Russia is waging a disgraceful war on Ukraine. Stand With Ukraine!
How you can support Ukraine 🇺🇦
LT → Русский → Osip Mandelstam → Tristia → Английский

Tristia (Tristia) (перевод на Английский)

  • Исполнитель: Osip Mandelstam (Осип Мандельштам)
  • Песня: Tristia (Tristia)
    •
    1 перевод
    Английский
✕
Запрошена проверка
Русский/Латинизация/Латинизация
Русский/Латинизация/+1Латинизация
A A

Tristia

Я изучил науку расставанья
В простоволосых жалобах ночных.
Жуют волы, и длится ожиданье,
Последний час вигилий городских;
И чту обряд той петушиной ночи,
Когда, подняв дорожной скорби груз,
Глядели в даль заплаканные очи
И женский плач мешался с пеньем муз.
 
Кто может знать при слове расставанье —
Какая нам разлука предстоит?
Что нам сулит петушье восклицанье,
Когда огонь в акрополе горит?
И на заре какой-то новой жизни,
Когда в сенях лениво вол жует,
Зачем петух, глашатай новой жизни,
На городской стене крылами бьет?
 
И я люблю обыкновенье пряжи:
Снует челнок, веретено жужжит.
Смотри: навстречу, словно пух лебяжий,
Уже босая Делия летит!
О, нашей жизни скудная основа,
Куда как беден радости язык!
Все было встарь, все повторится снова,
И сладок нам лишь узнаванья миг.
 
Да будет так: прозрачная фигурка
На чистом блюде глиняном лежит,
Как беличья распластанная шкурка,
Склонясь над воском, девушка глядит.
Не нам гадать о греческом Эребе,
Для женщин воск, что для мужчины медь.
Нам только в битвах выпадает жребий,
А им дано, гадая, умереть.
 
Добавлено shinedshined в сб, 15/01/2022 - 22:55
Комментарий:

Written in 1918

перевод на АнглийскийАнглийский (equirhythmic, rhyming)
Выровнить абзацы

Tristia

Parting is a science I have mastered
In hair-loosed grievances as night wound down.
As oxen chewed and expectation lasted,
The final hour in vigils of the town;
A rooster’s night-time liturgy I honor
As grief’s weight is borne the road along,
A distant glance of tear-stained eyes upon her
And woman’s cry confused with muse’s song.
 
And who can understand when we say “parting”
What sort of absence we should think it is?
What is this rooster’s exclamation starting,
When fire burns on the Acropolis?
Whatever this new life is at its dawning,
While lazily the ox chews in his stall,
How comes the rooster, crier of such morning,
To beat his feathers on the city wall?
 
I also love the practices of looming,
The shuttle hurries, and the spindle hums.
Look there, to meet you shoeless, unassuming,
As gentle as a swan’s down Delia comes!
O pitiful are our life’s foundations,
And how but poor the language of delight!
All is as old, recurring combinations;
Sweet only is the moment of insight.
 
Let it be so: transparent and arrayed
Upon a spotless earthen platter, drawn
And slender like a squirrel’s pelt displayed,
There bending over wax a girl looks on.
Greek Erebus yields not to our surmises,
With women wax, with men hard brass agrees.
It’s war alone our destiny devises,
It is their lot to die in prophecies.
 
Спасибо!
❤
thanked 5 times
Добавлено shinedshined в сб, 15/01/2022 - 22:55
В последний раз исправлено shinedshined в чт, 27/01/2022 - 16:14
Автор перевода запросил проверку.
Это значит, что автор будет рад любым исправлениям и улучшениям перевода.
Если вы владеете языками перевода, и у вас есть замечания/предложения, оставьте свои комментарии.
✕
Osip Mandelstam: Топ 3
1.Ни о чем не нужно говорить... (Ni o chem ne nuzhno govoritʹ...)
2.Ленинград
3.Звук осторожный и глухой... (Zvuk ostorozhnyy i glukhoy...)
Комментарии
SchnurrbratSchnurrbrat    ср, 26/01/2022 - 04:52

