“The Wanderer” by N. P. Ogarev (translation)

This year at Cambridge I founded a small Russian poetry translation group. Unlike my German poetry translation group, which never made it beyond a Facebook group chat, I can call the Russian one a success. We have yet to meet in person, but already we have seen each other over Zoom a few times. This poem, by Nikolai Ogarev, was the first poem I translated specifically for the group.

I came across it while flicking through an anthology of Russian religious poetry that I have. Much as with Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I wrote about last week, I enjoy religious poetry because it makes people’s beliefs accessible and stamps them with an individual’s personality. We often come away from religious poetry believing in belief, even if we don’t get any further.

As for why I translated Ogarev’s poem instead of any of the hundred others included, the answer is rather more simple – it is nice and short! “The Wanderer” is the only poem of his included, so there was lots of white space around it, which gave me a place to begin the translation.

Anyway, here’s the poem:

The Wanderer

 Misty lies our dreary vale,
 Clouds conceal the sky.
 Sadly blows each mournful gale,
 Sadly looks each eye.
  
 Though you wander, have no fear,
 Though this life is hard -
 Peace and prayer are always near,
 Safe within your heart!

I enjoyed translating this poem, just as I enjoyed reading the original. One of the advantages of translating a poem (and poet) which is not too well known is that it is far easier than something from a “Great” poet. Both because the poet has inevitably been translated many times already (and certainly better than you could), but also because it’s nice to feel a certain degree of equality to your quarry. It is certainly presumption on my part, but there you go. I don’t feel, from the original, that Ogarev is a fantastic artist, but I felt he was one I was good enough to be able to translate. A similar train of thought is how I explain my success with Theodor Storm’s poetry in German.

I don’t feel the poem itself needs much explanation. It’s the kind of optimistic call for self-reliance that is always necessary for a revolutionary (and most of the rest of us). But I like it. It’s a nice little credo, the sort of thing that perhaps really can be mumbled before bed.

A photo of the page in my anthology of Russian prayers where I translate Ogarev's "The Wanderer".
My surprisingly neat attempts at translating “The Wanderer”. Generally it is much worse – I feel particularly sorry for my copy of Fet’s poems.

Nikolai Ogarev is best known now for his association with Alexander Herzen, a major Russian radical who lived for much of his adult life in exile in London. Together they printed the newspaper “The Bell”, which was smuggled into Russia and provided a far more liberal outlook than could be found in most Russian papers because of tsarist censorship. Today there is a website with the same name, run from America (in English and Russian), which gives an interesting look on Russian affairs. The spirit of criticism lives on, even though there is little else that links the two.

Thanks for reading. For more Russian poetry, look at my translation of Baratynsky.

The Religious View of the World – Marilynne Robison’s Gilead

For most of us educated Westerners the mystery of faith is the mystery of why anyone would believe at all. At its best, Christianity has rather become the religion of our grandparents or those oddly fanatical young people we may encounter on visiting a Christian Union. At its worst, it is a cruel mockery of all that it once stood for, a motivation for policies and persons that are anything but Christian. Christianity may be the belief that we put down on the census, but churchgoing and active faith are almost without exception relics of a bygone age. If we are still spiritual, our God may look a little like Jesus, but dressed up in our own hopes and ideals. It’s just the way things are.

For me unbelief is something I struggle with. And it’s not just because of Ivan Karamazov’s infamous claim that “if there is no good, then everything is permitted”. When I look at the magnificence of an oak or the radiance of a misty morning, or feel the weight of stars upon me late at night, I can’t help but feel that something is out there. Without God I cannot find any sense in the world, and whatever certain thinkers may say all I get out of that position is despair. Nietzsche et al. would say (probably correctly) that my belief is motivated by the most shameful of psychological urges – a need for comfort, for order, for plan.

Be that as it may, though I am not a churchgoer and am only really a Christian only by default, I feel the rudiments of a real Christian faith within me. And when I look at those who truly believe, whose faith animates them like a fire, underneath my scepticism is a kind of jealousy, a wish that I could believe too.

Gilead

I say all this because Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead is a novel about faith and the loftiest parts of belief – its virtues, hopes, and despairs. To read it is to be brought into a world where God is here, now. He is not visible, but simply present, lurking behind every page and every thought. The story takes the form of a diary of sorts, or a series of letters, written by the seventy-six-year-old pastor John Ames to his seven-year-old son. Ames knows that he does not have long to live, and he wants to leave a testament for the boy, so that through these pages the child may come to know the father he scarcely had. Gilead pulses with Ames’s faith and its greatest merit is the way it makes faith and its value comprehensible to a non-believer. It does not convert, but it shows the beauty of a believing world.

