Saturday, October 30, 2004

Russian Syntax is a Bitch

OK, so here's my translation, followed by notes nobody cares about.


I loved you -- by A.S. Pushkin

I loved you; love remains, perhaps,
In my heart it has not died out entirely.
But let it no longer trouble you,
I don't want to sadden you with anything.

I loved you silently, hopelessly,
Now shyness, now jealousy torment me:
I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly,
May god grant you are this beloved of another.

Notes:
1) This translation is highly literal. Others found online are much prettier. Google it.
2) In line two of the second stanza the verb "to torment" is conjugated as "we torment." I am not sure if this is a colloquial way of saying "they torment"; if it is a meditation on the human condition, as in "we torment ourselves with shyness and jealousy"; or if it is a what-might-have-been statement: "we (as a hypotheticalpair) are tormented (in this case, to the point of not being a "we") with shyness and jealousy." I have defaulted to the connotation I found most prevalent in other translations, because I have three years of High School Russian and that sucks. But I think my last option would be the coolest possible meaning.
3) The last line is highly idiomatic, and I'm very proud I made any sense of it at all, let alone managed an acceptable traslation for it (n.b. my modus operandi was to try my hand with the dictionary and what I know of Russian, then check it against a million online translations to see if I had made any glaring errors; I did not consider a lack of poetic license to be an error, as previously stated, so... yeah, not too pretty).
4) What the fuck was my Russian teacher thinking, assigning this poem to teenagers? Good god, the melodrama!

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