us not so much an individual interpretation as a direct mistake: in Sorokin, dawn in the forest, and in the original, dawn comes from behind the forest, this is a completely different image (apparently, Sorokin adopted the mistake from Cherkassky). Gitovich does not mention the forest at all, but redundant epithets appear ("early morning dawn"), and the meaning of what we have conveyed by the oxymoron "unbearably tender" is translated as "pleasing to the heart" (an expression more typical of the traditional Russian poetic dictionary). We have already mentioned above the potentially symbolic meaning of the line "And the unbearably gentle sunrise from behind the forests......". In translations, this symbolic meaning is partially preserved only by Gitovich: And about a pleasant one for the heart early morning dawn. At the same time, the image of the forest disappears, which can also be interpreted as symbolic (a dark forest as something closing the horizon). Sorokin and Cherkassky have no symbolic meaning of dawn as the future: Sorokin moves the dawn directly into the forest (the observer is in the forest), besides supplying it with the epithet "the quietest" that does not correspond in the original; Cherkassky introduces the plural: "About the incomparable forest dawns...", which also contradicts the symbolic understanding. If in the original the river is "bubbling", then Sorokin's is only "crying" (the meaning is conveyed not by a verb in a personal form, but by a participle, which supports the general tendency to eliminate verbs). A graphically underlined plot is very important for the composition of the original: — Then I would have died And even my feathers have rotted in the ground. The motif of death is often found in Ai Qing's poetry, especially early; in the 1938 poem, it is determined by the historical situation: the poems, we recall, were written during the Sino-Japanese war. As we have already noted, there are no words about death in Gitovich's translation — Sorokin says about death, but it is attributed to a "more understandable" future (in the original, apparently, death is spoken of as something accomplished or something that can be conveyed in European languages by forms of the subjunctive mood: — Death will interrupt the song, A bird will rot in the ground. Not only are there no decayed "feathers" — a specific detail that enhances the impression, but also a lyrical "I", but the image of an interrupted song is introduced as the main consequence of death. Cherkassky retains both "I" and "feathers", but in his own way departs from the original in a very significant way: he named the cause of death - the song; let us assume that this showed the influence of the Russian literary tradition with its cross—cutting theme of the tragic "death of the poet": And then I would have died from the song, And the feathers would rot in the ground. Ai Qing has no direct explanation of the cause of death, there is only a statement of its inevitability. In the finale, Sorokin introduced a direct appeal to the earth, which was absent in the original, again, apparently subordinating the translation to the original concept, suggesting that the logical structure of the utterance should not be too obvious in verse. Note that the last line is interpreted as an answer to the question asked in the penultimate line, not only in the Gitovich translation ("Why ... because..."), but also, for example, in modern translations into English proposed by native Chinese speakers as their native language ("Why... because"). Perhaps we can conclude that Sorokin, having witnessed how modernist features were smoothed out in Russian translations from Ai Qing, as well as features peculiar to Chinese linguistic and artistic thinking, hyperbolizes these features and features in his own translation, which also leads to deviations from the original. The very radicality of Sorokin's approach can, I think, be understood as close to the experiments of his time — the poetic "Bronze Age". The changes that the original is undergoing in translations indicate not only the inevitable difficulties of the reception of Chinese poetry by a European, but also how the translation reflects the ideological and artistic processes taking place in Russian culture itself. References
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