Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

My own translation of Pushkin’s 1836 poem ‘I have raised myself a monument’ below is of this second kind – finickingly literal, without pretensions to being an independent poem. It is nearly half as long again in terms of word count, an inevitable result of the fact that word-units are longer, on average, in Russian than in English. Therefore, the English sounds much more verbose than the Russian. While some alliteration survives (by pure chance), the metre, with the use of the shortened fourth line in each stanza to puncture the grandeur of the first three, does not. There are some problems with vocabulary too. The beautiful word podlunnyi becomes sublunar, a word that sounds like a citation from a NASA bulletin; the term nerukotvornyi (Greek acheiropoietos), applied to a miraculous icon, has to be paraphrased. Yet the translation draws attention to some of the hidden problems in a piece so often anthologized and learned by heart in the original Russian that its subtlety becomes blunted. And though workaday English cannot convey the way that Pushkin orchestrates his themes linguistically – with a sound play on ‘p’ to bring out the grandiose motif of posthumous survival – the dramatism of the piece still comes through.

Exegi monumentum

‘I have raised myself a monument not made by human hands’

Exegi monumentum

I have raised myself a monument not made by human hands,

The path of the people to it will never grow over,

Its insubordinate head has risen higher

Than the Alexandrian Pillar.

No, I shall not fully die – the soul in my fateful lyre

Shall survive my dust, and shall escape putrefaction –

And I shall be famous, wherever in the sublunar world

Even a single poet lives.

Tidings of me will go out over all great Rus,

And every tribe and every tongue will name me:

The proud descendant of the Slavs, the Finn, the Tungus

Who is now savage, and the steppe-loving Kalmyk.

And for long I shall remain loved by the people

For awakening noble feelings with my lyre,

Because in my cruel age I have celebrated freedom,

And called for pity to the fallen.

O Muse, be obedient to the command of God,

Do not be fearful of abuse, do not demand a crown,

Accept both praise and slander with indifference,

And don’t dispute with fools.

Even in English, ‘Monument’ (to adopt the title commonly, if incorrectly, attached to the poem) gives not only a feeling of ‘discovery’, but something equally important in a ‘classic’ text, what Calvino calls ‘the sense of rereading something we have read before’. This comes partly from the fact that Pushkin’s poem is itself a free translation, or imitation, of an ode by Horace, as the Latin quotation ‘Exegi monumentum’ makes clear. ‘Monument’ also plays on an earlier imitation of Horace by the great eighteenth-century poet Gavrila Derzhavin. Derzhavin’s poem was both a literal version of Horace and a literal version of the statue motif: Derzhavin’s monument has nothing airy or mystical about it, but is ‘harder than all metals and taller than the Pyramids’. Pushkin’s poem, on the other hand, is teasingly insubstantial: a ‘monument not made by human hands’ is from some points of view not a monument at all.

In some ways, this idea of an art work about the impossibility of making an art work seems more characteristic of the twentieth century than of the early nineteenth century: it seems Modernist rather than Romantic. But many other themes and motifs in Pushkin’s poem – for instance, the idea of dignified survival in the face of a ‘cruel age’ – evoke the Enlightenment ideals of civilization in whose abstract existence Pushkin fervently believed, even if his own life gave him little chance to experience them in practice. And the theme of art’s endurance is common to this poem and to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, also written under a self-glorifying monarchy (‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme . . .’), while some phrases in ‘Monument’ play on the finale to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, hinting at Pushkin’s long devotion to Ovid, another poet exiled by a capricious ruler.