Question for Discussion: The Role of Music in The Master and Margarita
One of the more obvious, and delightful, elements of this story is the role of music in The Master and Margarita. Notably, many characters bear the names of famous composers: Berlioz, Rimsky, and Stravinsky, to name a few. In addition, a number of scenes feature actual music, either being played, or heard on the radio. Consequently the novel often seems to provide its own soundtrack. So what are among the ways Bulgakov uses music in this novel, and what do these say about his musical tastes?
This is the Master and Margarita cover I made for my translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s awesome tale of the extraordinary in 1930s Moscow, which will be published before the end of of 2017:
In an earlier post—Sympathy for the Devil in Russian Literature—I compared Bulgakov’s Satan with the Devil that appears to Dostoevsky’s character Ivan, one of the Brothers Karamazov. There are many similarities. Both seem to be gentlemanly, and in Dostoevsky, Ivan is sure that this character is the product of the delirium from his own “brain fever”, in Bulgakov, when the Master first encounters the Satan character, he says, “it would, of course, be much easier to consider you the product of a hallucination.” (These are reminiscent, too, of Scrooge’s argument that the ghost of Jacob Marley may be the result of a “slight disorder of the stomach,” in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”).
In that earlier post, I was concerned mainly with the outward appearance of the Devil, as described by both authors, and his manner. But I also included some discussion of how Dostoevsky’s Devil muses on the nature of good and evil, and his place in the conflict between them. He argues to Ivan that he is not inherently evil, or even bad, but that fate had chosen him to be the representative of these things, as a counterpoint to good: Continue reading “More Sympathy for the Devil in Russian Literature”
With two dreams, one after another in Master and Margarita, Bulgakov touches on some risky subjects.
As mentioned at the beginning of my last post (“Sympathy for the Devil in Russian Literature”), my efforts to translate Chapter XV of Master and Margarita, “Nikanor Ivanovich’s Dream,” led me to become fascinated with the use of dreams as a device in Russian novels. My first avenue for delving into this topic further was Dostoevsky’s use of it in The Brother’s Karamazov, specifically the chapter titled, “The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare.” This provided not only another example of a dream sequence, but also another depiction of the devil, so I devoted that last post to a comparison of Dostoevsky’s devil with Bulgakov’s.
Soviet Show Trial-https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/category/anarchism/volume-1/chapter-18-the-russian-revolution/
As it turns out, I did not win this year’s Compass Award for outstanding English language translation of Russian poetry, awarded through the Cardinal Points journal. I did not even make the short list.
Not too disappointed, though, as it was my first entry to any such competition, and now that I am no longer in the running I can present my work to anybody out there with any interest in the Russian poetry of the Soviet period.
This year the contest asked for translations of poems by Maria Petrovykh, a poet who was a friend of some of the greatest luminaries of the early Soviet period, notably Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam; Mandelstam’s poem, Masteritsa vinovatykh vzorov, that Akhmatova called “the greatest love poem of the 20th century,” was dedicated to Petrovykh.
Maria Petrovykh
The poem of hers I chose to translate for this contest is Муза—‘Muse.’ As I had not been familiar with ther work until I learned of this competition, I decided this poem would be a good place to start as it might give a clue to what inspired her to write. It turns out that “night” was one of her muses at this time. This is not that surprising for someone who had just survived WWI, the Russian Revolution, The Russian Civil War, the “Red Terror,” unprecedented poltical, economic and social experimentation and the beginnings of Stalinist totalitarianism.
But aside from historical context, I found this to be a beautiful poem, and my humble translation a pale ghost of the real thing. As always I struggled in my efforts to balance meaning, meter, tone and rhyme. I feel convinced that sacrifices must always be made of one for another; a strict observance of the exact meaning of each word makes it impossible to convey the meter and rhyme, but departing too much from meaning for these feels like an abomination.
But sacrificies must me made.
