Sergei Yesenin

 

Tadpoles. Warminster, 2 April 2023.

Reading Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Wild Berries has reminded me how little Russian literature I really know, and especially Russian poetry. So this evening I picked one of the recurring names, it was Sergei Yesenin (1895 - 1925), and decided to read a little deeper. 

I was helped by finding this site: https://ruverses.com/sergey-esenin/ , an assemblage of all the translations it could find (with the Russian text opposite), mostly into English but also other languages. The texts are often a mess (the French ones, for instance, contain no accents). 

 (It also includes a quite informative introduction; an anonymous bit of soviet-style propaganda. "His grave is perpetually scattered with flowers left by admiring readers — taxi drivers, workers, students, and simple Russian grandmothers.")

They are drinking here again, brawling, sobbing,
to the amber woes of the accordion.
They curse their luck and they hark back
to a Russia — a Moscow — of other days.

For my part, I duck my head,
my eyes foundering in wine,
rather than look fate in the face,
I think of something else for a while.

There is something that we have all lost forever.
My dark blue May, my pale blue June,
that must be why the corpse smell
dogs this frantic carousal.

Oh, today’s a great day for the Russians
the homemade vodka’s flowing
and the noseless accordionist’s singing
of the Volga and the secret police.

They’re grumbling that bony October
caught them all in its blizzard
courage has gone back to whetting
the knife from its boot.

A hatred shifts in the eyes
rebellion grates in the raised voices
and they pity the young and foolish
whose blood flamed up and burned away.

Where are you now and why so far?
Do we shine brightly for you?
The accordionist’s on a vodka cure
for his clap caught in the Civil War.

No. the lost Russia will not be silenced.
On all sides the rot feeds a wild courage.
Oh Russia, my Russia,
rising in Asia.

(Poem source: https://ruverses.com/sergey-esenin/they-carouse-fight-and-sob-again-ere/9390/ .)

This was in 1922, three years before Yesenin took his own life. That's if he did; there's a touch of doubt he might have been murdered. The poems suggest, anyway, that the thought of suicide was no stranger to him. 

The translator here is W.S. Merwin, apparently... but it's far less obviously Merwinesque than the three others I've found. Here's one of them:

In the country of yellow nettles
the twig fences are brittle
the log houses huddle like orphans
into the pussy-willows

through fields over the hills’ blue
by the greenness of lakes
a road of sand leads to the mountains
of Siberia

Between Mongols and Finns Russia
is lost there before she is frightened
along the road men make their way
in irons

Each one has robbed or killed
as his fate would have it
I am in love with the grief of their eyes
and the graves in their cheeks

many have killed from pure joy
they are simple-hearted
but in their darkened faces
the blue mouths are twisted

I cherish one secret dream
that I am pure in heart
but I too will cut a throat
to the whistling of autumn

I too on the blown road
on these same sands
will go with a rope at the neck
to make love to mourning

I will smile as I go by
I will swell out my chest
and the storm will lick over
the way I came

(Source: https://ruverses.com/sergey-esenin/in-the-land-of-yellow-nettle/9386/ .)

I love this, but possibly more for its Merwin elements than its Yesenin ones. (On the surface such extremely different writers.) This poem is from 1915, quite early in Yesenin's brief career (the author just twenty). 

I think the "yellow nettles" are most likely Large-flowered Hemp-nettle (Galeopsis speciosa), a beautiful arable weed native from N.Europe to Siberia. Russian sources say that Hemp-nettles are poisonous, causing paralysis in livestock, but I couldn't find much detail about this on the Internet. An alternative might be Yellow Archangel (Lamium galeobdolon), also native as far east as Iran, but this is a woodland plant. 

Two more Merwin translations: 

https://ruverses.com/sergey-esenin/wind-whistles-through-the-steep-fence/ .

https://ruverses.com/sergey-esenin/i-am-the-last-poet-of-the-village/9389/

Yesenin, himself of peasant stock, wrote a popular poetry. His poems are mostly rhymed, and most of the other translators try to emulate this, with mixed results. It's perhaps a kind of poetry that intrinsically resists transplantation into another language. 

But, brought up by his better-off grandparents, he never really lived a peasant's life. The constant evocation of the peasant country where he was born (Konstantinovo, some 100 miles SE of Moscow)  is a torturing nostalgia for what he had left behind. By the time he was publishing poetry, he was hanging out with people from much posher backgrounds, such as his writer pal Anatoly Marienhof or, the second of his four wives, Zinaida Reich, who later became a prominent actress until she was horribly murdered, probably by Beria's people. 

He was a troubled soul, an alcoholic, and a rowdy. The later poems become increasingly fixated on his own disastrous trajectory. 

His third wife was Isadora Duncan, eighteen years his senior.  (He doesn't appear in My Life, which ends just as Isadora is setting off for Moscow, "the beautiful New World... the World of Comrades...") During their two-year marriage he travelled with her to Europe and the USA, but they didn't really have much in common except alcohol. 

*

'But Yesenin behaved like a hooligan sometimes,' the cashier added insidiously. 'And he even admitted it.'

The leader grew angry. 'What terrible things did Yesenin do, really? Turned over a dozen tables, punched a dozen faces, and -- who knows? -- all dozen faces may have deserved it. If he was guilty of anything, he repented and punished himself.  He punished himself too harshly, unreservedly. Some people will never overturn a table or punch anyone's face -- quiet, modest people -- but they'll betray you in a moment,  ruin you. And no-one calls them hooligans. Of course, you can write bad poetry and be a good person. But you can't write good poetry and be a bad person. '

'My opinion exactly, ' the director's secretary said, looking at everyone with great dignity, as if the last phrase had been meant for her.

(Wild Berries, Ch 14; Yevtushenko depicting literary societies in a time of denouncers and informers.)

*

I don't understand why the ruverses.com site omits the remarkable 1920 poem Sorokoust (prayer for the dead). Perhaps it's not as comprehensive a collection as I've assumed. There's a translation of Sorokoust, by Rose Styron, here: https://www.oocities.org/sulawesiprince/russpoets/yeseninpoetry1.html 

*

An interesting article about Yesenin's life and reputation by Alexandra Guzeva, with some great photos:

https://www.rbth.com/arts/334253-yesenin-russia-poet