After several poems in English, I wanted to try another language again. I chose Mikhail Lermontov’s “The Sail,” a short Russian poem about a lone sail at sea.
I began with the Russian, an approximate pronunciation guide and a deliberately plain translation, before reading a polished version or anything about the poem.
The poem
Белеет парус одинокой
В тумане моря голубом!..
Что ищет он в стране далекой?
Что кинул он в краю родном?..Играют волны — ветер свищет,
И мачта гнется и скрыпит...
Увы! он счастия не ищет
И не от счастия бежит!Под ним струя светлей лазури,
Над ним луч солнца золотой...
А он, мятежный, просит бури,
Как будто в бурях есть покой!
Approximate pronunciation
This is only a guide for an English speaker sounding out the Russian.
Beléyet párus odinókoy
V tumáne mórya golubóm!..
Chto íshchet on v strané dalyókoy?
Chto kínul on v krayú rodnóm?..
Igráyut vólny — véter svíshchet,
I máchta gnyótsya i skripít...
Uvý! on schástiya ne íshchet
I ne ot schástiya bezhít!
Pod nim struyá svetléy lazúri,
Nad nim luch sólntsa zolotóy...
A on, myatézhny, prósit búri,
Kak búdto v búryakh yest pokóy!
A simple, naive translation
A lone sail gleams white
In the blue mist of the sea!..
What does it seek in a distant land?
What did it leave in its native land?..The waves play — the wind whistles,
And the mast bends and creaks...
Alas! It does not seek happiness,
Nor is it fleeing from happiness!Beneath it, a current brighter than azure;
Above it, a golden ray of sun...
But it, rebellious, asks for a storm,
As though there were peace in storms!
This is deliberately plain. It is there to show me roughly what the Russian words are doing before I read a translator’s poem.
Before I read a polished translation
I happened to be spending the day on the beach, with fog rolling in and swallowing the sails. It felt like the perfect backdrop for reading this poem aloud.
Those last two lines make the ship feel tempestuous to me, too bored by the calm and prettiness around it. I can identify with that ship.
Listening to the Russian
I listened to Mikhail Tsaryov read the poem. I thought I would hear his tone change when he reached the last two lines, but I couldn’t.
Two translations
Alice Stone Blackwell’s translation was published in The Russian Review in 1916:
A lone white sail on the horizon
Upon the azure sea doth stand.
What seeks he in this foreign region?
What left he in his native land?The whistling breeze the mast is bending,
The playful waves around him rise.
Ah! not for happiness he searches,
And not from happiness he flies.The sun is bright as gold above him,
Light spray below, a snowy fleece;
But he, rebellious, seeks the tempest,
As though the storms could bring him peace!
Max Eastman’s translation appeared in The Nation in 1925:
White is the sail and lonely
On the misty, infinite blue;
Flying from what in the homeland?
Seeking for what in the new?The waves romp, and the winds whistle,
And the mast leans and creaks;
Alas! He flies not from fortune,
And no good fortune he seeks.Beneath him the stream luminous, azure,
Above him the sun’s golden breast;
But he, a rebel, invites the storms,
As though in the storms were rest.
By far and away, Blackwell’s is the rendition I love. The spark of solidarity I felt with the ship grows into a blaze in her translation. I love its rhythm too.
What I learned
Lermontov wrote “The Sail” in 1832, when he was only seventeen. One of the surviving copies is in a letter he sent to Maria Lopukhina from St. Petersburg on September 2. The poem had no title in the letter. He introduced it simply as more verses he had written “on the seashore.” It was not published until 1841, the year he died.
The Russian looks simple, but it is very tightly made. There are three quatrains of iambic tetrameter with alternating rhymes. Each stanza follows the same movement. Two lines show us something that can be seen or heard, then two lines try to read a motive into it. The first stanza ends with questions, the second with a statement and the third with an exclamation. The emotional pressure increases even as the form remains steady. Perhaps that is why I expected the reciter’s voice to turn more sharply at the end.
Blackwell’s decision to call the sail “he” isn’t just old-fashioned language. Parus, the Russian word for sail, is grammatically masculine, and Lermontov repeatedly refers to it with the masculine pronoun on. English makes the translator choose. Calling the sail “it” leaves us looking at an object. Calling him “he” makes it easier to see a creature with motives and to feel solidarity with him.
The word translated as “rebellious” is myatezhny. It is related to myatezh, a rebellion or uprising, and can carry shades of rebellious, mutinous, turbulent and restless. The sail isn’t merely bored. He is in revolt.
The verb in that line is also stronger and stranger than either polished translation quite suggests. Prosit buri means that he asks for, or requests, a storm. Blackwell has him seek the tempest; Eastman has him invite the storms. In the Russian, he asks for one. The final line then says, literally, “as if in storms there is peace.” He is not seeking peace after the storm. He imagines finding it inside one.
The poem never actually tells us that the sail represents Lermontov, or anyone else. There is no explicit comparison. The descriptions simply become human a little at a time, until a patch of white in the mist can seek, abandon, flee, rebel and ask for trouble. By the end, it is hard not to treat the sail as a person.
Even the famous opening line has a history. It echoes a line from Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s 1828 narrative poem Andrei, Prince of Pereyaslavl. Lermontov took the borrowed image somewhere else entirely.
Reading it again
The more I have read about this poem and Blackwell’s translation, the more I love it. Its control, its principled structure and, most of all, its appeal to find peace not after a storm but in it, all resonate with me.
What stayed with me
The appeal in the last two lines of Blackwell’s translation is one I love, in part because she uses tempest, a word I adore:
But he, rebellious, seeks the tempest,
As though the storms could bring him peace!