The following article offers an overview of the literary and scholarly receptions of Spenser in Russia, as well as a review of the latest scholarly edition of Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion in Russian translation, compiled and edited by Irina I. Burova (2018).[1] I am grateful to Jane Grogan and Andrew Hadfield for the opportunity to conduct research on Spenser and to experience his poetry in the ‘great and mighty Russian language’, my native tongue, which deeply informs my literary and scholarly sensibilities but rarely figures in my published work.[2]

Predictably, select Russian readers first became aware of Spenser through his associations with Shakespeare, his preeminent contemporary, and with Byron, who acknowledges his use of the Spenserian stanza in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and whose influence on Russian literature can hardly be underestimated. (It is through Byron that I first heard of Spenser as a teenager, although it was not until some years later, at university, that I read Spenser’s own stanzas and heard their hypnotic resonance – quite the change, after the booming sublimity of the later Childe Harold.) Predictably too, the earliest Russian encounters with Spenser in the original can be traced to Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (1799–1837), universally considered the father of Russian literature and the greatest Russian poet of all time. Just as Pushkin became the first major Russian author to read Shakespeare in English, to supplement the available but often unreliable eighteenth-century French and German translations,[3] so he became the first to familiarize himself with Spenser. The extent of this familiarity is uncertain, and unlike Shakespeare, Spenser left no traces of influence in Pushkin’s literary oeuvre. In one essay, unpublished during his lifetime, Pushkin names Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare as England’s proud answer to Dante, Ariosto, and Calderón. In another, he casually mentions Spenser – along with Ariosto, Boccaccio, La Fontaine, [Giovanni Battista] Casti, Chaucer, [Christoph Martin] Wieland, and Byron – in defending his comical verse tale Count Nulin against accusations of indecency, feigning incredulousness that the shamefast critics could know such ‘authors of jocular tales’ only by name.[4] What ‘jocular’ – or, in Burova’s gloss, ‘frivolous’ – tale of Spenser’s he has in mind is unclear, although the content of Pushkin’s tale and the catalogue of authors both suggest something like a fabliau. In a recorded conversation, Pushkin praises Spenser’s episode of Una and the Lion alongside Milton’s Comus (which he calls an ‘epitome of purity’) as an example of Christian English humanism in opposition to French, which tends to indecency and paganism.[5]

The first references to Spenser in literary-critical publications are dated to 1823 (in O. M. Somov’s ‘On Romantic Poetry’, which names him alongside Shakespeare as a major poet of the age), 1835 (in S. V. Shevyrev’s ‘History of Poetry’, which identifies Spenser as a poetic inheritor of Chaucer and Italian authors), and 1840 (in a short biographical profile of Sir Walter Raleigh by F. Shal’), but these do not indicate any real familiarity with Spenser’s poetry.[6] More substantive knowledge of Spenser’s art would not reach Russia until 1872, with the translation into Russian of Hippolyte Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise, which characterizes Spenser as a poet devoted to the highest Platonic ideals of beauty and purity, a dreamer given to fancy and contemplation, one whose epic similes likened him to Homer.[7] Spenser’s works in multiple genres are acknowledged and their titles named, but the chief focus is on The Faerie Queene. Whereas Taine’s Histoire provides a selection of Spenser’s texts along with literal prose translations, the Russian edition translates from the French, and omits the English originals. It is this text, however, that forms the basis of the first original publication in Russia that describes Spenser’s life and art in any detail: the one-page entry in N. V. Gerbel’s 1875 anthology English Poets in Biographies and Samples.[8] Here, Spenser is presented as the most famous and beloved poet of the age preceding Shakespeare’s, an epic poet in ‘romantic-allegorical garb’. Gerbel praises the ‘incredible strength and melodiousness’ of Spenser’s poetry, his ‘richness of fantasy’, but notes his occasional tediousness and – in a departure from Taine but in accord with the German philologist Stephan Gäschtenberger – laments Spenser’s ‘dark allegories’ and ‘neglect of verisimilitude’.[9] Spenser’s world in Gerbel’s account is ‘ideal and abstract’, characterized by ‘elevated sentiments and noblest feats’ but lacking а sense of ‘lived reality’ (lit. ‘life truth’), especially in comparison to Shakespeare, who entirely overshadows Spenser in that respect.[10] The unfavourable comparison of Spenser to Shakespeare would continue well into the twentieth century, and even now Spenser is considered a largely subsidiary author to the Bard.[11]