That said, below is my translation, followed by the original:
Muse
When by mistake I let the pen slip, Missing the inkwell, near the moon see it dip,- To the lake of black nights in its unceasing creep, Is stitched the overgrown inkwell with a dream from the nightingale’s keep,- Diverse harmonies rush from the pen, An astonishing layer of silver on them, They are like birds, of whose touch I am afraid, But the lines flock together and fill up the page. I welcome you here, wild-running night, And we have exactly one origin and plight- We are both dark for our doubting eyes, One homeland we share and she never dies. I remember how you were conquered by day, You remember how I, from the rock, broke away, You ever from the milky paths turn aside, In the cracks of the lines you do love to hide. Child of a dream, sketched with nightingale’s hues, Solitary reader, you are my muse. I see you off, with no thanks for your time, But in a froth of delight, I am brimming with rhyme.
More On the Strange Results from Free Online Translation Sites: Bulgakov’s “Varenukha,” A Spicy Fruit Liqueur? Or “The Blizzard Gets Stronger?”
Varenukha?or Varenukha?
In earlier posts I’ve hinted at my fascination with the strange and humorous forms that language sometimes takes in online translation applications (see posts-Google-translate: original Russian vs Google vs Me; Googlisms- Russian to English). These delight me on a number of levels: for the assurance I get that there is still something a human can do better than a computer, for the comedic value I see in this sort of verbal slapstick, and for the insights into the nature of language I gain from looking at how and why it can go so wrong.
Recently I discovered another free translation site that I find even more entertaining than Google or Bing (formerly Windows Live Translator); translation.babylon.com is especially notable for its greater tendency to insert proper names, often unnecessarily, and to translate a single word as an entire phrase, occasionally an English quote or idiom. I was especially struck, and remain puzzled, by its preference for rendering the name of one character from Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita–Varenukha, (Russian- Варенуха)–as the English phrase “the blizzard gets stronger.” Continue reading “The Blizzard Gets Stronger?”
History in Literature: The coup attempt in the Soviet Union of 19 August 1991 as viewed from the hinterlands.
Bolshoi Ballet-Swan Lake- WWW NEWS CN
I love reading good literature that gives a view of great historical moments from the perspective of ordinary people. At the beginning of Andrei Dmitriev‘s novel The Peasant and the Teenager (Крестьянин и Тинейджер) there is depicted, through the memories of a man in rural Russia, presumably the “peasant,” an event recent enough to be a part of my own consciousness–the coup attempt of August 1991 that sought to reestablish centralized Communist Party rule in the Soviet Union, in reaction to the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev.
The decline of Soviet economic and social life leading up to 1991 is highlighted in the reminiscences of Panyukov, the first character introduced in The Peasant and the Teenager, as he reflects on the life he shared with his childhood friend, Vova, after both had served with the Red Army in Afghanistan. Continue reading “Where Were You On 19 August 1991?”
Andrey Dmitriev’s character, Panyukov, marks time according to the life-cycle of his televisions
‘Sunrise’-Soviet Television Set
I have shifted back into translating prose for the time being. The poetry break was nice, but I want to try to actually finish a novel at some point. One of the attractive things about translating a poem, excepting epics like Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, is that it can be started and finished in a few days, maybe even just one. A novel, on the other hand, is a long term project.
I will present here another passage from The Peasant and the Teenager(Крестьянин и Тинейджер), by Andrey Dmitriev. As mentioned in an earlier post, this novel begins with the introduction of Panyukov, a man living in a village in rural Russia. Panyukov’s character is initially described through his own reflections on his past, on the “best of times” he had enjoyed when his friend Vova still lived across the road and they worked together raising livestock and growing food in their private gardens and greenhouse. The excerpt below hints that the passage of time for Russians living in farm country could be marked by the life-cycle of televisions. It is funny, poignant and sad in a way that only the relatively minor misfortunes of others can be. Continue reading “Panyukov’s Televisions”
