Translation as a form of dialogue: artistic translations by V. Narbut and M. Zenkevich

Temirshina Olesya Ravil'evna ORCID: 0000-0003-0127-6044 Doctor of Philology Professor, the department of History of Journalism and Literature, Institute of International Law and Economics named after A. S. Griboyedov Moscow, Yana Ranijs boulevard, 39, apt. 58 side-way@yandex.ru Other publications by this author     Ustinovskaya Alena Aleksandrovna ORCID: 0000-0001-5381-0777 PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Department of Romano-Germanic Languages, Moscow State University of Humanities and Economics 107150, Russia, Moskva oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Losinoostrovskaya, 49 alyonau1@yandex.ru

Pogodina Yuliya Yur'evna PhD in Philology Senior Lecturer, Department of Foreign Languages, National Research University "Moscow Power Engineering Institute"; Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation. 111250, Russia, Moskva oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Krasnoznamennaya, 14 yydmitrieva@mail.ru

To date, it is generally accepted that translation should be understood "not only as an act of speech, but also as an act of intercultural communication" ^{[2, p. 35]}. This understanding of translation leads the researcher into a wide sphere of artistic pragmatics, the main coordinates of which can be interpreted in the spirit of the concept of dialogue by Yu.M. Lotman, suggesting that "any act of thinking is a dialogue" ^{[10, p. 268]}. Considering the global interaction of different cultures, Lotman argues that their development and enrichment is possible only within the framework of dialogic interaction. This culturological idea can also be projected onto the semiotics of translation, which in this perspective will be understood as a "field" of interaction between different philosophical and aesthetic systems.  Of particular interest in this context is the translation activity of poets. Thus, it is obvious that in poetic translations not only the characteristic features of the original texts are realized, but also the specific features of the aesthetic and poetic system of the translators themselves. The poet-translator in this case turns out to be a kind of magic mirror in which the original text is reflected whimsically and not always accurately. The degree of accuracy seems to depend both on the degree of proximity of aesthetic systems and on the metapoetic concept of translation itself.

In our article, we address an almost unexplored problem related to the implementation of the acmeistic principles of writing in the field of literary translation in the lyrics of V. Narbut and M. Zenkevich. M. Zenkevich in Soviet times was perceived primarily as a translator – he was considered one of the founders of the Soviet school of translation. His translation activity is large-scale and diverse, but first of all it is connected with translations of English-language poetry. So, in 1939, Zenkevich published the anthology "Poets of America", which presents translations of American poetry in both its classical and modern versions – it was this anthology that determined the main vector of his translation activity (which, we note, has not yet been subjected to detailed scientific research). Narbut as a translator is practically unknown. The translations found in the author's archive were made by the poet for the collection "Poetry of the Mountaineers of the Caucasus", published in 1934. These translations have also not yet been the subject of scientific analysis. 

We believe that Narbut and Zenkevich's literary translations reflect, on the one hand, a complex of acmeistic views (which unite these poets in the "left wing" of acmeism), and on the other hand, specific individual authorial features realized in motive-thematic complexes are embodied in the translated artistic texts.  Hence the purpose of the work: to identify the mechanisms of dialogical development by acmeists of the "left wing" of other aesthetic systems in the act of literary translation, to show the degree of implementation in translations of their own linguistic and poetic "patterns".

Let's turn to Narbut's literary translations. These translations paradoxically correlate with the original poetry of Narbut during the revolution and the Civil War. We believe that it is from the military revolutionary poetry that the complex of semantic and stylistic features that we found in the poet's literary translations grows.

Narbut's early poetry is deeply physiological (see about this: ^{[4, pp. 169 – 175]}). The central meta–image of his early work is the image of Nature-Matter undergoing endless changes: in Narbut's texts, "the image of a single flesh is constructed, gradually passing from one form to another: the body connects with the space of the external world, receiving its properties" ^{[14, p. 117]}.

