'Samuil Marshak's translations Wordsworth's "Lucy" Poems (1)

Ironically, William Wordsworth (1770-1850)--the greatest English poet since Milton and one whose historical influence on language, ideas, and manners has been immense according to the respected scholar English Romanticism, Carl Woodring--has been translated to little effect ... relative to Dante, Shakespeare, Bunyan, or Dostoevsky. (2) One the relatively few translators Wordsworth has been Samuil Marshak (1887-1964), quintessential Soviet Russian man letters his time. Marshak was successful poet, translator, political satirist and state propagandist, magazine editor, and author children's books. Moreover, he was the founder the state children's publishing house, and in his moving depiction pre-revolutionary Jewish life in his memoirs he established himself as a link in the chain many generations Russian Jewry. (3) One the projects Marshak undertook as poet-translator involved four the five short lyrics Wordsworth that posterity has brought together under the rubric the poems. (These four poems appear below in Appendix A; Marshak's translations, in Cyrillic, appear in Appendix B; our back-translations Marshak's versions appear in Appendix C.) (4) It should be noted at the outset that much is lost if the reader tends to view the poems as simply traditional poems. The poems in fact, first all, as Geoffrey Durrant says, 'lyrical ballads,' each which tells verse story and presents it dramatically. To confuse the mode the 'Lucy' poems with that the love lyric is to overlook their structure, in which, as in the traditional ballad, story is told as boldly and briefly as possible.... (5) comparison of, say, the first stanza She dwelt among the untrodden ways with the first stanza the traditional ballad Katharine Jaffray: There livd lass in yonder dale, And doun in yonder glen, O. And Kathrine Jaffray was her name, Well known by many men, O. and the last stanza A slumber did my spirit seal with stanza 26 of The Lass Roch Royal: O cherry, cherry was her cheek. And gowden was her hair, But clay cold were her rosey lips, Nae spark life was there. (6) demonstrates that Wordsworth follows the folk ballad in his handling rhythm, structure, and, to certain extent, theme and imagery, although he--followed by Marshak--uses variant ballad stanza: a4--b3--a4 b3. (Wordsworth bought copy Percy's Reliques Ancient English Poetry, the great repository British ballad materials, in Hamburg in 1798 few months before he started to write the poems during his and Dorothy's sojourn in Germany.) (7) Secondly, the poems are, as Carl Woodring suggests, elegies. They are elegiac in the sense sober meditation on death or subject related to and they have the economy and the general air epitaphs in the Greek Anthology.... If all elegies mitigations death, the Lucy poems also meditations on simple beauty, by distance made more sweet and by death preserved in distance. (8) side-by-side comparison poem from the Greek Anthology, the Epitaph the Singing-Girl with both stanzas A slumber did my spirit seal reveals the similarity in tone and structure the poem, ironic and spare as it is, to the Greek epitaph and thus helps to support Woodring's point: Musa the blue-eyed, the sweetly singing nightingale, Lies here suddenly mute in this little grave, Still as stone, who was once so witty, so much loved: Pretty Musa, may this dust rest lightly upon you. (9) Though one is not obliged to accept F. W. Bateson's thesis that the figure Lucy is Wordsworth's device for sublimating his incestuous feelings for his sister Dorothy, (10) it does seem likely that, as Wordsworth's editor, Ernest De Selincourt, suggests, the figure Lucy is in fact inspired by Dorothy). …

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