{"id":13210,"date":"2022-07-12T04:00:23","date_gmt":"2022-07-12T04:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/in\/?post_type=product&p=13210"},"modified":"2022-07-12T04:06:12","modified_gmt":"2022-07-12T04:06:12","slug":"walt-whitman-in-russia-three-love-affairs","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/in\/walt-whitman-in-russia-three-love-affairs\/","title":{"rendered":"Walt Whitman in Russia Three Love Affairs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walt Whitman\u2019s<\/a> influence on the creative output of 20th-century Russia \u2014 particularly in the years surrounding the 1917 Revolution \u2014 was enormous. For the 200th anniversary of Whitman’s birth, Nina Murray looks at the translators through which Russians experienced his work, not only in a literary sense \u2014 through the efforts of Konstantin Balmont and Kornei Chukovsky \u2014 but also artistic, in the avant-garde printmaking of Vera Ermolaeva.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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At the core of any translation venture, at the nucleus that shapes all its qualities, lies an often random and routine event \u2014 an individual\u2019s encounter with a text. Before a translator dons the mantle of a cultural ambassador, a conduit of knowledge, a missionary of art, or whatever other responsibility inevitably comes with taking a work of literature from one language to the other \u2014 before the translator steps into the very public space of cultural advocacy \u2014 he or she is merely a reader seduced by an imagined world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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If it weren\u2019t for a handful of change in sixteen-year-old Kornei Chukovsky\u2019s<\/a> pocket one day in Odessa, Whitman\u2019s \u201cSong of Myself\u201d may not have come to shatter and shape the Russian poetic imagination until a generation later. Chukovsky was a school student, teaching himself English from dictionaries, old newspapers, and whatever he could buy from sailors. What were the chances that on that particular day, for that particular school-kid, the sailor would bring\u00a0Leaves of Grass<\/em>? But that\u2019s how it happens \u2014 somebody, somewhere, flips a book open, and it speaks to him, changes his way of seeing the world, and alters his soul.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Other great Russians had read\u00a0Leaves of Grass<\/em>. Tolstoy got a copy from one of his fans in England in June of 1889, read it, and wrote in his diary, \u201cThese are awkward verses\u201d.1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0He was surprised to learn from his friends abroad that in Europe his own work was often compared to Whitman\u2019s and conceded to give the book a second chance. In October of the same year, Tolstoy noted, \u201cThere is much that is blown-up, empty, but I did find some good things this time.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Turgenev, while living in Paris in the 1880s, read\u00a0Leaves of Grass<\/em> too and penned down a draft translation of \u201cBeat! Beat! Drums!\u201d but that single sheet remained the full extent of his interest in Whitman.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Whitman needed not a mere celebrity endorsement, not just an appreciative aesthete, but a lover in Russia: a passionate, devoted reader who would accept him without judgment. Before Chukovsky could have the luxury of spending years on his eleven editions of Whitman\u2019s poetry, somebody else had to discover Whitman. Chukovsky’s energetic verse would carry Whitman to the masses, but it would be feeding the hunger inspired by another translator who had given Whitman a divine aura in the Russian imagination. That person was Konstantin Balmont, bohemia incarnate, Symbolist luminary, globetrotter, poet.<\/p>\n

When in the early 1900s Konstantin Balmont<\/a> (1867\u20131942) set himself the task of bringing the work of Walt Whitman to a Russian audience, he did so with a very definite set of opinions on how and why this task ought to be pursued. \u201cTrue poets\u201d, he wrote about Whitman in 1920,<\/p>\n

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are always seers and prophets. They feel for many people, blend their souls with all creatures, make their minds present in the past, present, and future. If they are sensitive at all, the great epochs of change and reformation especially attract their imagination and having charmed them magnetically, such times send omens into the poets\u2019 work, throw upon their writing flashes of their coming fires, the first blazes of their pearly and scarlet, tender, and ferocious dawn.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Balmont introduced Whitman to the readers of the Symbolist journal\u00a0Vesy<\/em>\u00a0as \u201ca powerful dweller on earth . . a chaotic, young, unbridled and undisciplined soul\u201d.4<\/a><\/sup> In subsequent essays, Balmont developed a language of such reverence and grandeur as were rarely bestowed on poets even within Russia\u2019s then indulgent artistic milieu: Whitman was an \u201cultimate\u201d, an \u201cinevitable\u201d, \u201cstrong\u201d poet, \u201cas inescapable in the life of our souls as the first love, first grief, a moonlit night, or a sunny morning.\u201d\u00a0His poetry, then, could not be akin to anything before or contemporary to it. Writing in 1908, Balmont denied Whitman\u2019s verse any \u201caccessible consonance of rhyme\u201d, \u201ccommon ornamentation of poetry\u201d, or any \u201ccorrect measure\u201d, seeing in it, instead, the \u201cmovement of waves\u201d, \u201crustling of breezes\u201d, and the \u201cbreath of the sea\u201d.\u00a0As if determined to make his words a self-fulfilling prophecy, Balmont enslaved himself to the original text, like a desperate lover. He crafted translations that were so accurate in their mimicry of Whitman\u2019s sentence and line structure that they were faithful to a fault (the clumsiest examples include \u201cThe Bravest Soldiers\u201d turned into\u00a0bravye<\/em>\u00a0[dashing] soldiers and the \u201ccommon prostitute\u201d becoming\u00a0obshchaya<\/em>\u00a0[shared], the first meaning of \u201ccommon\u201d in Russian). As desperate lovers are wont to do, Balmont also projected his own glorified vision of Whitman as an icon of a new world onto Whitman\u2019s work. As Martin Bidney noted in his excellent essay \u201cLeviathan, Yggdrasil, Earth Titan, Eagle: Balmont\u2019s Reimagining of Walt Whitman\u201d,<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"