Я вас любил (I Loved You), by Alexander Pushkin: translation and commentary
Georgio Konstandi
Я вас любил
Я Вас любил: любовь еще, быть может,
В душе моей угасла не совсем;
Но пусть она Вас больше не тревожит;
Я не хочу печалить Вас ничем.
Я Вас любил безмолвно, безнадежно,
То робостью, то ревностью томим;
Я Вас любил так искренно, так нежно,
Как дай Вам бог любимой быть другим.
Александр Пушкин
I Loved You
I loved you: there may be love inside me still,
The love within my soul has not completely frayed,
But this love can no longer be cause for your ill;
I cannot be the poison that leaves your joy decayed.
I loved you silently, beyond will,
And in this shy, jealous love, we began to fade;
But it was a love written tenderly, with truth’s quill
May God render you again love’s sweet maid.
Georgio Konstandi
This began as an assignment issued to me by the tsarist regime…actually, by my Russian lecturer. She’s very nice. The tsar analogy was probably hyperbolic.
Though I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I describe the horror that strikes anyone faced with translating the beautifully infinite variables of Russian lyric poetry into the rigid components of the English language. How does one go about translating the sublime with the comparably bland? How does a translator preserve the effortless nuance of the Russian instrumental case - that subtle alteration arming nouns with a context of their own - into English words that are equipped with no such linguistic tool? What to do with the last line of the poem, seven words that contain shades of emotion ranging from prayer, to lament, to adoration? And on top of all this we are forbidden from defiling the existing rhyming pattern? Боже мой.
As a writer myself, I have battled over my fair share of writer’s block, particularly when faced with the contraptions of poetry. Translating is different in that you are provided with the stimulus, but you need to do it artistic justice. You are effectively a messenger to your community, in my case, the anglophone community.
Pushkin’s Я вас любил (I Loved You) was the first poem and indeed the first ever piece of writing that I read in Russian. I had only been studying at Cambridge for a few weeks and had found myself one evening wandering round the MML library in search of the Russian section, with absolutely no idea as to what book I was looking for (this all sounds very Matilda but I promise you it is the unembellished truth). I pulled out a tiny, dusty, unmarked red hardback and opened it to find an anthology of Pushkin’s poems typed out in beautiful Cyrillic. I was also embarrassingly illiterate when it came to Russian literature; at this point Alexander Pushkin was just a name I had heard of somewhere in my youth.
When I sat in my room, later that evening, to read the first poem of the book, Я вас любил (I Loved You), I was no longer in Homerton College - I was lost in the story of disillusioned love that Pushkin had managed to wrap in just eight lines. Plagued with my writer’s itch, I set to transcribing the poem in both Russian and English, and in doing so I drew myself into closer proximity with the Russian words, these stunning swirls of Cyrillic that acted as notes to Pushkin’s nineteenth-century melody. Then I sat back and muttered the lines to myself, Я Вас любил… любовь еще, быть может… В душе моей угасла не совсем…
Three years later and this poem, much like to millions of Russians, has become an anthem to me.
So now for the translation: I felt a weight on my shoulders, not just because there was the prospect of my work being read out to my peers over Zoom (a software that has only rendered classes of socially awkward Cambridge students more toe-curling), but also because this poem is so anthemic that any attempt to meddle with it seems like blasphemy in itself.
I wanted to keep a sense of timelessness to the piece - there was no point trying to make this sound contemporary (besides, isn’t love by nature a timeless story?). That being said, I have been studying eighteenth and nineteenth-century European literature throughout my degree, so phrases like ‘be cause for your ill’ chimed perfectly, to me, with Pushkin’s register.
My vocabulary choice for the translation was made in the interest of preserving what I interpret to be a story of love in decay. When I read the Russian original I don’t hear shock, or horror at a love that has suddenly been torn from the speaker’s arms; instead I hear his soft sadness mixed with a reluctant acceptance of what was and what now remains of love. In Pushkin’s poem we hear a tender farewell to a wilted love affair, no cry of revenge. Hence my translation speaks of a love ‘not completely frayed’, ‘your joy decayed’, ‘began to fade’; the essence of decay, I hope, has been preserved.
And now for the final line - arguably the greatest conundrum of Pushkin’s linguistic masterpiece. Как дай Вам бог любимой быть другим. A grammatical feast (or nightmare, depending on your perspective), and as I have already said, a story in itself. Commonly translatable to ’May God make you the love of another’, I was instead interested by the imperative, дай ~ give, and the instrumental, (быть) любимой ~ (to be) the beloved. I allowed myself a degree of poetic license to place more emphasis on the idea of being given to love. I should stress that this was not done for the sake of any patriarchal norms of relationships (please see my array of feminist writing to clarify my position on patriarchy). Rather, I interpret the final line as a sort of homage to love itself. Yes, the speaker is wishing the unnamed woman future love and happiness, but in his expression of this wish he highlights the way, ultimately, we all serve love. Or more precisely, love and the human heart serve one another. Thus, the final line of my translation: May God render you again love’s sweet maid.