Introductory Notes. Imagery in Translation

Imagery in Translation

POETRY UNIT2:

TRANSLATING JOHN KEATS INTO RUSSIAN

John Keats (1795-1821) was supposed to become an apoth­ecary but abandoned the profession for the sake of poetry. From 1816 he devoted his life purely to writing. Keats was close to such poets as Leigh Hunt and Haydon, and met with Shelley, Hazlitt and Wordsworth whose poetry and views particularly in­fluenced him. One of his favourite writers was Shakespeare whom he highly praised for the utmost openness and unselfishness in poetry and whose sonnets were a model for the novice poet. Keats was always happy with friends, who loved him and his poetry and did much to support and defend him from sharp and unde­served criticism. Fragile and weak, he fell seriously ill with tu­berculosis in the winter of 1819. It became clear that he would not live out another winter in London. In 1820 Shelley invited him to live with his family in Italy. Keats went there, but he did not join Shelley, settling in Rome, his health in a very poor state. There, in Rome he died in February 1821.

Like many other English poets, he started with Ancient Greek and Roman mythology, classical literature and allegoric ways of formulating the idea of the beautiful. However, this turned out not to be enough for longer poems. He came to nature and undertook a journey round the Lake District, Scotland and North­ern Ireland In 1816-1817. For him it was like a pilgrimage to places of sacred beauty. The mountainous landscape of those plac­es awoke his imagination and was a step towards his poetic ideal, the union of the Picturesque and the Sublime. His imagination thus stirred, in December 1817 he moved to Hampstead and set-

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tied in what is now known as the Keats Memorial House. There he met Fanny Brawne with whom he fell deeply in love and who became his fiancee. He had only two more years of life at his disposal, though he could not have known it then.

What can a poet do within such a short period of creative activity? John Keats did so much. He wrote a quantity of lyrics and longer poems that placed his name among the immortals. The most productive period for his poetry was 1818, and he himself referred to it as the Great Year. It was in 1818 thai he wrote, con­secutively, "The Eve of St. Agnes," "The Eve of St. Mark," "Hy­perion," "Lamia," and his major odes such as the "Ode to Psyche," the "Ode to a Nightingale," the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "To Autumn." For a young man as he was, the style of these pieces was powerful like the brush of a great painter. It is incredible to find such a diversity of colours, forms and shades of human feelings and nature in Keats's major works. The wind, the grass, the roof of the house, the colour of the path in autumn, the form of a flower in the vase, the voice of a village girl, the sound of the cart wheel, all these details together make his poetry rings out like a mighty sym­phony arranged in words and metre.

His favourite poetic forms included the sonnet. He was the first of the Romantic poets to rediscover the form that was con­sidered superfluous, naive and too platonic for serious poetry. Byron treated Keats's sonnets with contemptuous superiority as "trifles" but came to revise his own attitude later, after Keats's early death.

In his best sonnets Keats's diction is simple, the tone is natural for he found the beautiful everywhere, even in such "tri­fling" matters as the voice of a grasshopper or the sand on the seashore. He might start with a detail, as he did in the sonnet "On Visiting the Tomb of Burns":

The town, the churchyard, and the setting sun, The clouds, the trees, the rounded hills all seem, Though beautiful, cold — strange — as in a dream,

___________ I dreamed long ago, now new begun.___________

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