[Carl Copeland]

Ok, I still haven’t written to my expert, but I guess I can respond to comments that aren’t touched by that issue.

Originally Posted by Glenn Wright

I’m curious about Zenkevich’s religious convictions.

I’ve seen no direct evidence that Zenkevich was religious, but such evidence would have been a liability after 1917, so you never know. As I mentioned before, he wrote a few poems about prehistoric humans and animals that the Orthodox Church would likely have regarded as unbiblical.

Originally Posted by Glenn Wright

I wondered about плескаясь in L11. I thought this word usually meant “splashing” and implied water. “Larking” is an interesting and vivid choice.

“Splashing” would be literal, but I didn’t like “splash in the sky,” so I improvised.

Originally Posted by Glenn Wright

It appears that you rendered the mostly iambic tetrameter of the Russian original as anapestic trimeter. This struck me as an excellent decision. The sprightly rhythm of your translation is perfectly in keeping with the swelling, hopeful tone of the ending.

I was actually just imitating what I took to be regular anapestic trimeter (allowing myself the variation of headless lines). Now that I think about it, though, that involves quite a few demotions in the Russian, which I’d been led to believe were virtually verboten. Most could be explained away by calling them cretics, but I have no idea what a Russian versifier would do with this.

Originally Posted by Matt Q

The translation and the crib seem to be saying different things here. In the crib, the sense of the wave coming is the reason the roosters give the hot cry as they're roused. Whereas here, it seems that this sense of impending dawn is a hot cry at first light. Which leads to something of an (ahem!) chicken and egg problem, I think. If they crow because they have a sense of impending dawn, how can their crowing be a sense of an impending dawn?

My crib may not be literal enough. In Russian the sleeping roosters sense the fiery wave “by means of” a hot cry (instrumental case with no preposition). Not only that, they’re doing it “amid sleep,” so they seem to wake themselves up with their own cry! Logically, of course, I understand the sequence of events as you do, but I think I want to preserve the chicken-and-egg oddness that seems to be there in the original.

Originally Posted by Matt Q

I guess if the coming light is a wave, then the first slightest lightening of the sky is the wavefront. But is one concerned with (warning about, heralding) that first slight lightening, or the whole wave, the whole dawn, and the appearance of the sun itself? And the translation seems to say that it's already first light, in which case the wavefront is already here, and no longer impending.

Ok, that’s interesting. You read “wavefront” as “the first slightest lightening,” while to me it implied the front of a large, powerful wave. Not sure why. And how the roosters sensed its coming is a question I don’t think I ever asked myself. Was it their internal clock or a faint glow preceding the main wave? As with the previous issue, I’m not determined to make this perfectly logical, and my sense is that the poet wasn’t either.

Originally Posted by Matt Q

L3, "the" doesn't seem right. It's God, surely, who is the newly risen, not "the God", or else it's "the god", no? If it's a sun-god and not the Christian god, then "god" would be right.

Point well taken. I’d prefer not to choose between paganism and Christianity, but I may have to.