Zukovskij and Southey's Ballads: The Translator As Rival (1) (Vasilij Andreevic Zukovskij, Robert Southey‪)‬

Vasilij Andreevic Zukovskij (1783-1852), whom his contemporary Lord Byron called "the Russian nightingale," has more recently been described as the "most original translator in world literature," (2) and his translation of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" in 1802 has been said to mark the birthday of Russian poetry. Zukovskij, son of a Russian gentleman and a captive Turkish girl, grew up to become tutor to the future Czar Alexander II and the acknowledged patriarch of the Russian Golden Age of Poetry. The bulk of his work consisted of his translations from the poetry of the Western World, particularly Germany (his German favorites were Uhland and Schiller) and Great Britain. The masterpiece of his old age, however, was a brilliant translation of The Odyssey based on a word-for-word German translation, since he did not know Greek. (3) Zukovskij said of his own work, "Almost everything I have is someone else's, and yet everything is my own." And his comment on another poet stands as a gloss to the statement about himself: "A poet-translator can be an original author, even though he has written nothing of his own. A translator in prose is a slave; a translator in verse is a rival." (4) Zukovskij's epoch-making translation of Gray's "Elegy" was followed by his translation, in part, of Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" in 1805 and then by his versions of poems by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, James Thomson, Goldsmith again, and David Mallet. Southey's "Rudiger" in 1813, Zukovskij's first translation of a poem from the English Romantic Movement, was followed the next year by his translations of Southey's "Lord William" and "The Old Woman of Berkeley." Then, apparently surfeited with Southey, he turned to other writers: "It's always either devils or coffins," he said. "Don't think that I want to be carried down to posterity on devils alone." (5) During the years before his interest in Southey's devils and coffins was revived, he translated works by Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, and Sir Walter Scott, and alter leaving Southey a second time in 1831 he translated a poem by Thomas Campbell and, finally, in 1839, Gray's "Elegy" once again.