 This "eternal transformation" of the flesh inspires the "poetics of the mythological metamorphosis" of the body, which is expressed in the breaking of binary oppositions and the destruction of subject-object connections. Hence the motive of the displacement of the world: reality is endowed with the features of the body, becomes physiological and "solidified" (cf. this "bodily ontologism" in the poetry collection "Alleluia", 1912).

However, already in the poems of 1918 – 1920 there are other motives associated with the tread of the iron mechanized age: images such as a bayonet, a revolver, a train, a sickle, a factory, a blast furnace, etc. are introduced into individual poems.:

There are lice in overcoats, and faith in the heart,

The road sways with bumps.

Not from a bayonet – from a revolver

on the way to die: somehow…

^{[11, p. 428]}

And if in the poem of 1919 "Pre-Easter" in the finale there is a motif of the physiological uprising of the body from the dead (cf. "to correct death by death, to rise from the dead, // poisoned blood in the womb", ^{[11, p. 409]}), then in the last stanza of the second poem, included in the cycle "The Seventeenth", the motif of the physiological uprising of the flesh is replaced by the motif "the ascension of the hammer, which marks a new stage in history. Cf.:

Hot blood veins-strings

they sing and will sing forever,

while under the rainbow Commune

a man raises a hammer.

^{[11, p. 429]}

It must be said that in Narbut's poetry of the first half of the 1920s, the motif of ascension /uprising /rising, correlated with the image of the mechanism and brought to the final of the poem, is exceptionally frequent. Cf. the last stanza of the poem "Miners":

The giant's hand will stretch out from the boiling blast furnace,

Above the mines it will lift firmly and knock out in the lightning,

The Immortal Word

"Victory!"

^{[11, p. 476]}

The question arises: how does the physiologically carnal principle in Narbut's early poetry correlate with the "mechanistic" paradigm of poems associated with the elements of revolution?

The combination of these two systems, apparently, was conceived by Narbut within the framework of an apocalyptic plot, which became quite common in the poetic tradition of the revolution.  Narbut understands this apocalypse in his own way, in the semantic coordinates of his "acmeistic method". The revolutionary "end of time" is interpreted by the poet as the transformation of a "lump of earthly flesh" into a "mechanistic body" of the Revolution. This motif sounds with particular vividness in the poem "May Day Easter", where the natural flesh turns into a "Sun-bearing Comintern", cf.:

A bee sucking an earring,

a girl with a branch barefoot, –

everything is floating on the same track,

and everything is an earthly single lump.

In hammer and sickle cohorts

we walk through the stench and cold of filth.

And it wasn't Christ who rose from the dead,

and the Sun-bearing Comintern.

^{[11, pp. 439 – 440]}

The transformation of an organism into a mechanism seems to be the topos of Soviet poetry of the 1920s, being associated, among other things, with the aesthetics and poetics of proletarian lyrics. In any case, proletkult poetry demonstrates the same conjugation of myth and industrial motives (see about this: ^[9]) as Narbut's texts – so paradoxically the poetry of war communism and the left wing of acmeism converge within the framework of post-symbolist aesthetics.  See also the idea of I.E. Vasiliev that left acmeism merges with futurism ^{[3, p. 29]}.

Narbut's texts of the 1920s are related to Proletkult poetry not only by the organic connection of myth and mechanism, but also by the special pragmatics of the poetic text. The revolutionary canon presupposes, first of all, poetic sloganeering, embodied in a large number of performatives and rhetorical questions (cf.: the already noted "sloganeering of proletkult poetry and numerous appeals in poetic texts resembling ritual spells of a shaman" ^{[9, p. 72]}).

The importance of the communicative-pragmatic dimension for poetry of this kind leads to a large number of rhetorical appeals in Narbut's texts. Poetic appeal, as a rule, is associated with some symbolic inanimate ("October"), or in an extremely generalized way ("worker"), cf. two characteristic examples:

October, October!