Gerbel’s anthology includes the first translations of Spenser into Russian. One of these, however, a twelve-line poem by M. L. Mikhaĭlov entitled ‘Contemplation’ (first published in 1847) is untraceable to any source in Spenser, and may well be an original work.[12] This poem also made its way into V. R. Zotov’s History of World Literature in Essays, Biographies, Characteristics, and Samples (1882).[13] The other is a real translation, by Gerbel himself, of stanzas 5-7 and 9-13 of Epithalamion, spliced together, under the latinized title Epithalamium.[14] Gerbel’s stanzas vary in length from 12 to 20 lines and take the form of iambic hexameter couplets, alternating between feminine and masculine rhymes, lacking Spenser’s refrains but retaining the repetition of ‘woods’ and ‘echo’ in each stanza’s last line.

No new Russian translations of Spenser would appear in print until 1937, with the publication of B. I. Purishev’s Chrestomathy of Western European Literature: Renaissance and 17^th Century.[15] The first edition includes Amoretti LXXXIX (trans. O. B. Rumer) and the episode of Una and the Lion (FQ I.iii.1-9, trans. M. D. Zabludovskiĭ), with a note on the Spenserian stanza as a modification of ottava rima and on the general plot of Book I of The Faerie Queene. The second edition (1938) expands the selection, adding passages from The Shepheardes Calender (‘May’, lines 1-36, trans. Rumer) and FQ I.i.1-10, I.i.39-41, and I.iii.1, 3-9 (‘Una and the Redcrosse Knight’, ‘Morpheus’ bower’, and ‘Una and the Lion’, trans. S. N. Protas’ev) in clean, modern Russian.[16] One of these latter passages (FQ I.iii.1), would appear in the entry on the Spenserian stanza in A. P. Kvi͡atkovskiĭ’s Poetical Dictionary (1966), along with a stanza from Byron (Childe Harold I.1, trans. G. Shengeli).[17] Otherwise, efforts at further translation of Spenser’s oeuvre were dormant again for several decades, and would not take off in earnest until the 1970s. Truly comprehensive translations only emerged in the last two decades or so, most of them concentrated in just the last few years.

Literary translation in Russia has been and continues to be a robust, well-developed industry. To this day, major Russian universities offer Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in literary translation. In Soviet times, literary translation was part of the institutional agenda of mass cultural education. The U.S.S.R. prided itself on its output of literary translation, and while the quality varied considerably and may be disputed, it is difficult to argue with the sheer quantity.[18] The wealth of literary translation in Soviet Russia (much like the wealth of children’s literature) can also be attributed to systematic state censorship. Authors whose original works were banned often turned to translation to make a living. Notable among them is Boris Pasternak, whose idiomatic translations of Shakespeare’s plays remain current and widely popular, with Hamlet and King Lear immortalized in the films directed by Grigoriĭ Kozint͡sev (1964 and 1971, respectively). Even so, translations of works or authors deemed ideologically unsound could languish unpublished for years, or be cut, expurgated, or otherwise ‘corrected’ for publication. Literary criticism was subject to similar restrictions. To wit, the first major scholarly studies on Shakespeare and Russian literature emerged only after Stalin’s death in 1953, with criticism on Hamlet in particular serving as a form of ‘Aesopian polemic’ against the regime.[19]