Hi, Dan.
That's a pretty difficult verse to deal with, but I guess it's right up your alley.
As usual, I like the language and your expertise with meter and rhyming, but I found some deviations.
For example in the L4, the original is a pentameter, but your version looks quite a bit longer (and I assume that you use "hour" as a two-syllable word.)
I also would like to ask about the grammar in your preceding line. For me, the verb tenses and their conjugations(?) in the sentences, always constitute something that I'm afraid of. I understand that there are two separate clauses here, but maybe it would be better to keep them in the same tense? chewed / lasted? I don't have enough experience with this and would like to ask you about the legitimacy of such structures.
Acropolis falls off the meter too, but I guess there is no other way to form this sentence, grammar and meaning wise.
While lazily the ox chews in his stall, = that's a neat trick to shift the stress from the article, I should use it Regular smile I'm always struggling with such sentences, and use something like "And while the ox ..."
Another question for you:
As gentle as a swan’s down Delia comes!
What is the meaning of this [ 's] here? To me it works quite well without one: Delia comes down as gentle as a swan.
Or am I missing something?
Anyway, not much of proof-reading,
but I've enjoyed reading it.
Cheers,
S.

shinedshined    чт, 27/01/2022 - 08:13

Thanks for your always careful reading. You are quite right of course about line 4 being hexameter; I will fix that. And i think you are right again about mixing tenses for chew and lasted (easy fix). Down (пух } is the soft fluff under the feathers of a bird, a noun here and not an adverb. We say an "eider down comforter" to mean a duvet stuffed with duck's down. I can't see where the acropolis line falls off the meter unless you don't sound "fire" as a diphthong as i intend.

I did the translation for a pal who likes Mandelstam and the acmeists generally. Myself, more a traditionalist and I have a soft spot for way over the top Russian romantic stuff.пух

shinedshined    чт, 27/01/2022 - 16:20

So I pluralized vigils (as in the original) and made "hour" a monosyllable with a wave of my hand. Voila 5 syllables. But I say back to
Гробик ребенку и ужин отцу.

SchnurrbratSchnurrbrat    чт, 27/01/2022 - 19:40

Thank you for clearing the "down" part, I complicated it above and beyond.
re: acropolis. I guess that I was wrong in my count, my apologies. Tired eyes.
I don't see a problem with "Fire burns" as three syllables, but in the original stanza, at least with the first four lines, the stressed syllables are #2,4,6 and 10. So, I expected to see the last syllable be there stressed as well. But it's still in the original meter and forms a good rhyme, so just disregard this.
A great translation, as always. Please don't stop there.

shinedshined    пт, 28/01/2022 - 05:55

I am hearing the last syllable of acropolis - both in Russian and in English - as a secondary stress. I grant you the rhyme with "is" pushes the reader to add a little more oomph to acropolIS. I was going to to do Leningrad, but I saw your translation, which is excellent; so is there another Mandelshtam you think would be good to do? D

SchnurrbratSchnurrbrat    пт, 28/01/2022 - 19:00

Dan,
Please disregard my comments on the stress in Acropolis, I was just covering up my previous mistakes in arithmetic. Regular smile Obviously I'm the last person to speak with on English pronunciation, especially of Greek-sounding names. They scare me in general, but appear quite often in Russian poetry.

Regarding Mandelshtam, feel free to translate Leningrad as well, if you like it. We sometimes have like 20-30 translations for popular songs. For me it's always interesting to read what others can find rhyme-wise, etc. I came upon the powerful reading of Leningrad and it moved me to translate it. And thank you for your praise, but if you see any mistakes or poor-sounding English on my part, please don't hesitate to point them out. I stay away from the Silver Age poets, they are too good for my language skills. Not that I don't like them of course. I mostly translate Soviet singer-songwriters plus poetry of Bella Akhmadulina, she is often named one of the best (if not the best) poets of the Soviet era. I really like her themes, style, and her rhyming always sounds so fresh. Plus, she prefers iambic verses.

Back to Mandelshtam, I think that .@Pinchus [ @Pinchus ] can share a link to Mandelshtam poetry translated on a pro level. We discussed it with him once.

Read about music throughout history