What memory,

Over the scarlet year of the divination

You dare not frame

The prominence of the rebellion?

^{[11, p. 430]}

Do you see, worker? – over Kiev white,

On your meat, you raised eagle!

Do you hear the worker? – Not moans, but arrows

From sunset they pierce the Ukrainian Dol

^{[11, p. 466]}

Cf. also other examples of poetic appeals: "Why do you speak with a wound that turns red so anxiously?" ^{[11, p. 436]}, "Go and tell the dead ..." ^{[11, p. 437]}, "Goodbye, our hopes, our future" ^{[11, p. 441]} and many other poetic texts, where there are appeals and proclamations.

The generalized image of the lyrical We, which is present in a large number of Narbut's war poems, is also associated with revolutionary poetic pragmatics. Cf.: several representative examples: "We turn fervor into loud powder..." ^{[11, p. 431]}, "We are the first legionnaires / The Universal Army of Labor..." ^{[11, p. 459]}, "We have not forgotten how in the gardens of the Palais Royal..." ^{[11, p. 460]}, etc.

A large number of toponymic names in Narbut texts also attracts attention: for greater poetic expression, Kiev, Odessa, Don, Pripyat, Dnipro, Zhytomyr, etc. are mentioned in Narbut's poems. This toponymic and broader – national – specificity paradoxically intertwines with a generalized subjective plan, which gives the military-revolutionary texts of Narbut rhetorical persuasiveness.

Thus, in the first approximation, a certain motif-figurative, verbal and compositional structure of Narbut's post-revolutionary lyrics emerges, including the following elements:

1. The apocalyptic motive of the transformation of organics into mechanics, which is thought of as the onset of a fundamentally new revolutionary era.
2.  An important marker of the new era turns out to be the motive of ascension / ascension, always brought to the end of the poem. And if in the early lyrics this motif was associated with the rise from the dead, then in the era of revolution and Civil War it is associated with the ascension of the mechanism.
3. Verbally, the above-mentioned motivic complex is complicated by the presence of a special pragmatics, which includes the image of a generalized lyrical hero ("we"), performative slogans and proclamations.
4. The national element is realized in the toponymy scattered over the poet's military texts.

We do not claim that this pattern exhausts all of Narbut's poetry of the 1920s, but it seems to be extremely important, since it includes a number of invariant meanings characteristic of Narbut's lyrics of this period. We also believe that it was this semantic complex that inspired Narbut's appeal to the translations of Temirbolat Mamsurov's poem ("In a foreign Land. Lullaby") and two poems by Mahomet Mamakaev ("Pandur" and "In his native land").

Mamsurov's poem is a key one for the collection, it "opens the whole collection and the section "Ossetians"" ^{[11, p. 802]}, Mamakaev's poems are included in the section "Chechens and Ingush".

In these texts, the semantic invariant, which was discussed above, clearly emerges. So, firstly, in the poems of Caucasian poets, a number of performative constructions appear, characteristic of Narbut's lyrics. Cf.: "Sleep a quiet sleep, a serene sleep ...", "Oh, pity us, the native land" ("In a foreign land. Lullaby" ^{[11, p. 629]}). Cf. whole performative blocks in the poem "Pandur", which is compositionally constructed as an appeal to a musical instrument, in fact, - pandur:

Sing us a song of freedom,

We will raise our brows high!

I gave the verse with my pen

Songs about blood flows.

You're a link, steel,

About communism, about the share,

Secrets, string, revealing,

Sing about the factories and the field…

^{[11, p. 630]}

In Mamakaev's poem "In his native land", an explicit image of the addressee also appears, indicated through the lyrical You, cf.: "Rush, Argun, fly, my glorious..." ^{[11, p. 631]}, "When your light of centuries wrinkles / Wipes away ..." ^{[11, p. 631]}. The sphere of lyrical personality is expressed here, as in other poems of Narbut, through direct appeal and the possessive pronoun "yours".

