Carl,
I’m curious about the meter in the original, since I know nothing about Russian prosody. When you say you replicate the meter of the Russian poems, does that mean that trochaic meter and iambic meter work the same in Russian as they do in English? Is Russian verse accentual-syllabic in the same way?
About your translations here, my first suggestion is for S2 of the first poem by Pushkin, where “Who” has to be inserted somehow. When I read it the first couple of times, without the crib, I thought “uncanny force” was referring to a kind of Bergsonian impersonal energy, which is quite far from the Pushkin and from the dialogue with Philaret. For the discussion to make any sense, the personified God has to be explicit. Besides that, S2 seems very solid.
S1 reads very well in both sound and sense (matched up to the crib), and I like the “senseless / sentence” rhyme.
For S3, I’d consider reworking it to emphasize the absence of goals, which the crib has as the opener, with the mind/heart part as an explanation. Your version does convey the sense of romantic ennui, but taking two lines to say the heart is barren and the mind is inactive or listless is rather fillerish. Also, is “I find weary, beyond bearing” close enough to being weary with melancholy? It seems quite different to me.
Your version of Philaret’s poem reads nicely overall. For a simple tweak in S1, “by simple chance” instead of “in simple chance” would be more idiomatic and clear. Perhaps also change “a hidden plan” to “God’s hidden plan” (again, playing up the personification / Christian content). The original repeats “God” there, according to the crib.
In S2, I’d prefer “and with doubt . . .” etc. to “who with doubt.”
“be remembered / in forgetfulness” in S3 is a lovely phrase, but does it really work in this context? A particular person’s forgetfulness seems to be the point here. Philaret is saying that he needs to remember God more, whom he forgets on a regular basis.
That’s all for now. I’ll be back later for the second Pushkin poem.
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