Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin's Late Poetry by Smoliarova Tatiana (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 535 Smoliarova, Tatiana. Three Metaphors for Life: Derzhavin’s Late Poetry. Translated by Ronald Meyer, with Nancy Workman and Tatiana Smoliarova. Edited by Nancy Workman. Liber Primus. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2018. 319 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $79.00. The Russian text on which this book is based was published in Moscow in 2011 by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie under the title Zrimaia lirika. It was warmly received, saluted especially for its adventurous, deeply informed intellectual scope. This English version must be acclaimed first of all as a feat of translation; the particular contribution of each of the three individuals credited is not specified. The main difficulty arises, needless to say, in translating adequately the primary material concerned, which is exhaustively and bilingually cited here—threemajorpoemsfromthesubstantialbodyofworkDerzhavincreated after his enforced retirement from state service in 1803, ‘Magic Lantern’ (1804), ‘Rainbow’ (1806) and ‘To Evgenii. Life at Zvanka’ (1807). The third of them, not surprisingly, gets the lion’s share of analysis, about 110 pages. This poetry is rugged, pocked with archaisms, and seems to revel in syntax that is sometimes maddeningly convoluted. The task of translation has been accomplished with rare sensitivity and insight; chasteningly, it is hard to imagine anybody reading the result who cannot at least make at least a stab at the original Russian. There are minor inaccuracies, but very few in view of the bulk and barbarity of the target texts. To say all this about the vehicle is by no means to denigrate the significance of the content it articulates. Why the book’s original title has been so radically altered is not easy to understand. The English version, after all, does not deviate substantially from the central concern of Tatiana Smoliarova’s original, i.e. the relationships between ways of seeing as modified and articulated by various technologies — sometimes, it is argued, as metaphors — scientific theories and imaginative writing (and also such concerns as garden design). These technologies notably include the telescope, the magic lantern, the camera obscura, all the way down to the ‘Claude glass’ used by devotees of the picturesque. The pan-European dialectic between these bodies of thinking about human perception, going right back to antiquity, runs through the book. A good deal of the reference material adduced here was originally written in English, and filtered usually through French before it reached the Russian versions which, as Smoliarova asserts (with due caution, thankfully) Derzhavin was aware of and which helped to shape his thinking. Alexander Pope is rightly a key figure. The quotation and illustration of secondary material is lavish. Unfortunately, in view of the subject matter, the illustrations are all in monochrome, and sometimes reduced to miniscule size. The now fashionable interpolation into the text of self-contained topic boxes, where a particular subject is given mini- SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 536 encyclopedia treatment, means that a sustained narrative sometimes struggles to emerge, but readers with attention-span problems will be delighted. Exceptionally good of its kind is the box on the picturesque. But Smoliarova can be as rewarding when performing close reading as she is when the focus is pulled back, as witness in particular the analysis of the ‘steam engine’ stanzas of ‘To Evgenii’. There are lapses, though, when falsifiable statements are ventured: an abyss yawns when the free iambs (vol´nyi iamb) of Derzhavin’s ‘Girl at the Harp’ are categorized as ‘bumpy vers libre’; in Derzhavin’s last poem and Morris Halle’s translation of it ‘iambic pentameter seems crucial’ — but both happen to be in iambic tetrameter; and the iambic pentameter of Pope’s Essay on Man doesn’t have a fixed caesura. The author’s mind was on higher things, let us surmise. Smoliarova is throughout standing on the shoulders of giants, some of the Russian ones relatively neglected, like Lev Pumpianskii and I. Z. Serman, but her manner and her approach are much more unconstrained, even breezy. The author’s most risky positions assert or imply bold claims about what ‘we’ perceive and understand when reading and contemplating poetry and art. Nothing is ever written or even thought without a conscious subtext, it would seem. The book’s last chapter spirals away...