Secondly, these texts also contain some toponymic elements, which Narbut loved so much. However, this time we are not talking about Ukrainian toponymy, but about Caucasian. So, in the poem "In the native land" the name of the Argun River is repeated three times. Argun, we will explain, is a river in the North Caucasus, a tributary of the Terek. Cf. the contexts of the nominations "Argun roared, the jet burst" ^{[11, p. 631]}, "Argun is raging with many waters" ^{[11, p. 631]}, "Rush, Argun, fly my glorious ..." ^{[11, p. 631]}.

It seems that in the image of the deep-water Argun, allusions to the romantic text of the Caucasus created in the Russian literature of the first quarter of the XIX century are also obvious, but the internal, immanent meanings of the poetic semantics of Narbut, permeated with national specifics, should also not be discounted.  In any case, we believe that the romantic plot of the stormy unconquered river is transformed in a significant way here. The river, expressing a chaotic and uncontrollable beginning, turns out to be curbed and subdued. Thus, we come to Narbut's own revolutionary mythology, correlated with the apocalyptic plot of the birth of a mechanism out of organic chaos. The motif of the transformation of nature, as it always happens in Narbut's military poetry, is brought to the final and is associated with the motif of the lifting / ascension of the mechanism / instrument. However, it is not a hammer or sickle that ascends here, as in the texts analyzed above, but a metal wheel that provides the new world with energy, cf. the finale of the text:

When on your shores

Steel wheel high

Will lift the flywheel into the sky

And the blast furnace will give a stubborn move,

When your light ages wrinkles

It will sweep away – and it will bring life back to the sacks.

^{[11, p. 631]}

Thus, the internal semantic logic of Narbut's original texts is projected onto his translations, forcing them to be read in the same semantic context. The structure of the "perceiving system" turns out to be absolutely dominant, which leads to the transfer of the key motif-figurative and stylistic patterns of the poetic system of the late Narbut to his translations.

As mentioned above, Zenkevich's translations are much more widely known. The format of the article forces us to turn to the most representative texts, in which the aesthetic attitudes of the poet are most clearly manifested.

In the preface to the collection "American Poets in translations by M. Zenkevich", the author himself noted that in his translations he "tried to recreate the images, style and form of each poem in Russian poetically closely" ^{[1, p. 3]}. However, even here we find non-random correspondences of motives and images.

One of the most important themes of Zenkevich's lyrics is war. The importance of this topic is connected not only with the historical and biographical context, but also with the fact that the thematic complex of the war turns out to be a kind of "semantic polygon", where the author's key ideological attitudes, genetically correlated with natural philosophy and with the dialectical motive of the confrontation of flesh and spirit, are "run-in". That is why we have chosen only those translated texts where there is a military topic as the object of analysis.

The war in Zenkevich's poetry, like Narbut's, is described in a mythological-apocalyptic spirit (for more details about the eschatological plots of the "left" Acmeists, see: ^[8]). Thus, the first characteristic feature of war is its global universal character. War is understood by Zenkevich as a "conflict" principle of the universe, and, true to his principles, the poet depicts war in the most physiological aspect: "... Zenkevich was captivated by Matter, and was horrified by it" ^{[6, p. 44]}.

Perhaps the physiologism of war is most vividly manifested in the "Plowing of Tanks", a poem oversaturated with physiological details. Cf.:

Splashing brains, flattened skulls,

They burst like lice under an iron.

Land dreadnoughts, dredgers,

Climbing the ladders of corpses,

Tanks sink and pull

Groaning, scooping buckets of space.

^{[5, p. 146]}

A number of Richard Aldington's poems, translated by Zenkevich, contain similar naturalistic details woven into the "military text". Cf. examples:

On a frosty night when the guns were silent,

I leaned against the trench,

Cooking a haiku for yourself

From the month, flowers and snow.

