Gnedich
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Maria Rybakova’s Gnedich captures the reader’s attention in its first stanzas with a striking allusion to Homeric Greece: “The rage that killed so many/the wretched rage of Achilles/who knew that he would perish/ that he would perish young.This is a novel-in-verse about the first Russian translator of the Iliad, the romantic poet and librarian Nikolai Gnedich (1784-1833). Since Gnedich spent almost his entire life translating Homer’s epic poem, Maria Rybakova has chosen verse as the most appropriate stylistic means in recreating his life. To the English-speaking world, this genre of poetic biography is best exemplified by Ruth Padel’s Darwin – A Life in Poems.
Like the Iliad itself, the novel consists of twelve Songs or Cantos, and covers the life of Gnedich from his childhood to his death. It depicts the lives of Gnedich and his best friend, the poet Batyushkov, who is slowly losing his sanity, and incorporates motifs from their poetry, from Homer’s epics, and from Greek mythology, as well as magnificent images of imperial Russia and the Homeric world. The space of the novel covers snowy Russian villages, aristocratic St. Petersburg salons, magnificent Italian landscapes, and the austere Greece of Homer’s heroes.
Rybakova conjures a fittingly romantic vision of the dramatic lives of Gnedich and his best friend. A major part of the novel is the moving correspondence between the two poets. Philosophical reflections on the fate of the individual are intertwined with poignant stanzas devoted to the great but unhappy love to the tragic actress Ekaterina Semyonova that consumed Gnedich. The novel culminates in Batyushkov’s final breakdown in the lunatic asylum and Gnedich’s ruminations on Russia’s tragic future fate.
The poetic language of Gnedich is refined: it combines the clarity of Rybakova’s syllabic verses and the sophistication of her metaphors with distinct, novelistic depictions of certain landscapes, people, and their interactions.
The novel is spectacularly designed: Rybakova’s style resembles a movie projection with stop-cards at the key moments in Gnedich’s life, his long conversations with his friend, and particular striking sceneries. It creates a novelistic effect on the tale about Gnedich’s life, spanning over twenty years.The narrative is often interrupted by streams of consciousness and reminiscence by its main heroes. At the same time, it continues the traditions of Russian classic literature with its attention to detail and the psychology of the characters.
A significant part of the novel is dedicated to the description of Gnedich’s friendship with Konstantin Batyushkov, a talented poet of the Pushkin epoch. Gnedich, disfigured by a childhood disease, was a librarian at the Imperial Library in St. Petersburg and became famous through his translation of the Illiad. Batyushkov, an officer of the Russian Imperial court who participated in military campaigns, as well as one of the best poets of the beginning of the 19th century, went through deep crisis and mental illness. The friendship between the two becomes one of the themes within the novel.
Rybakova builds the novel-in-verse’s plot around Gnedich’s translation of the Illiad into Russian. The narrative progresses from the adult Gnedich’s recollection of his childhood in a small country estate in Ukraine in the first Song, his illness and discovery of the magnificent Greek epic about the siege of the Troy that changed his life forever, to the completion of his work on his translation as a final victory over his life’s circumstances. The titanic work on the translation continued for almost twenty-two years (1807-29).
Maria Rybakova
Maria Rybakova was born in Moscow. She studied Greek and Latin in Russia, then in Germany and subsequently in the USA where she is now teaching the subject. Her first novel, Anna Grom and her Ghost was published in 1999. Several novels and short stories followed. Maria Rybakova is a recipient of numerous literary awards in Russia, including Students' Booker Prize, Eureka Prize, Serguei Dovlatov Prize, Antologia Award, The Russian Prize, Globus Award. Her novels have been translated into German, Spanish and French. Gnedichis her first book to appear in English.
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Reviews for Gnedich
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gnedich is a novel in verse about the first Russian translator of the Illiad, and as such it brings up some interesting points about the nature of translation. Is a translator of a book but a mouthpiece for a ghost? One does not profess to read Fowlie when they read Rimbaud, or Robert Pinsky when we read Dante. Gnedich's dread is the dread of invisibility. As a man, he is bent and half-blind, almost grotesque, but the most profound part of him that endures is an imitation. Rybakova's fashioning of this character is superb, his feeling exquisitely captured through a myriad of images. These images reference, distort, and reimagine events of the Greek tragedies and histories, mirroring Gendich's own distortions. He is half in the world and half lost in words that are not his own. As Rybakova writes, "From one dusty book to another dusty book -- this is his path and he himself is ash, and dust, and an empty word." This poetic biography of Gnedich offers up a portrait of a man his toil and near delirious ardor, his doubt and humanity. The translation of Rybakova's own poem is, I would think, an exceptional one. I have not and cannot read this in the original Russian so thanks are due to Elena Dimov for carefully translating a work about the sorrows and doubts of translation into a poem rife with stirring lyricism.