Spenser has always lagged far behind Shakespeare in reception, riding on his very long coattails. Several factors may have contributed to the lag, including the difficulty of Spenser’s pseudo-archaic idiom and the obscurity of his allegory.[20] Increasingly, however, Spenser was seen not merely as part of the context of Shakespeare’s work, but as an important author in his own right. A major step towards this recognition was the publication of the volume European Renaissance Poets (1974) as part of the series Library of World Literature (Biblioteka Vsemirnoĭ Literatury, hence BVL), a massive, 200-volume editorial project (1967-77) with a print run of over 300,000 copies.[21] The general introduction by R. M. Samarin notes Spenser’s significance as a national author and his transformative effect on English poetry, both in content and in style. Selections of Spenser include excerpts from The Shepheardes Calender (the sestina from ‘August’ and all of ‘October’, the former translated by Vladimir Rogov, the latter by Andreĭ Sergeev), The Faerie Queene (I.vii.27-36 [Una encounters Arthur], IV.Proem and x.21-27 [Scudamore describes Venus’s Island], trans. Sergeev), Amoretti (in this order, XXXVII, LXII, and XIX, trans. Sergeev; XXX, XXXIV, LIV, LXX, LXXII, and LXXV, trans. Rogov; and LXIII, trans. Vladimir Mikushevich), and, oddly, Iambicum Trimetrum (trans. Rogov). All these translations adhere strictly to Spenser’s metrical forms, including the sestina, with perfectly replicated end-words, and are written in a literary, modern Russian. The selection successfully conveys Spenser’s versatility and formal innovation and represents him as both an epic and a lyric poet, one who celebrated Elizabeth I, but also issued veiled criticisms of her court under the guise of pastoral simplicity.[22]

With the publication of the BVL volume, Spenser in Russia finally takes his rightful place as a major poet of the English Renaissance. From this point on, his name and works are consistently represented in literary anthologies and encyclopaedias, and, starting in the mid-1970s, the first scholarly publications on Spenser begin to emerge.[23] Still, until recently, translation of Spenser remained fragmentary at best, with new translations of individual poems from the Amoretti appearing in various anthologies of English and/or Renaissance poetry, particularly sonnets – a tendency attributable to the enduring primacy of Shakespeare.[24] Spenser’s lyric poetry has far outstripped his epic, and wholesale translation of Spenser’s longer works is only a very recent phenomenon. The first full translation of The Shepheardes Calender appeared in 2016, the first concerted effort at The Faerie Queene (Book I and parts of Books II and III, trans. Mikushevich) in 2019.[25]

By contrast, the past two decades have seen a veritable explosion of Amoretti. An edition of Amoretti and Epithalamion to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of Spenser’s death, compiled and edited by Burova, offers the first complete translation of the work by a team of scholars and translators, most of them based in St. Petersburg, as well as the first full translation of the Epithalamion by Sergeĭ A. Stepanov.[26] The first complete single-author translation of the Amoretti by Aleksandr V. Pokidov (2001, rendered as Love Messages: a cycle of 88 sonnets, omitting LXXXIII as a redundancy) is a bilingual edition but not an altogether scholarly one, despite the presence of annotations and glosses. In the space of its short introduction, it manages to misstate the age difference between Spenser and Shakespeare (‘14 years’) and to attribute to Spenser a few misquoted lines from Donne’s ‘The Good-Morrow’.[27] The English text is modernized, and not error-free. The edition is notable, nonetheless, for its unified aesthetic and its consistent, elevated, celebratory style. The partial translation by I͡uriĭ Erusalimskiĭ (2008), aimed at a general audience, is of highly uneven quality: while some poems closely follow Spenser’s content and style, others entirely ignore the original’s metrics and rhyme scheme, and sound more like variations on Spenserian themes.[28] The first translation of the complete Amoretti and Epithalamion together by Aleksandr Luk’i͡anov appears as part of a much more rigorous, philologically-informed volume that also includes the Fowre Hymnes (2011). If the article I found is indeed the introduction to this volume, it is a solid, scholarly one, detailing the poems’ architectonic structures and several key contexts: Petrarchism and anti-Petrarchism, Protestant conceptions of marriage, Neoplatonism, Christian ethics and the liturgical calendar, and the emotional development of courtly love.[29]

The present, newest edition of Amoretti and Epithalamion by Irina Burova is the most comprehensive scholarly edition to date, and announces itself as such. It makes a point, for instance, of carefully replicating the typography of Spenser’s original publication, such as the indents and capitalizations of the Amoretti, and of not translating the title to retain its nuances and connotations. All the texts, the editor tells us, were meticulously checked against the Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems, and the extensive explanatory notes in the back of the book – providing thorough glosses, quotations of relevant classical, continental, and biblical passages, and a running narrative of the sequence as a whole – clearly benefit from familiarity with this edition. The main text of the Amoretti includes translations by twenty different scholars and professional translators. A plurality of the sonnets, 21 in total, is translated by Elena Dunaevskai͡a, among which are some of the most elegant in the collection. Burova and N. Lebedeva contribute nine each; other translators between one and six. The Anacreontics and Epithalamion are in Stepanov’s translation. Somewhat surprisingly, almost none of the translations in this volume are new. The oldest is Rumer’s LXXXIX; some are reprinted from the 1974 BVL; even the more recent ones have already seen print in the 1999 volume. This present edition, however, published under the aegis of the Literary Monuments series from scholarly Nauka Publishers, is sure to give Spenser’s poetry a wider dissemination and more prominent status.

