Kern

A lovely moment I recall.

By Eva Spier 

Illustration by Jiaying Geng

In 1825, Alexander Pushkin, widely regarded as the father of Russian poetry and memorized by legions of pupils to this day, joined Russian socialite Anna Kern at her aunt’s Trigorskoye estate near Mikhaylovskoye to work on his manuscript of Eugene Onegin. He became infatuated with the woman in a matter of weeks, who had been unhappily married to General Yermolai Kern by ways of an arranged marriage since the age of 17. Before leaving, Pushkin left her a copy of Eugene Onegin, with a poem carefully folded into the second chapter. 

Their affair took place while Pushkin wrote large parts of Eugene Onegin, and so the relationship became a guiding torch in the annals of Russian literature. It was Kern who inspired the sentence, “How is someone allowed to be so beautiful?” After her departure from Trigorskoe, Pushkin wrote to Kern’s sister: “Every night I stroll through a garden and repeat in my mind: she was there—a boulder she stumbled upon rests on my desk.” Years later, memories of their relationship soured, or at least became diluted by the passing of time. Kern ended up selling the handwritten copy of the poem gifted to her, and Pushkin unsavorily referred to her as the “whore of Babylon.” According to an urban legend, her funeral procession passed Pushkin Square, just as his statue was being erected.

Russian poetry is in a league of its own. Since the language declines in six cases, it can do two very useful things for poets. First, every noun can be rhymed with almost any other noun, and any adjective can be rhymed with any other adjective. Second, word order is highly flexible, and for any given sentence, there are a variety of orders that the words can assume. This is wonderful for Russian poets, and terrible for anyone wanting to translate a Russian poem. 

These difficulties are layered on top of a natural awkwardness that already exists in translation, simply because two words meaning the same thing will have different associations in different languages. Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian writer fluent in both English and French who often translated his own work, has a very nice lament on this awkwardness, published in The New Yorker in 1955. He tried his hand at translating Pushkin’s poem to Kern, and struggled as follows:

“Yah pom-new” is a deeper and smoother plunge into the past than “I remember,” which falls flat on its belly like an inexperienced diver [...] It belongs phonetically and mentally to a certain series of words, and this Russian series does not correspond to the English series in which “I remember” is found. And inversely, [...] the central word in Housman’s “What are those blue remembered hills?” becomes in Russian “vspom-neev-she-yesyah,” a horrible straggly thing, all humps and horns, which cannot fuse into any inner connection with “blue,” as it does so smoothly in English, because the Russian sense of blueness belongs to a different series than the Russian “remember” does.

I decided, after reading Nabokov’s article, that I too wanted to contort Russian grammar and grimace at words that belonged to different series. What fun! I forbade myself from looking at any preexisting translations while I did this. When I finally did look, I realized that this poem has been translated many times. The value, then, of my translation began to elude me. I was never under the impression that I was delivering Pushkin to the English-speaking world, but the thought of adding a third translation to two existing ones, or even a fifth to four, felt a whole lot more appealing than when I realized I was adding a 27th to 26. 

Another truth which troubled me was that when translating prose, a moderate amount is lost, but when translating poetry, almost everything is lost. This becomes clear when looking at the opening stanza of any two existing translations of a poem. Advice from a friend over a garish slice of Ferris cake resolved this concern. She ventured that the words you choose to translate the poem render Pushkin twice removed: through language, through you. Even so, as long as the translation is an earnest communication of your understanding of the original poem, there is a lot to gain. 

The best translation in my opinion, so good that it was embarrassing to find, is one written by Cecil Maurice Bowra. Bowra uses entirely different words and phrases than those in the Russian original. However, appealing to Nabokov’s understanding, his chosen English words and phrases belong phonetically and mentally to—or at least approach very closely—the same series as Pushkin’s words and phrases. 

K***

A lovely moment I recall:

Before me you appeared,

Like a ghost ephemeral,

Pure beauty I revered. 

And in my hopeless agony, 

In torment from my vanities,

Your gentle voice long called to me,

I dreamt of your sweet qualities. 

Years passed. A rebellious tempest divined

Me to dispel my hasty dreams,

And I forgot your easy mind,

Your celestial qualities.

In the black of isolation,

Quiet days slipped by devoid of

Deity and inspiration,

Tears, and life, and love.

My soul awakened after all:

And you again appeared,

Like a ghost ephemeral,

Pure beauty I revered. 

My heart beats now in exaltation, 

And in its honor soar above,

Deity and inspiration,

Life, and tears, and love.

1825

To [Kern]

Я помню чудное мгновенье:

Передо мной явилась ты,

Как мимолетное виденье,

Как гений чистой красоты.

В томленьях грусти безнадежной,

В тревогах шумной суеты,

Звучал мне долго голос нежный,

И снились милые черты.

Шли годы. Бурь порыв мятежный

Рассеял прежние мечты,

И я забыл твой голос нежный,

Твои небесные черты.

В глуши, во мраке заточенья

Тянулись тихо дни мои

Без божества, без вдохновенья,

Без слез, без жизни, без любви.

Душе настало пробужденье:

И вот опять явилась ты,

Как мимолетное виденье,

Как гений чистой красоты.

И сердце бьется в упоенье,

И для него воскресли вновь

И божество и вдохновенье,

И жизнь, и слезы, и любовь.

1825

By Alexander Pushkin, Translated by Eva Spier

*Pushkin censored Kern’s name in the title so as to not publicly dedicate the poem to a married woman. ‘K’ is not meant to represent the first letter of Kern’s name, rather the preposition ‘K’ in Russian means ‘to.’ Famously, Pushkin was a ladies man and liked to keep readers guessing as to the true subjects of his poems. Modern scholars engage in a lot of elaborate guesswork by studying the dates of events in his life.