Half-Light & Other Poems

By Yevgeny Abramovitch Baratynsky and Peter France

Half-Light & Other Poems brings together the most important and enduring poems by this neglected writer, one of Russia's great 19th century poets. In a new translation by Peter France, the philosophical, social and iterary struggles of Russia under Tsar Nicholas I are brought to vivid life in the verses of a man who felt profoundly and was highly skilled at expressing his emotions and beliefs in dazzling, often fantastical fashion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Release date: Feb 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781908376909

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Half-light

Published by Arc Publications,

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Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Translation copyright © Peter France 2015

Copyright in Introduction © Peter France 2015

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2015

978 1908376 88 6 (pbk)

978 1908376 89 3 (hbk)

978 1908376 90 9 (ebk)

Design by Tony Ward

Cover design by Tony Ward

Printed by Lightning Source

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are one or more variant versions for many of the poems printed here. With a small number of exceptions on points of detail (notably in the poem ‘Rhyme’), the translations have been made from the one-volume edition of Baratynsky’s poems edited by L. G. Frizman and published in the Novaya Biblioteka Poeta collection (St Petersburg, 2000). Earlier versions of some of the translations appeared in Fulcrum, Cardinal Points, International Literary Quarterly, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (ed. R. Chandler, 2015) and European Romantic Poetry (ed. M. Ferber, 2005). The translator’s thanks go to all those who have helped and encouraged him in this labour of love, in particular Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, Ilya Kutik, Irina Mashinski, Siân Reynolds and Antony Wood.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without

the written permission of Arc Publications.

‘Arc Classics:

New Translations of Great Poets of the Past’

Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier

Yevgeny Baratynsky

Half-light

AND OTHER POEMS

Translated and introduced by

PETER FRANCE

Arc.TIF

2015

To the memory of my dear friend and co-translator, the poet Jon Stallworthy

CONTENTS

Introduction

СУМЕРКИ / HALF-LIGHT

OTHER POEMS

Biographical Notes

INTRODUCTION

Among the great figures of Russian literature, Yevgeny Baratynsky is one of the least known outside Russia. Why this should be so is rather mysterious. Partly it must be due to the ‘purgatory’ that he suffered for some sixty years after his death in 1844 – and again in post-Revolutionary Russia, where it was only in the last third of the twentieth century that he came into his own as one of the outstanding poets in the language.

Whatever the cause, for the most part he has been published in English in a fragmentary way. And yet there is a lot that might attract foreign readers to his poetry. Of all European writers of the time, he seems closest to Giacomo Leopardi, long considered one of Italy’s greatest lyric poets. Leopardi, born in 1798 and dying in 1837, was an almost exact contemporary of Baratynsky (1800-1844), and there is much in the clear-sighted, bleak vision of man and society in the Canti that reminds one of the poet of Half-light: the historical pessimism, the noia (something like Baudelaire’s spleen), the awareness of human fragility and ephemerality, but also the idealism and the vital honesty and magnanimity.

The parallels are not exact of course. Leopardi’s poetic language, with its unprecedented exploration of freer verse forms, is quite different from that of the classicist Baratynsky, for whom metre and