Before I comment on the translations, I should acknowledge that my priorities as a scholar may or may not correspond with those of the translators and editors of this volume, and my aesthetic preferences and tastes (perhaps especially in my native language) inevitably factor into my evaluation. Although prevalent theories and prescribed practices of translation have shifted over time, often depending on the political context, Russian literary translation traditionally values the ability to convey the original’s stylistic and aesthetic qualities. In poetry, this may entail a slightly freer treatment of content in favour of artistic expression. This principle is expressed most forcefully in the famous aphorism of nineteenth-century poet and translator V. A. Zhukovskiĭ: ‘A translator of prose is a slave; a translator of verse – a rival.’ (Sometimes, the rivalry is all too successful: after reading Blake in Samuil Marshak’s translation, it took me years to appreciate the original.) The present set of translations maintains a healthy balance between accuracy and artistry. Still, an evaluation of accuracy must address not only what may be lost or omitted, but also what poetic flourishes are added and how well they comport with the original. For instance, ‘an hundred Graces’ that sit on the lady’s eyelids in Amoretti XL are crowded into an adjective, grat͡siózna: when the lady smiles, ‘every eyelash, graceful and tender, sends forth a sunbeam’ – imprecise, but lovely. The ‘fayre sunshine in somers day’ becomes the sky turning blue again after a storm, a colour echoed in the last line as the speaker is warmed by the azure of the lady’s clear (unclouded) look. Somewhat less successful flourishes – yet still well within Petrarchan conventions – appear in the blazon in XV, which substitutes Spenser’s ivory for ‘Parian marble’, adds a ‘breath of myrrh’, and specifies the ‘rubies of Kashmir’, the latter two in order to rhyme with ‘sapphire’.

Overall, I have been impressed and delighted by the quality of the translations, and while occasional infelicities are inescapable, genuine howlers are very few. Russian, in many ways, is a natural fit for translation from English (but decidedly not vice versa). A stress-timed, highly inflected language, it is well suited to the iambic metre and to the sonnet form, offering both an abundance of rhymes and substantial syntactical flexibility. One need look no further than Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, in which he pioneered a complex fourteen-line stanza in iambic tetrameter, rhyming ababccddeffegg, with a-, c-, and e-rhymes feminine and the rest masculine. Yet as a predominantly synthetic language (as opposed to the more analytic English), Russian faces a challenge in conveying Spenser’s lines, with their relatively low morpheme-to-word ratio. Spenser’s diction, especially in the Amoretti, tends to be mono- and disyllabic, and the musicality of his lines is achieved through repetitions, balanced phrases, alliterations and assonances. Naturally unstressed prepositions, pronouns, articles, and auxiliary verbs provide soft padding to the more substantive parts of speech. Translations in the present volume often, but not always, dispense with alliteration, and vowel reduction in Russian makes true assonance largely impracticable. Instead, Spenser’s characteristic musicality is achieved through longer words, which also mitigate somewhat the language’s notorious consonant clusters. Russian verse can operate beautifully in plainer, shorter diction (again, witness Pushkin, whose verse can sound as natural as everyday speech without missing a bit of its melodiousness), but in a form as constrained as the sonnet, it makes sense to take advantage of the generally higher ratio of morpheme to word. Take, for instance, these lines from Amoretti XXI (trans. M. Bortkovskai͡a):

For with mild pleasance, which doth pride displace,
  she to her loves doth lookers eyes allure:
  and with sterne countenance back again doth chace
  their looser lookes that stir up lustes impure.[30]

Prognáv gordýni͡u, míloĭ prostotói͡u
  vli͡ublënnykh vzgli͡ády privlechët oná,
  no vspýkhnuvshikh neskrómnoi͡u mechtói͡u
  otvérgnet, nepreklónno kholodná.[31]

