[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

I wonder if this exchange consciously echoed the Book of Job? It is similar: Pushkin-Job’s despairing nihilism, his interlocutor’s affirmation of divine intervention and design, and P.’s resolution-acceptance at the end. Taken in this light, I’m not sure that Oleg Proskurin’s speculation is accurate. The Bible is full of the dangerous God.

The parallel with Job is quite interesting and worth exploring. Pushkin was already in a precarious position, having been investigated that same year for an outrageously blasphemous long poem that he’d written years earlier. Proskurin argues that he wouldn’t have risked referring to God as malicious, and if the poem had been understood that way by others, it wouldn’t have passed censorship. This is only one point in Proskurin’s much longer argument, and I’m still trying to decide how much of it I buy, but it’s extremely well reasoned and substantiated.

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

Do the originals reflect the trochaic meter of your translations for Pushkins’ first poem and Philaret’s response, with the iambic measure for Pushkin’s second poem?

Yes, I’ve followed the original meters and rhyme schemes exactly, including the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, which is traditional in Russian verse (presumably taken over from French).

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

About the (as far as I can tell) repeating rhyme schemes of poems 1 and 2, knowing your meticulousness, I’m sure they’d be in your translations if that were possible. You do echo some of it, though, which is what made me notice it.

Ah, you’re looking at the Cyrillic! Yes, Philaret has used all of Pushkin’s rhymes in the first two stanzas. I only managed to repeat senseless/sentence. Another thing I regret losing is the exact parallel between Pushkin’s L10 (“heart empty, idle mind”), which I’ve divided between two lines, and Philaret’s L12 (“heart pure, serene mind”).