"The Sail" by Mikhail Lermontov

One white and lonely sail out there,

amidst the fog and the ocean’s blue!

What does it seek in distant lands?

What was amiss in the one it knew?

Waves leap up into whistling wind;

the tall mast bends, and the rigging strains.

This is no flight from happiness,

but nor will happiness be its aim.

Before him spreads an azure path,

as though golden suns would never cease,

but he, rebellious, seeks the storm,

as if only in storms were there peace.

Mikhail Lermontov
Translation by Frank Beck

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41) made his name at the age of 23 with a poem about the tragic death of Pushkin in a duel. Lermontov was part Russian and part Scot, the descendant of George Learmont, a Scottish officer who joined the Russian army in the 1600s.

Lermontov's poem was an outraged cry against the code of conduct that had led to Pushkin's death, yet Lermontov himself died the same way, challenged by a friend he had offended with his cutting remarks. The early deaths of these two poets made them legendary figures--much like Shelley and Keats in the English tradition.

Russian speakers still read Lermontov's prose--in particular A Hero of Our Time--as well as his poetry. Like much Russian verse, the poetry is difficult to translate, because its meaning is conveyed largely through the use of rhyme. English has far fewer rhyming possibilities than Russian does, so whether Russian rhymes can be reproduced in English is largely a matter of luck.

Lermontov in 1837

Boris Pasternak's "My Sister, Life," written during Russia's 
tumultuous year of 1917, is dedicated to Lermontov. "What was he to me, in the summer of 1917?" Paternak later wrote. "The personification of creative adventure and discovery--the principle of everyday, free, poetical statement."

That dedication forms a link between Russian Romanticism and Russian Modernism, as if Eliot's "The Waste Land" has been dedicated to Shelley or Keats. 

(The image at the top is a detail from "Seascape," a 1910 painting by Nikolai Dubovskoy.)

• AUDIO: Hear the poem in Russian
• Lermontov's poem in Russian
  
• A Russian view of Lermontov's life and work
• AUDIO: "Winter Night" by Boris Pasternak (from Doctor Zhivago)

"Tiflis" (Tblisi), painted by Lermontov at the age of 23 in 1837

The first song history gives us

While you live, be joyful;

grief must know its measure.

The span of life is brief;

time will claim its treasure.

Listen to the only song to come down to us from Ancient Greece, and consider its message. Known as the Seikilos Epitaph, its words and accompanying musical notation were inscribed on a tombstone discovered in 1883 near Aiden, in what is now Turkey.

The song was written by someone known to us only as Seikilos and dedicated to Euterpe, thought to be his wife. Archeologists believe that the tombstone was made about the time of Jesus.

Generally, I believe that translations of songs and poems should preserve the meter of the original, if possible. Here, however, I've been loyal to our English tradition of rhyming epitaphs. It's a strange coincidence that this song about the transience of life is the only musical composition from that era to survive. Does Fate have the heart of a poet?

Here is the original poem, in Classical Greek:

Ὅσον ζῇς φαίνου

μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ

πρὸς ὀλίγον ἐστὶ τὸ ζῆν

τὸ τέλος ὁ χρόνος απαιτεῖ

transliterated in the Roman alphabet:

Hoson zēis phainou

mēden holōs sy lypou

pros oligon esti to zēn

to telos ho chronos apaitei

and in a literal translation from the Greek:

While you live, dance and sing;
grieve not and be joyful.
For a lifetime is too short,
and time bears death's prize away.

Translation by Frank Beck, 2015
(Fresco from the Tomb of the Leopards, Tarquinia, Italy)

• AUDIO: San Antonio Arts Ensemble sing the song
• Anne Carson's brilliant Sappho impersonation
• Sappho's most famous fragment

Sappho: An evocative fragment

Fresco associated with Sappho (from Pompeii, first century CE)

Dropping out of sight go the moon  

and Pleiades. Midnight slides

by me, then hour on hour.

I lie here awake and alone.

Anne Carson says, "Sappho is a musician," and her own Sappho translations are some of the most musical English versions of Classical Greek poetry I've ever read (see the first link below). Many translators simply put the poet's thoughts into modern English, without trying to reproduce Sappho's music. 

In this translation of one of the best known fragments attributed to Sappho (no. 168b), I've maintained the syllabic count of the Greek lines and echoed the meter as closely as I could. I've also been mindful of the caesura (the mid-line pause in Classical verse): in lines 2, 3 and 4, it falls in the same place as in the Greek.

I have also matched the position of key vowels, although I had to juggle the four long vowels in the last line that give the poem's closing its plaintive feeling in Greek. (Note that I intend "Pleiades" to be spoken with the accent on the second syllable, as in Greek, not on the first syllable, as in English.) 

In order to replicate Sappho's meter, I've altered a few line-to-line meanings. For example, the phrase that runs over from line 2 to line 3 means, "It is the middle of the night". I've changed that to "Midnight slides by me" to meet the needs of the meter.

Anyone who reads Greek can judge how faithful I've been to Sappho's music and where I've strayed from her literal meaning:

Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληίαδες· μέσαι δὲ
νύκτες, παρὰ δ᾽ ἔρχετ᾽ ὤρα·
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.

Anne Carson translates Sappho's best known poem
Article on Fragment 168(b) by Paul Reiner and David Kovacs
Edith Hall reviews "The Complete Poems of Sappho"
The poems of Sappho in Greek, with English translations
More about Alma-Tadema's painting, at the Walters Art Museum

"Sappho and Alcaeus" by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1881 (click to enlarge)

"Aeolian song is suddenly revealed as a mature work of art in the spirited stanzas of Alcaeus. It is raised to a supreme excellence by his younger contemporary, Sappho, whose melody is unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled, among all the relics of Greek verse." 

                                    British classicist Richard Claverhouse Jebb (1841-1905)