 

Thirty-two words in English become fifteen in Russian, and yet almost none of the substance is lost. The first line still gives the contrast between ‘pride’ (dismissed) and ‘mild pleasance’; in the second, the lady still allures lovers’ looks (with an alliteration, to boot); the third and fourth capture the enjambment: ‘but those inflamed with an immodest dream / she will reject, inexorably cold.’ The effect of such translations is one of greater compression, sophistication, and specificity, in opposition to Spenser’s expansion, deceptive simplicity, and occasional gauzy vagueness. This strategy in translation carries a risk that the resulting poems could sound overcomplicated and hyperbolic. Pokidov’s renditions, for instance, often embellish the courtly aspects of Spenser’s sequence far too much for my liking. Fortunately, such excesses are rare in the present edition, and sometimes polysyllabic, sophisticated diction is indeed appropriate, as in the Neoplatonic sonnet LXXIX. Still, some of the best translations in the collection are those that retain both Spenser’s musicality and his plainer diction.

Elsewhere, some repetitions are reduced (e.g. the triple anaphora of ‘Fayre’ in LVI; most of the polyptoton of ‘assured/assurance’ in LVIII-LVIX), but some translations do capture rhetorically significant repetitions to great effect, as in Amoretti I (‘happy’, blazhénny, suggesting both ‘happy’ and ‘blessed’). Spenser’s pseudo-archaic diction presents a particular difficulty for the Russian language, whose modern form is relatively young and makes a sharper, more conscious break from its older forms. To convey Spenser’s unique idiom, translators selectively introduce poetic and slightly archaic Russian words, which do not always correspond exactly to Spenser’s (e.g. poetic and archaic laníty, ustá, and dlan’ for plain ‘cheeks’, ‘lips’, and ‘hand’), but successfully achieve the effect of the milder archaism of the Amoretti and Epithalamion.[32] With the exception of a few words, the Russian in these poems does not sound as alien to my ear as Spenser’s English might to a modern reader, but it is distinctive enough to be recognizably Spenserian.

The edition includes several appendices, which together occupy more pages than the central text: a reprint of Pokidov’s complete Amoretti; selective alternative renditions of individual sonnets (a total of thirty-three sonnets are represented, some in multiple versions, including four additional versions of LXXV and three of XXX); the Anacreontics and Epithalamion translated by Luk’i͡anov; the fragmentary translation of Epithalamion by Gerbel; and Prothalamion translated by Dunaevskai͡a, appearing in print for the first time. With such a smorgasbord of variations available for comparison, it is unfortunate that this edition does not include Spenser’s original, as the earlier one by Burova did. An edition of this scope and production value would be a prime candidate for facing-page translations to benefit scholarly and casual readers alike. After sampling the B-side translations of the sonnets, I generally agree with the editor’s choices for the main text. For reasons I cannot discern, however – perhaps editorial principles or issues of copyright – Luk’i͡anov is rather underrepresented among the supplemental Amoretti, although in my estimation he often achieves more precise translations and retains more of Spenser’s repetitions and vocabulary.

The number and variety of available Russian translations of the Amoretti is a testament both to Spenser’s aesthetic appeal and to the inventiveness he inspires. It may be instructive to consider the sheer range of translations of Amoretti LXXV, the most frequently translated sonnet of the sequence:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
  but came the waves and washed it a way:
  agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
  but came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
Vayne man, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay,
  a mortall thing so to immortalize.
  for I my selve shall lyke to this decay,
  and eek my name bee wyped out lykewise.
Not so, (quod I) let baser things devize
  to dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
  my verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
  and in the hevens wryte your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,
  our love shall live, and later life renew.