Moments

This beauty comes, first and foremost, as moments. Because Gilead is a diary, Ames’ entries range from paragraphs to several pages. He sits and watches his son, and part of the wonderful intimacy of Gilead is the way Ames constantly refers to “you” while he writes. You did this, or you did that. He describes his son and his wife playing with bubbles:

I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping in the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavours. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.

This is just a moment. But seen through the eyes of a dying man, and of a loving man, it takes on a radiance. Life is a collection of such moments, and in our attitude towards them we can transfigure them or turn them into dust.

Reading with Faith

I think one of the difficulties of Gilead is that reading it requires an act of faith in itself. If we go in with scepticism, with an unwillingness to engage with the book’s message, it can seem boring. One of the most common criticisms of Robinson’s work that I’ve read is precisely that – that it’s boring. I actually read Housekeeping, Robinson’s first novel, earlier this year. I didn’t get anything out of it, which is why I didn’t write about it here. But I read Gilead differently, over several weeks, and I let it wash over me like a blessing. If we go into a work like this with hostility, then we will only be disappointed. Take, for example, Ames’s comment – “how I have loved this life”. He often says similar things when finishing a note. It is repetitive, and in a way annoying. But it’s also what he feels.

Ames is a man who is blown over by the beauty of the world, and if anything we should be jealous of him for loving it as he does. In the same way, there is a lot in this novel about things that aren’t relevant at all to non-believers – matters like baptism, or blessings, or the Eucharist (the wafer and wine). These things have significance for him, and we must try to feel our way into his shoes to enjoy what he says about them. For in their mystery there lies so much about the redemption of his world.

Fathers, Grandfathers

A great part of Gilead is taken up by the theme of family and the passing of the generations. Ames’s father and grandfather were also priests, and his closest friend, Boughton, is another priest. Ames is haunted by the memory of his grandfather. That man had fought in the American Civil War (Gilead takes place in 1956) and lost an eye. When his shocked family sees his wound his response is simple: “I am confident that I will find great blessing in it”. He is a man who has visions of God and who finally disappears to become an itinerant preacher in Kansas. It is fair to say that Ames struggles with the differences in their faiths – his own faith is quieter, less mystical. He wonders whether that means it is a faith at all.

Ames also struggles with his own role as a father. His unexpected marriage and son so late in life mean that he won’t be able to be a father to his boy for very long. Much of Gilead also centres on Jack Boughton, the wayward son of Ames’ friend, who is named after Ames himself. Ames does not want to forgive the man for something he did when he was younger, though he knows Christ would have wanted him to, and this leads to another tension that is at the heart of the story.

Love

When I think about it, love is at the centre of Gilead. This is perhaps inevitable for a work that is so manifestly Christian. Love for moments, love from fathers to their children, and love of a romantic sort too:

Just now I was listening to a song on the radio, standing there swaying to it a little, I guess, because your mother saw me from the hallway and she said, “I could show you how to do that.” She came and put her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder, and after a while she said, in the gentlest voice you could ever imagine, “Why’d you have to be so damn old?”

We are left with a feeling that love, like beauty, is something that can be found in every part of our lives if only we have the eyes to see it. More than once I closed the book, touched by something it had said.

Conclusion

Gilead does have its share of tensions, of intrigues. I had no idea how the novel would conclude and actually it ended up surprising me. But what I am left with is not a story so much as a vision of love and of peace. Here is a world where goodness and redemption are possible for everyone. It presents a version of Christianity at its best. And though not all of its readers will be Christians – or will want to be – there’s enough value and enough compatibility between Ames’s worldview and a good, happy, atheist-or-whatever life that it’s perfectly reasonable to call the novel an inspiration and a source of hope.

I can’t wait to read more Robinson in the future.

Many Books or Few Books?

I have a book buying problem. They arrive, four or five at a time, like clockwork several times a month. Books upon books upon books. There is nothing else, save transport or food, that I really spend money on. The main thing, anyway, is that the books keep coming. At home, the bookshelves of my “library” are overflowing, even with a good part of my collection still at Cambridge, and the floors of both that room and my bedroom are covered with books which only occasionally have consented to let me place them in boxes.

There is nothing wrong with buying books, especially when you read them, of course. I do not read all of the books that arrive, but I would say with cautious optimism that I read about a quarter of those that do. After all, in every case I ordered the books for a reason, so that even those books which I have passed over may continue to hope that I will yet turn to them and say: “well why don’t we finally get to know each other?” I am sure that Hume understands me when I ignore him to pick out a fiction writer, and that George Eliot approves when I turn to the Germans I write essays on instead of to Middlemarch. Their time will come. Well, maybe not Hume’s.

