The Russian Mood Volume 1

By James Vendeland

The Russian Mood volume 1 is an anthology of 19th and 20th century Russian poems translated into English by Elena Levin and James L. Vendeland. In most instances the authors have endeavored to keep the same rhyme, rhythm, and essence of the original Russian text. The translation of poems by fourteen Russian poets comprises this volume. Included are poems of Zhukovsky, Viazemsky, Tyutchev, Lermontov, Polonsky, Nekrasov, Gumilev, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Yesenin, Zabolotzky, Gamzatov, Korzhavin, and Rozhdestvensky. Following several of these poems are hyperlinks connecting the reader to you tube sites where one can listen to the music to which these poems have been set.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Vendeland
• Release date: Oct 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301738670

James Vendeland

Jim Vendeland is a graduate of Case Western Reserve University and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. For 35 years he practiced ophthalmology in Cleveland, Ohio and has been studying Russian for 20 years. For several years Jim and his teacher and coauthor Elena Levin, have translated a wide variety of Russian poems, opera librettos, musical romances, and prose into English. He is also an opera fanatic, a collector of rare medical eye instruments, and former president of the Ocular Heritage Society. Jim is married and has 3 children and 5 grandchildren.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

OR

WHY WE WROTE THIS BOOK!!

Let me begin by giving the reader some background information about myself and my co-author Elena Levin. At the present time I am a retired physician who has been a student of Russian for many years. By this I mean that I have had formal lessons with my tutor, friend, and co-author Elena on a weekly basis for twenty years! Thanks to Elena, I have acquired much knowledge of Russian poetry, prose, opera librettos, Russian music, and Russian culture.

Initially I needed to learn Russian because as a practicing ophthalmologist in Cleveland, Ohio I was beginning to see Russian émigrés, who at that time had obtained permission to leave the Soviet Union. When they arrived at my office, very few of them over the age of fifty spoke English. Often they were unaccompanied by their English speaking children or a translator. I knew that if I were to treat these patients, I had to learn Russian. I found Elena by chance when she accompanied her mother to my office for an eye exam. Upon hearing of my predicament, Elena offered to become my tutor. She is very knowledgeable, speaks English fluently, and has worked as both a Russian translator and interpreter for well over twenty years after emigrating from Russia. She also had been a translator in the Soviet Union for many years. I accepted her offer and thus our collaboration, studies, and friendship began. This relationship has endured for twenty years! The first years were devoted to teaching me basic Russian so that I could communicate with my Russian patients. I recorded each weekly hour long lesson. During the rest of the week I listened to the recording and did homework assignments. We found that translating short poems and lyrics of Russian romances (art songs) was an excellent way for me to learn the language and be exposed to Russian culture. As I progressed, we branched out into translating longer works from Russian into English which included a number of Russian opera librettos. I have been highly motivated by these studies and have collected the recorded music of many of these rarely performed Russian operas and songs. After translating into rhyming English verse the long poems The Fairy Tale About Fedot-Strelets by Leonid Filatov (not included in this anthology) and The Twelve Sleeping Virgins by Vasily Zhukovsky, we realized that these poems, virtually unknown in the West, are excellent examples of Russian poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and should be heard and read by English speaking audiences.

And now I’d like to comment on how and why we selected specific poems and poets included in this anthology. All of these poems are either unknown or not well-known by an English-reading audience, but were very familiar to Russian readers at the time when these works were created. Poets were selected on the basis of chronological order beginning with Vasily Zhukovsky. He wrote at the beginning of the Russian golden age of poetry (1800-1850). We then continued this list through the twentieth century and ended with Robert Rozhdestvensky. Also included in our collection are some of the poems of Naum Korzhavin, the only living poet in this collection

As we gathered material for this anthology, it became apparent that we were attempting to do more than just list a number of nineteenth and twentieth century Russian poets with examples of their works. A pattern illustrating the fabric of Russian society as it existed in the nineteenth century and then was transformed following the Russian Revolution of 1917 emerged. The first six poets presented are almost all of noble birth or came from families at the higher levels of Russian society in the nineteenth century. These men were well educated, lived comfortably, and had leisure time to pursue whatever interested them. Their poetry reflected this with such common themes as love, beauty in nature, fairy and folktales, and a happy life. With the poets including Gumilev, Akhmatova, Yesenin, and Tsvetaeva, a dramatic change occurred. They were born in the latter half of the nineteenth century and were caught up in the Revolution. Most of them were also from the upper strata of Russian society; however, following the Revolution, they were stripped of these privileged rights. They were not permitted to attend universities and most were unable to obtain meaningful work. They had to do menial labor or starve and many were sent to concentration camps in the Gulag where a number of them died. [A brief comment is in order here regarding the Gulag. It was the Russian penal system created to guarantee a continuous supply of slave labor. Without this system, the Communist government would not have survived. Many who were sent to these camps, which existed in wilderness regions of the country, were broken in health and perished.]

A few lucky Russians were able to escape Russia in the ten years following the Revolution. However, by 1928 almost no one was permitted to leave the country. Those that had managed to leave settled in the West in countries such as France where it was safe, but they still had to do the most difficult and menial of work in order to survive.

The last group of our Russian poets includes Zabolotzky, Gamzatov, Rozhdestvensky, and Korzhavin. They are products of the post Revolutionary period. These men did not come from the upper strata of Russian society. They had to be careful about what they wrote and said. Any criticism or suspected criticism of the Soviet regime could result in their immediate imprisonment and execution. Survival in Russia in the post-Revolutionary time was unpredictable. When many of the Russian intellectuals who had escaped to the West returned to Russia, they were immediately arrested and sent to the Gulag where many perished. The poetry of Soviet poets reflected their hardships and misery. Their message was quite different from that of poets of the nineteenth century.

With regard to the style of poetry included in this anthology, Elena and I feel that rhyming verse is preferable and more enjoyable than straight translation. Almost all of the works presented in this book are in rhyme form as in the original Russian. In our translations we have endeavored to keep the rhyme, rhythm, and intent of the author as close as possible to the original Russian. This has been quite a challenge since rhyming is much easier to do in Russian than English due to the six Russian case endings and the Russian grammatical structure as compared to the English structure. In Russian there is much greater flexibility in the placement of the parts of speech in a sentence than in English. This allows a greater ease in rhyming lines of Russian verse. Also Russian is a language of vowels which makes it easier to rhyme and maintain a rhythm in contrast to English which is a language of consonants. It is often difficult to find a correct equivalent in English for a word or idiomatic