The best versions, in my view, are by Pokidov and Luk’i͡anov. Both capture the wavelike rhythm of the first quatrain and the distinction between the waves and the tide. Both also capture the double polyptoton in the second quatrain, ‘vayne’/‘in vaine’ and ‘mortall’/‘immortalize’, the latter identically (obessmértit’ smértnoe), the former with one word identical (tshcheslávnyĭ, ‘vain’) and the other alliterative (tshchítsi͡a, ‘strive, assay’ in Pokidov; tschëtno, ‘in vain’ in Luk’i͡anov). This is one instance in which Luk’i͡anov’s more precise translation yields too strong a verb in Russian (‘decay’), but Pokidov makes too mild the erasure of the lady’s name. In both these translations, the third quatrain rightly elevates the tone, with Pokidov’s speaker promising the lady the ‘brilliance of stars’, Luk’i͡anov’s offering ‘godlikeness’; the renderings of ‘and in the hevens write your glorious name’ are identical.[33] The translation included in the main text of Burova’s edition, by A. Kokhanova, rather suffers by comparison. There is only one polyptoton in the second quatrain (tlénnoe for ‘mortall’ and istléi͡ut for ‘decay’), while the third presents the extraneous image of the ‘plough of centuries’ ploughing through all and turning it to dust, which mars an otherwise tasteful translation. Supplemental versions of LXXV exemplify the individuality of each interpreter. The syntactically difficult version by G. Usova amplifies the sonnet’s maritime activity: the lady’s name is washed away first by the tide, and next by the ‘ninth wave’ (devi͡átyĭ val), the hugest there is. V. Rogov’s calmer translation retains the waves and the tide, but introduces dunes. The lady sounds forlorn as she reminds the speaker of her mortality, but the sestet spells out firmly yet modestly what dies in dust and what lives on in the heavens. V. Novozhilov’s sestet is bolder, as if issuing a challenge to fate. The version by A. Shvedchikov, written in quatrains of anapestic tetrameter with an iambic pentameter couplet, gives the poem a more chivalric character. In short, all the available translations have something interesting to offer and capture some element of the original.

Some of my favourite translations in the edition’s main text of the Amoretti are as follows: XXX and XXXI (trans. M. Kononov), the first conveying brilliantly the play of Petrarchan paradox and retaining such crucial details as ‘boyling sweat’ (the gloss explains the pun on ‘Boyle’), the second using some vivid, idiomatic diction to depict the lady’s cruelty (krovávai͡a raspráva for ‘bloody bath’; li͡útyĭ nrav for ‘cruelty’, with added animal ferocity); XIX (trans. A. Sergeev) and LXX (trans. V. Rogov), both reprinted from the BVL volume, both closely rendering the joy of spring in Spenser’s original with a refreshing touch of Russian nature poetry; and the vituperative LXXXVI (trans. Dunaevskai͡a, showing great range), which adds strength and specificity to Spenser’s outburst against a slanderous tongue: ‘all the plagues and horrid paines of hell’ sound much less threatening compared to ‘May devils rip you from your rotten maw’ (da výrvut chérti iz gnilógo zéva). There are many others I found truly excellent, in whole or in part.

I must, however, point out a few instances in which the translation’s imprecision goes beyond infelicity. The first is Amoretti L, in which the speaker is visited by a physician, whom the speaker calls a ‘Vayne man … that hast but little priefe / in deep discovery of the mynds disease’. The main text in Russian gives, instead, ‘But all his leeches are but lies: / what use is there in this bloodletting?’ The gruesome image is not a carry-over from ‘leach’, which is understood correctly in the couplet, but an unnecessary artistic liberty. Pokidov’s version is more accurate, stressing the doctor’s ‘inexperience’, but cannot resist some unwarranted sarcasm at his arrival, and for ‘wounded heart’ gives mytárstvo, a colloquialism for extreme suffering, but also a term in Orthodox Christianity for the torments experienced by the soul in aerial toll houses (or telonia). Another supplemental translation amplifies the dismissive reaction to the physician’s visit, calling him a ‘charlatan, with some kind of ointment’ and in the next line a ‘blockhead of a doctor’. Luk’i͡anov achieves the most neutral tone with the least deviation from the original, and correctly names the physician’s main fault: vanity. Whereas translations of L suffer from excessive specificity, in XXVI it is precisely Spenser’s specificity that proves a stumbling block:

Sweet is the Rose, but growes upon a brere;
  sweet is the Junipere, but sharpe his bough;
  sweet is the Eglantine, but pricketh nere;
  sweet is the firbloome, but his braunches rough.
Sweet is the Cypresse, but his rynd is tough,
  sweet is the nut, but bitter is his pill;
  sweet is the broome-flowre, but yet sowre enough;
  and sweet is Moly, but his root is ill.