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Gnedich - Maria Rybakova
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Song I
The rage that killed so many,
the wretched rage of Achilles
who knew that he would perish,
that he would perish young,
yet he, Gnedich, will die lonely
and will probably also die young.
(It is better this way — otherwise
lonely old age—
they say it is worse,
than lonely youth,
even though then you had nothing to eat
and sat alone every evening,
and even when you did have money
and went to the brothel, women shied away
but then grew accustomed to you
because you were kind
and sad — and life was passing by, where every day
was death.)
Homer says: youth is always frightening,
and the memory of it is the most dreadful of all.
Sing, goddess, it is your amusement —
to sing our sorrows, our pain is your glory,
but when you come to me
pretending to be an actress
I will agree to suffer, said Gnedich,
and looked in the mirror with one eye.
In the dark hole of glass he saw
either the Cyclops or the hero-lover,
then Homer, then suddenly no one really,
just furniture and the sickly candle
(without even the hand that held it), myre alge, woes unnumbered,
a thousand sorrows, much grief,
algos is pain, algeo — I suffer,
but in Greek even suffering is good,
and in Russian it is nothing but pain.
The pain is etched upon me
(Gnedich says)
and now everyone reads: don’t come to him,
don’t love him,
but take pity on him,
even though he does not need your pity.
He hurled many strong souls into the invisible world…
Who? Achilles. Let us not be distracted,
(the sound of hoofs outside the window, the piercing voice of a tradeswoman)
into the gloom of Hades — god and place — an invisible god,
for the invisible one is dead,
dead as one who is afraid to be looked at,
one at whom they are afraid to look,
one whose reflection
even the mirror prefers to blink away as a tear
so it will not obscure the world,
perfect and everlasting.
He hurled souls to Hades and bodies
to dogs and to hungry vultures
so we would be divided after death,
as a butcher does in the marketplace:
souls there, bodies here
(and both are gloomy),
my face was beautiful, Gnedich says,
and then became ugly,
but as for my soul —
I don’t know.
I suspect it is invisible,
and probably also dead,
herein Jove’s will is accomplished,
my life is counted, my death
is assigned. I did not have love.
I did not have glory. Only words
I was left with — Greek —
to bind them with the Russian ones.
He often thinks about the daughter of Chryses, unnamed.
Her father came for her and she disappeared,
following her father without a word
and would not be seen with any heroes anymore.
This virgin without a name
belongs to her father, and he belongs to Apollo,
and all of them are in the transparent sphere, where only devotion exists,
only awe, only prayer.
She, having descended from the ship, dissolves
in the hands of her father
as wallpaper fades,
as walls crumble, as moisture evaporates,
without passion, without a name.
If he could also erase himself from the horizon
without pain…
But no, he is retraced, scratched out, he is cut
in the marble like the letters.
I turn to the mirror —
try to read it, but nothing is clear,
there are no chroniclers for me
(he smiles and ties his silk scarf
around his neck).
The elder walks at the edge of
the bustling sea,
polyphloisbos
where the waves accrue on the sand with a splash,
with foam, with thunder — and crawl back with a hiss;
silent, he is walking on the shore
in the never-ending noise of the abyss.
The sea does not listen to man,
but man thinks
he understands the language
in which the water talks
to him.
Every time they brought a note from her
he searched for the word yours.
God of mice, hear my prayers,
let her fall in love with me!
(The god of mice does not answer,
but quietly scratches in the corner
and rustles the wallpaper
all night.)
The ghosts of actors wander in the theater,
the shadows of heroes wander in Troy,
the shadows of words wander in the soul.
While you are asleep, she loves you,
Homer speaks to you, both of you can see,
both are alive, and life is beautiful
(but awakening heroes are crying
and ghosts are fading away).
After the sickness passed, they still didn’t allow him
to see himself in a mirror for a long time,
but he was so happy that he had recovered he didn’t care
because delirium — even if you are just twelve —
takes you to places
that are too dark.
He did not remember tulips in bloom there,
nor rivers of forgetfulness flowing.
He remembered only the grey air,
as though the earth was enveloped in clouds
and no sky. When he woke up
and started to catch with one eye
the light that flowed from the window
between the flower curtains
and heard the rooster’s cry and the bark
of fleetly-bounding dogs, oh, how he wanted to hug
them all!
Because over there in the gray sky-less air,
there was no one near. No chicken, nor cats
nor Avdotya, nor warm milk,
not even the cobweb, trembling,
when the window pane was open,
absolutely nothing at all: only he alone,
but how can one be that way — at twelve years old —
all alone —
and there?
Then he realized that