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The Poet Marina Tsvetaeva and Her Translator Elke Erb

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The Poet Marina Tsvetaeva and Her Translator Elke Erb VERGES: Germanic & Slavic Studies in Review 1/2020 Resounding Sound: The Poet Marina Tsvetaeva and her Translator Elke Erb Esther Hool University of Utrecht, Netherlands Abstract The repetition of sound patterns on different linguistic levels is a dominant characteristic of the Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry and recalls elements of both folk poetry and avant-garde texts. Tsvetaeva’s German translator, Elke Erb, not only considers the sonic dimension as being especially important for poetry in general, but also emphasizes the complex sound structures in Tsvetaeva's poetry in particular. In this paper, I use Erb’s translation of the poem “Sad” [“The Garden”] to illustrate the ways in which the sonic dimension of the source text and the poem’s references to both the literary avant-garde and folk poetry can be preserved. Keywords: poetry translation, Russian poetry, Marina Tsvetaeva, Elke Erb 1. Introductory remarks: the sonic dimension of Tsvetaeva’s poetry Repetitions of sound structures, such as rhymes, alliterations, and sound symbolism, are an important feature of a great deal of poetry. Indeed, according to Reuven Tsur, “[m]usicality seems to be the most salient—if not the distinctive—property of poetry” (Tsur, 2008, p. 209, emphasis in original). Complex repetitions on different linguistic levels are particularly striking in folk poetry and poems of the European literary avant-garde (cf. Schlaffer, 2012; Jakobson and Waugh, 1986). Typical elements of the literary style of the Russian Futurists, as well as formulaic patterns such as incantations, are characteristic features of the poetry of the Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva (cf. Lauer, 2000, p. 574), even though she herself never belonged to any of the Futurist literary groups. In this context, critics emphasize the crucial role that structural repetitions play in Tsvetaeva’s poetry: “[Э]нергия повторов в цветаевских стихах не знает ничего подобного или сравнимого в русской (и не только русской) поэзии.” [In Russian poetry (or poetry in any language), there is nothing similar or comparable to the energy created by the repetitions in Tsvetaeva’s verses.] (Etkind, 1991, p. 309). Some of these repetitions will be demonstrated through the example of Tsvetaeva’s poem “Sad” (Engl. “The Garden”), written in 1934 during her Parisian exile and only published after her death. Tsvetaeva had VERGES: Germanic & Slavic Studies in Review 1/2020 left Russia in 1922 to follow her husband, Sergei Efron, who fled Russia after the Revolution and spent the subsequent seventeen years in exile. As with many other poems by Tsvetaeva, “The Garden” has been interpreted in light of her life experiences. In considering her difficult circumstances in Paris, for example, critics have regarded the literary garden of the poem as a place that could metaphorically “shelter her” (Schweitzer, 1993, p. 323) from her misfortune. During these years, however, Tsvetaeva was not only isolated in political and ideological terms—one reason being her husband’s development of sympathy for the Soviet regime and his beginning to work as a spy for the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD)—but also as a poet. In view of the many cataclysms in Russia and Europe, the influential poet and critic, Georgij Adamovič, exhorted young writers of the Parisian emigration to cultivate simplicity and immediate truthfulness (cf. Lauer, 2000, p. 570; Schweitzer, 1993, p. 272), rejecting so-called verbal mannerisms. In this context, however, Tsvetaeva’s language was identified with the innovative tendency of Russian literature in the Soviet Union—notably associated with Mayakovsky and Pasternak (cf. Ševelenko, 2002, p. 312)—that was completely alien to the authors gathered around Adamovič. Furthermore, the title word sad [garden], repeated several times in the course of the poem, as well as the words ad [hell] and tot svet [afterworld], all have Christian connotations. In reference to the diction’s religious connotations and its repeated request Pošli mne sad or Mne sad pošli [Send me a garden], it has been remarked that the poem resembles a prayer (Schweitzer, 1993, p. 323). While some of the critics around the Parisian émigré circles called Tsvetaeva’s poetry “höchst musikalischer Unsinn” [highly musical nonsense] (Osorgin, cited in Wytrzens, 1981, p. 21), Elke Erb makes the competing claim that, in Tsvetaeva’s poetry, “der Sinn scheint ganz aus dem Klang zu kommen” [the sense seems to come entirely from the sound] (Erb, 1989, p. 180). In an interview, Erb foregrounds the sonic dimension of the language over its semantics: “Es ist nicht ablesbar von irgendeinem Inhalt, was ein Gedicht macht. Die Laute sind entscheidend.” [What makes a poem cannot be read from any content. The sounds are decisive.] (Erb, 1995a, pp. 220–1).1 While Tsvetaeva’s poetry has received much scholarly attention (e.g. Karlinsky, 1966; Etkind, 1991), the translation of repetitions of sound structures of “The Garden” has not yet been examined. This undertaking is the focus of this paper, which examines Erb’s translation for its highlighting of sound. Furthermore, the repeated patterns in Erb’s translations of Tsvetaeva’s poems are, in contrast to many other renderings, similarly complex.2 Erb not only writes a rhymed translation but also considers the specific characteristics 1 Many thanks to my editor Síomón Solomon (Dublin) for his assistance with some of these translations. 