It is difficult to imagine how amazing my collection would be to someone even from just a hundred years ago. The sheer quantity of books is perhaps less impressive than their variety. I have books from hundreds and hundreds of authors, from all around the world, on topics ranging from poetry to history to oil extraction to the finer points of Eastern Orthodoxy. In the days before paperbacks, people had fewer books, and they also tended to have collected editions. When they read, it meant that they read deeply but not widely. They came to know authors, rather than books. These days, we invariably do the opposite.

Nostalgia, especially for what one hasn’t experienced, is a rather dangerous state of mind. But still I often find myself wishing I had fewer books. Even if we subscribe to the various dicta stating that the vast majority of books are rubbish, still there are far too many books to read in this life that common consensus could call amazing. Even if we dedicated our every waking moment to reading we would not even scratch the surface of all there is to read because to really understand the best books we often have to return to them several times, each time excavating a new layer of meaning.

What bothers me in this is that the thought that because there are so many good books, we have forgotten how to read them well. I understand how to read a book. The essays I write at university seem proof of this. But I generally feel like searching for themes when I read is a rather idiotic enterprise. I may find the themes, and I may even have interesting thoughts on them, but that doesn’t mean I understand the book in a deep sense and it definitely doesn’t mean I enjoyed reading it. Books that we come back to, again and again, inhabit us like a kind of spirit. Books that we read, however intensely, on Friday for an essay due in on Monday, do not.

When I was hiking in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan I had only my Kindle with me, and though I had plenty of books on it too, I decided to focus on one – Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Perhaps it was the sheer contrast – of reading one of the world’s most urbane and “civilized” authors so far from anything that he would have recognised as civilization – but I really enjoyed the book. But more strangely, I also understood the book too, even though I was sleep-deprived and stressed. The limitations of the world around me allowed me to read the book as though it was the only book I had – to really care about what was written in it and to give the characters life within my head.

At home or at Cambridge, I am surrounded by books. And whether I want it or not, that fact influences how I read them. Even a book like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I am reading now, and which is designed to be read slowly, in fits and starts, I seem to be racing through, even though I am reading only a few pages each day. When it comes to a work of philosophy, like Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, which I ought be reading this month and in the next, then I know in advance that I am not going to understand a thing. I always have another book on my mind, distracting me from what’s at hand. Only non-fiction I can get something out of, since with such books one is often looking for facts more than anything deeper. 

One of my favourite times is when I am forced to pack up my books, such as before I go on holiday or back to university. I enjoy packing my books up at such times precisely because I am forced to choose between them. I always have a secret hope that I will select few enough books as to be forced to really spend quality time with them. Each time I am disappointed. I end up ordering books, or else the remaining space on my Kindle starts rapidly diminishing. Try as I might, the desire to read many books outweighs my intention simply to read a few.

It has even started affecting my studies. To answer any of the questions on an exam paper I only need two or three texts – long or short, it does not matter. The questions are so predictable that one really can get by with only having read two texts for each question. I, however, have read far more than that, as my own posts on this blog in these past two years have perhaps indicated. It is now a question of forcing myself to cut down, to focus. If not on two or three texts, then at least on five or six, rather than fifteen.

Forcing myself to reread for the purposes of exams is not the route to a deep understanding or affection for a book either, but perhaps it will help me start on that path. However, I rather doubt that. In my experience, reading for any reason except to enjoy the book for itself makes it impossible to form a real connection with it. It’s a bit like loving a person. As soon as we’re using them for any purpose, however benign, we cannot love them anymore.

There is nothing wrong with reading so many books and ordering so many books except that it does perhaps betray a certain attitude towards life that is unhealthy if left unchecked. Wendell Berry likes to write about the need for limits and a life that has “form”. What he means is a life where we have lived well within certain bounds – mostly those of the community – without letting ambitions or our desires get the better of us, for in those cases our fates will inevitably be disappointment. A life that is focused on quantity, rather than quality, as so many of ours are these days, is a dangerous life because it leaves us no chance to be pleased with what we have. In trying to read everything we end up reading everything badly and nothing well. Books themselves become tools for sounding clever, rather than wise and lifelong companions.

I don’t know what the solution is to my problem. Perhaps I just need to stop buying books. Obviously, I do! I have tried, without much success, such solutions as only buying a new book after I have read an old one. And in recent months I have been reading more, so that the ratio of “read” to “unread” books is improving. But that still does not mean that I am reading well. Alas, time and time again I am reminded that reading is not just about dragging your eye from one side of a page to the other, but instead is an ability that can be made better and more effective with the correct frame of mind and environment.

In the end, I am left only with a kind of hope that once my studies finish and I am no longer obliged to read books, I may be able to read those books that I choose to read with a more honest eye. I imagine doing a master’s degree unrelated to literature somewhere far from my little library and taking only two or three books with me. Perhaps then I will finally read Middlemarch. Not for bragging rights, because I have read it once already, but for my soul, because back then I read it badly and can’t remember a thing. One can only hope.

Readers, what’s the solution?