Intervention
Here Comes the Rain Again

Fall has arrived in Seattle. The first cold rain began on Friday. I've been holed up at home, avoiding the wet as long as possible. While going through boxes in my office, I came across a book that I must have bought in Moscow in 1990, though I can't remember doing so: Nikolai Nekrasov's Selected Works. Flipping through it, I found a poem that I thought I'd post, in honor of the change of seasons.

Here's my quick-and-dirty translation of Nekrasov's "Pered dozhdem" (1846):

Before the Rain

A mournful wind urges
A cloud-flock into sky's country.
A fractured fir tree groans,
The dark wood whispers lonely.

Leaf after leaf flutters
Into the speckled, mottled brook,
And the chill air runs
Like a dry sharp stream.

A half-dark lies over everything;
Rushing together from all sides
A flock of daws and crows
Whirls in the air and cries.

The top's been put up on a passing
Cabriolet, and its front part enclosed.
A gendarme, half-raising his whip,
Shout's "Let's go!" to the coachman.

I've tried, though not very hard and not very consistently, to preserve Nekrasov's trimeter, and a couple times you can see traces of his abab rhyme scheme ("country" / "lonely," "flutters" / "over," "sides" / "cries").

Nekrasov's lyric is a classic example of mid-nineteenth century Russian realism. Three stanzas of vivid description are followed by subtle social commentary. Everything in the poem is moving or speaking, including the vegetation (a tree groans, the wood whispers, the leaves fly). The poet also sets up correspondences that link the heavenly, natural, and human worlds. Clouds and birds both travel in "flocks," for instance, and the phrase used to describe the birds' cries (s krikom) finds an echo in the gendarme's shout (krichit). This is the flurry, not the calm, before the storm. The overall mood is threatening, as if the coming of rain would signal death or destruction.

The irony, of course, is that the worst that would happen to the gendarme, should a storm break, would be a soaking. Half-raising his whip, this figure of state and military authority makes a different kind of threat. He promises actual, physical violence if the coachman doesn't hurry up and manage to deliver him to his destination safe, sound, warm, and dry. Nekrasov, as always, is an attentive observer of class difference. People, like animals and plants, might be stirred up by a change in the weather, but only a human would turn the occasion into an opportunity for violent self-assertion. Note the use of passive voice in the first two lines of the last stanza. There is no need to ask which of the two men put up the folding hood and enclosed the front of the carriage. Nekrasov hints that the labor of the working class occurs under surveillance, as well as under the threat of punishment, but then effectively vanishes from public view. Streets are cleaned, buses run on time, dinner is prepared, etc.

One could push things further, in an intriguing direction. The Russian word listok, translated here as "leaf," also means "sheet of paper." Singing birds have been a metaphor for writing poetry since Antiquity. The poem's overtly about transportation--taking things from one place to another--but, significantly, the Russian word for translation, like the Latin translatio, etymologically means "carried or led across," perevod. The lyric quietly requests that we read it self-reflexively.

When I translate Nekrasov, am I the coachman or the gendarme?

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