(This series is timed to coincide with the 2019 Annual Conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies at Robinson College, Cambridge.)
It is no exaggeration to say that John Dewey befriended Calderonia out of the blue — back in autumn 2015, I think it was. Since then he has given me the absolutely invaluable benefit of his experience and advice as a self-publisher with the Brimstone Press, he has contributed a necklace of Comments to the blog, passed gold dust to me in the form of a list of 250 email addresses used to promote his own Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Tyutchev, and completely unexpectedly written a five-star review of my biography on Amazon. John’s contribution has been truly inestimable. I thank him from the bottom of my heart for the many, many hours that he has given the whole Calderon project.
I say what follows with no aspersiveness (for I simply don’t understand the phenomenon), but the communicativeness, proactivity and sheer altruism that all three of my Inestimable Russianists practise were never conspicuous to me in Academe. But then neither Michael Pursglove, John Dewey or Harvey Pitcher is an academic Russianist. Each at some point left Academe to pursue a deep personal, one might even say existential, commitment to an aspect of Russian culture, and this has blossomed into their real career. They are thus all Russianists in the Calderon tradition: independent scholars and translators.
John Dewey’s commitment came early. At Cambridge his academic results were higher in German than Russian. He was advised therefore to specialise in German, but ‘for reasons I still find hard to explain I opted for Russian instead, with German as subsidiary’. He trusted his intuition and it served him well. He was not headed for a Cambridge Ph.D., which was a real blessing. Instead, he embarked on a career teaching German and Russian in state schools and further education. But I sense that all through his teaching career he was incubating his second career. For at Cambridge he had ‘first encountered the lyric poetry of Fyodor Tyutchev, which cast a spell that was to last for the rest of my life’. He nursed the ambition to write a biography of Tyutchev, he researched it sporadically for years, and after taking early retirement at the age of fifty he was able to get down to it in earnest. Tyutchev is one of the greatest Russian poets. Even so Dewey could not interest a commercial publisher. This led to his involvement with Brimstone Press and the publication in 2010 of this superb 547-page paperback:
It is a dizzying achievement. What needs to be grasped is that, as Stanley Mitchell wrote in the Literary Review, ‘this book is not only the first life of Tyutchev in English, it is by far the best and the most complete anywhere, including Russia’. Whereas T.J. Binyon’s magisterial 731-page biography of Pushkin (2002) must be based largely on other people’s (published) work, Dewey’s is manifestly the work of a ‘first shoveller’ in both official and personal archives. Tyutchev’s life is astonishing for its geographical mobility, heterosexual passions, philosophical depths and political connections. Dewey has written a great human document that is an essential concordance to Tyutchev’s highly personal verse.
Mirror of the Soul is now out of print (and perhaps it is a sign of the times that the indie publisher Brimstone Press has ceased trading), but Dewey has made it available as a free download at www.tyutchev.org.uk and copies can occasionally be picked up on ABE.
His biography of Tyutchev gave him unrivalled contextual access to the poetry, but he already had long experience of translating Russian verse. In particular, his rhymed version of Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman was shortlisted for the John Dryden Prize and published in Translation and Literature in 1998 (it too is available at www.tyutchev.org.uk). It is excellent, but I think the versions of Tyutchev that he published with Brimstone in 2014 are in a class of their own. This is because Dewey is completely attuned to Tyutchev’s idiosyncrasies as a poet and scrupulously conveys them.
Here, for example, is his translation of the first stanza of one of Tyutchev’s most famous poems, Silentium!:
Be silent, guard your tongue, and keep
All inmost thoughts and feelings deep
Within your heart concealed. There let
Them in their courses rise and set,
Like stars in jewelled night, unheard:
Admire them, and say not a word.
I cannot remember noticing that Tyutchev ever breaks a line with a full stop as in the third line of Dewey’s translation. But this creates in English precisely the kind of departure from regularity that Tyutchev delights in producing in other ways. As a translation, then, this is working very subtly by enacting ‘equivalents’ to the original. In fact, this stanza in the original has such an extreme metrical irregularity in the fifth line that one wonders whether it is not so much a poetical acte gratuit on Tyutchev’s part as the product of an editor’s tin ear! That cannot be duplicated in English, so Dewey modulates something else, whereas most translations of Tyutchev that I have seen are more smooth in metre than the original. In this poem Tyutchev particularly modulates the metre of the last line of each stanza, for dramatic, vocal effect, and Dewey does this each time too. ‘Admire them, and say not a word’ is metrically dee-dum-dee, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum, but obviously it must be read as dee-dum-dee, dee-dum-dee-dee-dum (i.e. the penultimate foot is reversed, making the last two iambic feet into a single choriamb, dum-dee-dee-dum, which is a favourite line-ending of Dewey’s). Dewey’s tendency to produce ‘sprung’ rhythm in English on top of the regular metre admirably conveys some of Tyutchev’s own apparent waywardness. If Tyutchev imperceptibly slips a tetrameter or an Alexandrine into a poem otherwise written in pentameter, Dewey will subtly do the same.
Fyodor Tyutchev, Selected Poems: Translated with an Introduction and Notes by John Dewey (Gillingham, Brimstone Press, 2014) is now sold out, but accessible online at www.tyutchev.org.uk.
Since 1994 John Dewey has also translated many modern prose works for the pioneer Anglo-Russian publisher Glas, for example Boris Yampolsky’s classic novel The Old Arbat and writing by Irina Muravyova and Ksenia Zhukova. But I would particularly draw followers’ attention to his selection of the early twentieth century writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, entitled The Sign: And Other Stories. This attractive paperback was published by Brimstone in 2015 and copies are still available from chris@mikeoldfield.org.
I do not read many English translations of Russian works, and when I do I tend to read bits of them very closely and compare them with the original. I sat down with The Sign: And Other Stories intending to do the same, but the English simply carried me away and I read the whole book in two sittings. With translations of prose you want absolute accuracy, of course, but far more. It is not enough to say that you want the translation to ‘read like English’; you want it to read like an absolutely original writer of English and you always want that effect from it — it must be totally consistently native English, talented, fresh and finessed. It’s a lot to ask, but that’s what Dewey has produced with this breathtaking range of stories by Zamyatin, all but one of them never translated before. I did compare some passages of Russian and I am lost in admiration for how he has rendered them. The only adequate compliment I can pay these translations is to say that any reader and/or aspiring young writer in English MUST read these masterpieces of modernist fiction.
The official academic criterion of a person’s output these days is ‘impact’. In Russian Studies, at least, biography seems to be deeply out of favour, presumably because its impact is rated as low. But impact upon whom? The impact of an article entitled ‘Polysemous transgradiency of diachronic antinomial tropes in some poems of Pushkin’s Lycée period’ may be profound on other academics, but beyond? Similarly, believe it or not but in Academe translation is only just being recognised as an ‘impactful’ activity! I feel sure that the impact of Dewey’s scholarly but beautifully written biography of Tyutchev, his absorbing biographical-critical articles on Tyutchev’s poetry published in East-West Review over the last three years, and his translations of the poems themselves, will far outstrip anything of which most academics can dream.
John Dewey, independent scholar, translator and may one say populariser, has produced a body of first-class work that is a very serious contribution to Anglophone understanding of Russian literature. It will endure.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Yes, he is incredible. Irina Muravyova