As the gloss in the Yale edition points out, this flower catalogue emphasizes the ‘lower’ senses of touch and smell. The first six plants share an inner sweetness and outer sharpness or toughness. For ‘sweet’ the main translation gives the more generic otráden/otrádna, ‘pleasant’, and in the first quatrain botanical substitutions stray from the sensory focus of the original, pointing instead to the nakedness of a poplar in winter and the lack of light under a fir tree. The catalogue recovers with the oak (its trunk is rough), but goes awry again in the second quatrain, listing the pleasantness of honey (but the bees sting), pepper (but it is not sweet), and onion (but it has a strong odour) before concluding correctly with moly. Pokidov fares better, keeping the catalogue botanical throughout, but introduces some more exotic plants such as the orchid (which intoxicates), the edelweiss (hidden by crags), and the poppy (breeds strange dreams), and instead of the mythical moly gives the ordinary elder. Once again, Luk’i͡anov offers the most accurate translation, but neither this nor his version of L are included in the present edition. His catalogue correctly identifies all the plants listed, including the juniper (mozhzhevél’nik), the eglantine (shipóvnik), and even the broom-flower (rakítnik). Luk’i͡anov uses two adjectives instead of one for the anaphora (prekrásen and krasív, meaning ‘fair’ and ‘beautiful’; the former also used by Pokidov throughout) to maintain the iambic pentameter, but otherwise his translation is far and away the best of the ones available.

For all the compelling arguments, including Burova’s, on the integral role of the Anacreontics in the structure of the Amoretti and Epithalamion, I would be inclined to ignore them in this review, were it not for the error, in both Stepanov’s and Luk’i͡anov’s translations, that would have the poems’ speaker, and not the lady, wounded with Diana’s arrow. Both translations of Poem 4 (Cupid and the bee), particularly Stepanov’s, are impossibly charming and cute, reminiscent of the best examples of Russian poetry for children.

Perhaps inevitably, more than any individual sonnet, the star of the sequence is the Epithalamion, translated by Stepanov: expansive, exuberant, rich and rhythmic, capturing both the local subtleties (including Spenser’s gentle humour) and the overarching symmetries of the poem. One of my recurring quibbles concerning the Russian Amoretti is the spillage of sentences and phrases over the quatrain boundaries, particularly between lines 8 and 9 – a powerful poetic choice, but more typical of Shakespeare than Spenser. The longer stanza of the Epithalamion allows the translator greater flexibility for syntactical rearrangement, which helps preserve more of the content and texture of the original without sacrificing the metrics and rhyme scheme. Luk’i͡anov’s Epithalamion (included in the appendix) is likewise excellent, but I must agree with Burova in giving the edge to Stepanov for the more vibrant sound and more supple versification of his translation. The two translators’ handling of Spenser’s refrains is illustrative in this respect. Stepanov opts for rhymes on two archaic, poetic nouns, glagól (‘word, speech’, implicitly ‘song’) and dol (‘vale’, from whence the echoes ring).[34] Luk’i͡anov’s translation replicates more closely the rhyme on verbs ‘sing’ and ‘ring’: pet’ and zvenét’ in their root forms, with slight variations achieved through prefixes (propét’, spet’, prozvenét’) and later the negative, ne zvenét’. Yet the Russian infinitives, with the palatalized t’s, sound tinny compared to the more sonorous glagól/dol. The triumphant and solemn central stanza 13 of the Epithalamion is a triumph in Stepanov’s rendering. The image of the blushing bride is distilled to a red rose in the snow (the participle krasnéi͡a is wonderfully vivid, encompassing both ‘flush up’ and ‘red’, ‘vermill’, and ‘crimsin’), while the angelic presence is expanded: the angels are powerless to take their eyes off her beauty, and the fervor (pyl) of their ‘stare[s]’ makes her face ‘more fayre’. Their song (glagól) soars to the heavens. Yet some of the loveliest passages, and my favourites, are those of evening and nightfall (stanzas 16-18), especially the arrival of the evening star:

Hast thee O fayrest Planet to thy home
Within the Westerne fome:
Thy tyred steedes long since have need of rest.
Long though it be, at last I see it gloome,
And the bright evening star with golden creast
Appeare out of the East.

