Samuil Marshak's Translations Wordsworth's "Lucy" Poems (1) (William Wordsworth‪)‬

Ironically, William Wordsworth (1770-1850)--"the greatest English poet since Milton" and one whose "historical influence on language, ideas, and manners has been immense" according to the respected scholar of English Romanticism, Carl Woodring--"has been translated to little effect ... relative to a Dante, a Shakespeare, a Bunyan, or a Dostoevsky." (2) One of the relatively few translators of Wordsworth has been Samuil Marshak (1887-1964), quintessential Soviet Russian man of letters of his time. Marshak was a successful poet, translator, political satirist and state propagandist, magazine editor, and author of children's books. Moreover, he was the founder of the state children's publishing house, and in his moving depiction of pre-revolutionary Jewish life in his memoirs he established himself as "a link in the chain of many generations of Russian Jewry." (3) One of the projects Marshak undertook as poet-translator involved four of the five short lyrics of Wordsworth that posterity has brought together under the rubric of the "Lucy" poems. (These four poems appear below in Appendix A; Marshak's translations, in Cyrillic, appear in Appendix B; our back-translations of Marshak's versions appear in Appendix C.) (4) It should be noted at the outset that much is lost if the reader tends to view the "Lucy" poems as simply traditional "love" poems. The "Lucy" poems are in fact, first of all, as Geoffrey Durrant says, "'lyrical ballads,' each of which tells a verse story and presents it dramatically. To confuse the mode of the 'Lucy' poems with that of the love lyric is to overlook their structure, in which, as in the traditional ballad, a story is told as boldly and briefly as possible.... (5) A comparison of, say, the first stanza of "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" with the first stanza of the traditional ballad "Katharine Jaffray":