But the transparent running of huge rats,

Gorged on human meat,

Made me cringe in horror

^{[12, p. 26]}

Richard Aldington is primarily known for his anti-war lyrics, which are characterized by a special physiologism. For Western literature, which has passed through naturalism and assimilated the experience of the First World War, physiological details are a typical phenomenon. Zenkiewicz preserves these motifs of the destroyed flesh, which obviously correlated with his aesthetics and metapoetics. Particularly striking examples of such details are found in Aldington's "Trench Idyll", which thematically resembles the "Ploughing of Tanks":

  He said:

– I've been here for two years,

And only once was I killed.

– That's weird.

– The bullet pierced his throat

<…>

Last year on this site

To remove discs from the dead at night,

Hanging on the wire for six months

Just over there.

The worst thing is that they

Disintegrated at the touch.

It was good that there were no faces visible,

They were wearing gas masks...

^{[12, pp. 26-27]}

As in Zenkevich's original poetry, the war in Aldington's texts chosen for translation turns out to be a kind of model of a disintegrating universe, where all ties and laws are torn apart. Cf.: "For four days the earth was torn and torn, / Exploding, steel. / Houses crumbled around" ^{[12, p. 28]}. Cf. a fragment from Zenkevich's original poem "A Glass of shrapnel" (1924), where a picture of a torn world is drawn: "And the earth is raw and riddled with blood..." ^{[5, p. 154]}.

The complex of physiological images and motives associated with the theme of war appears in the poems chosen by Zenkevich for translation by Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Thomas Hardy, etc. Due to the limited format of the article, we do not have the opportunity to dwell on these translations – let's just say that in all these texts, the destructive face of war is somehow revealed and the motive for the destruction of the human body appears.

Conceptually, the main thing to say about these translations is, in our opinion, the following. In the texts translated by Zenkevich, the physiological imagery of war turns out to be "self-sufficient": being associated with anti-militarist connotations, in semantic terms it is "topical", wandering from one poetic system to another. However, in the original poetry of Zenkevich himself, military physiologism is endowed with completely different meanings: it becomes part of the universal mystery unfolding on the pages of the poet's books.

One of the main binary oppositions for Zenkevich's work is the "culture – nature" opposition. The juxtaposition of culture and nature in Zenkevich's poetry inspires the image of a body that is disintegrating, divided into components, dismembered. It is curious that the image of a disintegrating body first appears not in Zenkevich's war poems, but much earlier (see about this: ^[13]). Thus, the image of suffering flesh appears already in the "Meat Scarlet" (cf. such poems as "Impaled", "Death of an elk", "Bull in the Slaughterhouse", etc. – almost the entire collection is permeated with this theme), in military poems this image receives its further development, referring to natural philosophical searches Zenkevich, associated with an attempt to remove the opposition between flesh and culture (see: ^[7]). In military poems, this removal is thought of as an aggressive, almost libidinous fusion of organics and mechanics (the motive, as we noted, is also important for Narbut!), cf.:

What's in the red gruel

On a black and gold pubis

The lands are being rinsed by hundreds

Itchy steel raincoats.

^{[5, p. 147]}

The mindset of combining different ontological registers is manifested in the metaphorical model used in the poem "Plowing tanks". The status of this metaphorical model is the oldest metaphor of fertility, which paradoxically includes deadly military semantics: it is well known that "arable land" in traditional folklore discourse becomes both a marriage and a military metaphor.

Thus, Zenkevich and Narbut use different semiotic strategies for mastering someone else's text in the act of poetic translation. If Narbut is characterized by a direct projection of an individual author's semantic pattern on the translated material, then Zenkevich's "relationship" with the translated text is an order of magnitude more complicated.  The aesthetic-poetic system, which serves as a kind of "filter" for translations, is, apparently, much more extensive in its philosophical scope than the translated texts themselves, which leads to a strategy of narrowing the "physiological" theme in the corresponding translations.