 

O Sólnt͡se, na pokóĭ tebé porá –
Ty trúdish’si͡a s utrá.
Vot nakonét͡s tvoë pobléklo óko
I v chístom bléske zlatoserebrá
Vechérni͡ai͡a zvezdá, dozhdávshis’ sróka,
I͡avli͡aetsi͡a s vostóka.

 

[O Sun, it is time for you (to go) to rest; you have been labouring since morning. There, at last, your eye has dimmed, and in a pure radiance of gold-and-silver the evening star, having reached her long-awaited time, appears out of the east.]

In addition to, and immediately following, the supplementary translations, the edition includes Burova’s excellent scholarly introduction, ‘Amoretti and Epithalamion: Edmund Spenser and his Endless Monument of Love’, which offers a succinct yet thorough account of Spenser’s life, works, and literary legacy, of the history of the English sonnet (from Chaucer, through Wyatt and Surrey, with notable stops at Thomas Watson, Barnabe Barnes, Henry Constable, Daniel, Drayton, and, of course, Sidney), of the epithalamic tradition (with a stronger emphasis on Sappho than on Catullus as the codifier of the genre’s conventions), and of Amoretti and Epithalamion proper, with a particular focus on Spenser’s poetic innovations, religion and spirituality, and (not least) numerology. On this latter subject, Burova cites the works of Alexander Dunlop, A. Kent Hieatt, Alastair Fowler, Carol Kaske, and Anne Lake Prescott, among others, and offers what I think may be new and interesting numerological observations, but rather weakens the case with an overlong discursion on the number ‘nine’ and citations of early twentieth-century works of popular numerology. In the extensive discussion of numerological, calendrical, thematic, and narrative structures of Amoretti and Epithalamion, particularly the passages on the importance of the Anacreontics, the essay reads less like a scholarly introduction and more like an academic argument in its own right, valuable and convincing, but probably too technical for a more general audience. Yet for a scholarly article, the bibliography appears not altogether complete, with a heavier than expected reliance on early to mid-twentieth-century scholarship, and raises questions about the availability in Russia of recent academic publications on Spenser.

Russian scholarly publication on Spenser since the 1970s has continued to be sporadic, but has picked up speed in the last two decades. As yet, there has been no book, monograph or collection of essays, entirely on Spenser, although the monograph of A. N. Gorbunov on John Donne discusses Spenser at some length.[35] It may be too early to identify trends in Russian scholarship on Spenser, but a preliminary bibliography indicates an interest in Spenser’s linguistic idiosyncrasies,[36] translation (both of Spenser and by Spenser),[37] metrics and style,[38] numerology and architectonic structures,[39] religion,[40] and his influence on later poets.[41] Many of the existing articles appear in journals published by the authors’ academic institutions and regional organizations. Individual Spenser scholars are few, and indeed an exclusive focus on Spenser may be considered too narrow a specialization in the Russian academic system. The few scholars who do publish on Spenser, however, are increasingly prolific. Burova, for one, has done much to remedy what she perceives as a relative scarcity of scholarly work on Spenser’s shorter poems, regularly publishing short articles, including ones co-authored with her doctoral students, who in turn are beginning to publish independently.[42] Elena V. Haltrin-Khalturina, who trained as a Romanticist at Louisiana State University, has published several significant articles on the allegory of The Faerie Queene and the different races of Faerie Land.[43]

It is unclear how much direct communication the small but growing community of Russian Spenserians has had with the Spenserian community at large. The coming decade is likely to see an increasing interest in Spenser in Russian academic circles, and perhaps among the general public. A full literary translation of The Faerie Queene – whether by a single hand or by an all-star team of scholars and translators such as those who contributed to the present edition – is urgently needed to make Spenser a more familiar figure in Russian readers’ understanding of English Renaissance literature. Such a monumental work would make a fine addition to the Literary Monuments series, perhaps occupying more than one volume. I also look forward to seeing what Spenser’s satirical poems such as Mother Hubberds Tale sound like in colourful Russian. I hope, too, to see the work of Russian Spenserians and other early modernists in English-language publications. Russia has a strong tradition of literary studies, and the insights of Russian scholars on Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, and others will surely enrich the international conversation on Spenser and early modern literature.

                                                                                                Yulia Ryzhik

                                                                                    University of Toronto Scarborough