2 Translators differ in the way they deal with Tsvetaeva’s sound structures, e.g. David McDuff’s English translations are rhymed, while those of Elaine Feinstein are not. VERGES: Germanic & Slavic Studies in Review 1/2020 of Tsvetaeva’s rhymes and other sound repetitions.3 By considering the source text’s sonic dimension in her translation, Erb is also able to retain many of the similarities with texts of the literary avant-garde as well as folk poetry. The question arises if and in what way it is possible to preserve the sonic dimension of the source text in translation and what kind of shifts on other linguistic levels would follow. Shifts between the source text and the translation thereby “result from attempts to deal with systemic differences” (Bakker, 2011, p. 269) between the source and target languages. Such shifts are not faults; rather, a “[t]ranslation involves the transfer of certain values of expression or content across a semiotic border; and shifts are concomitant with this transfer” (p. 269). In different translations of the same source text, the kinds of shifts can differ from each other because “the way the transfer is carried out is not determined a priori” (p. 269). In the following section, the way Erb deals with Tsvetaeva’s specific writing style—which is for its part closely related to specific properties of the Russian language and metrics—will be examined. 2. “The Garden” and its translation Since repeated patterns on different linguistic levels are a dominant characteristic of Tsvetaeva’s style in general, they will serve as a tertium comparationis when comparing Tsvetaeva’s source text with Erb’s translation. Karlinsky lists the following types of parallelisms in Tsvetaeva’s poetry: “the anaphora, refrains of various sorts, periodic repetitions of passages, verbatim or with significant minor alterations, and finally, parallel syntactic and grammatical structures” (Karlinsky, 1966, p. 166).4 “The Garden” features several repeated patterns that can also be found in other poems by Tsvetaeva and that can be considered as characteristic of Tsvetaeva’s poetry. The focal points of the following sections will be repetitions of speech sounds (section 2.1), words, and syntactic structures (section 2.2). 2.1 Repetitions on the level of speech sounds In Tsvetaeva’s poetry, repetitions of speech sounds occur in both the first and last syllables of lines and within lines. In “The Garden,” end rhymes also play an important role, though they are not always pure rhymes. 2.1.1 Similar sound structures in line endings 3 Tsvetaeva’s poem and Erb’s translation can be found in the appendix of this paper. 4 On the different types of parallel structures in Tsvetaeva’s poetry, see also A. Filonov Gove’s article “Parallelism in the Poetry of Marina Cvetaeva.” VERGES: Germanic & Slavic Studies in Review 1/2020 The first three stanzas of “The Garden” have the following rhyme scheme: ABAB / BBBB / BABA. In the first and third stanzas, the lines are connected by the same alternate rhymes, whereas the second stanza is held together by a monorhyme that chimes with two line endings in the first and the third stanzas. Some of these rhyme words are identical: the word sad [garden] occurs in the first and third stanzas; six of the twelve rhyme words are let [years] and are distributed throughout the three stanzas. The line endings of these stanzas (and of the whole poem) are masculine, all of which are monosyllabic nouns. Since a great part of the vocabulary of Russian is polysyllabic, short words may be more eye-catching in a Russian text than in one written in another language.5 In addition to their length, all of these words end with the voiceless plosive consonant [t],6 whose dominant distinctive feature is abruptness. Together with the shortness of the lines and words, these plosives create an impression of a sudden ending. The similarity of the phonological structure of the words ad [hell], bred [delirium], sad [garden], let [years], bed [trouble], and klad [deposit] in the first three stanzas of the poem goes beyond the similarity of words in conventional rhymes, inasmuch as they coincide not only sonically but also syllabically. Some of these words have an almost identical sound structure and differ from each other by only one additional speech sound in the longer word. This applies to ad and sad, as well as bred and bed.
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