The Poem Pushkin Never Wrote

I still have a great deal to say about Erzurum and shall go on saying it. But in the interests of honesty: we are already in Kars—the town at the far north-eastern corner of the country, best known to English readers as the setting of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. So brace yourselves; there will be no shortage of stories from here either.

And in Kars there is a restaurant called Pushkin. You will appreciate that we could hardly walk past. The menu opens with Kiprensky’s celebrated portrait of the poet and—a Turkish translation of a poem.

At which point we came unstuck.

Here is the poem, in English:

AN UNKNOWN LAND

O distant land, O beautiful land!
O land unknown to me!
Not of my own will did I come here,
Nor on a noble horse.
Me, this brave young fellow,
The fire of youth brought here,
And the fumes of wine in my head.

Pushkin is part of the school curriculum, and of a general culture that nobody growing up in Russia manages to avoid. We still did not recognise it. So we began searching. And indeed, this translation turns up all over the Turkish internet. The translator is Ataol Behramoğlu, one of the country’s most distinguished poets and a serious translator of Russian literature. The work is The Captain’s Daughter.

For those who have not read it—which, outside Russia, is very nearly everybody—The Captain’s Daughter is a novel. It is prose.

The epigraph that escaped

What the Turkish internet has adopted as a Pushkin poem is in fact the epigraph to Chapter Two, which Pushkin himself labelled simply “an old song”—a piece of Russian folk material, or a convincing imitation of one, of the sort he liked to head his chapters with.

Behramoğlu’s translation, it should be said, is perfectly accurate. The error is not in the translating but in the reading: seven lines of verse, printed alone under the poet’s name, look exactly like a poem. Nobody had told the reader that they were a doorway rather than a room.

Except that “doorway” undersells it, and here is the part that makes the whole business rather poignant. The epigraph is load-bearing. Robert Chandler, who has translated the novel into English, points out—following Shklovsky—that in that same second chapter, in the middle of the blizzard, Pugachov tells Pyotr that he knows this country well enough. Which flatly contradicts the epigraph’s land unknown to me. Pyotr is lost in the steppe; Pugachov is at home in it; and the seven lines at the head of the chapter are there precisely to set up that contrast.

So what Turkish audiences have detached and set free is the one component that only works while it is bolted to something else.

And detached it certainly is. Somebody has set it to music, and Turkish audiences now sing it, entirely delighted to know the work of the great Russian poet.

(If you would like to check the context yourself, the whole novel is on Project Gutenberg in T. Keane’s 1916 translation, out of copyright and free: The Prose Tales of Alexander Pushkin. For a modern version, the Chandlers’ is published by NYRB Classics.)

Which is not a Turkish failing

Before anybody smiles, English does this too, and on a grander scale.

No man is an island, entire of itself. Everyone knows it; a great many people believe it to be a poem; anthologies helpfully print it in short lines to encourage the impression. It is prose—a passage from John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, written from a sickbed in 1623, in a chapter about hearing a funeral bell. The same paragraph goes on to never send to know for whom the bell tolls, which Hemingway then used as a title, which is how most people meet it.

A text with a good rhythm and a memorable opening will detach itself from its container and set up on its own, and no amount of scholarship will get it back in. Kars simply happens to have done it to a Russian.

So—could you honestly claim to have recognised the epigraph to Chapter Two of The Captain’s Daughter?