Girlish Muses
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry GIRLISH MUSES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL p ?ushkdm is more alive to Russians than Shakespeare or Wordsworth is to us," D.M. Thomas observes in the Introduction to his translation of The...
...The year Pushkin started "Rusalka" he had gotten a peasant girl into trouble and married her off to someone else...
...Thomas observes in the Introduction to his translation of The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems (Viking, 61 pp., $ 14.95...
...Her domestic life allowed her to hang on to a child's-eye view of adult foibles...
...Pushkin referred to his Muse as "a simple country girl...
...Yet Yevgeni is the victim of a heartless society and inhospitable climate...
...Their princely hearts are touched / By our small woes...
...She hated "fashionable verse," and boasted that she read little modern poetry...
...Petersburg, climaxing with the delusion of Yevgeni, the mad hero, that the great equestrian statue of Peter the Great is galloping after him through the dark streets...
...Spring sickens me...
...The short lyrics are "confessional" in a very contemporary way...
...moonlit, she's trembling, flushed...
...In her best work, however, like the famous "Not Waving, But Drowning" she was able to unmask the desperation behind clowning...
...An old gypsy, in explaining that the free life does not suit everyone, recalls the story of an exiled poet who had lived with the group centuries ago...
...I am no judge of Russian poetry in the original (though many of Pushkin's lyrics are familiar to me through the art songs of Mikhail Glinka and Rimsky-Kor-sakov...
...My blood is in ferment, my mind and feelings Are trapped by longings...
...What unites them all is his exuberance, his stubborn quest for freedom of expression...
...In fact, Pushkin's poems??nine long works and 38 short lyrics are included here??have a depth of psychological insight that seems modern...
...Late in life, their roles reversed...
...Eliot are both hacked to collops in her reviews...
...Like Ovid, Pushkin realized that his art was the product of civilization, of little use to the footloose gypsy life...
...The Gypsies," another long poem, is a complex study of liberty...
...In "Rusalka" a prince who abandons the pregnant miller's daughter to makean advantageous marriage becomes the epitome of the gentleman seducer, as well as of the cruel autocrat...
...Its protagonist, Aleko, has joined the band because he is attracted to their nomadic life...
...She stayed in a tiny pool and dominated it with a distinctive voice...
...His allegiance was to reality and common sense...
...His poetry, though, is a liberating force...
...And in "Autumn," he addresses the reader in the confidential tone of an intimate friend: This is my time: I don 7 like spring...
...Rejoice, rejoice, Halleluljah drink the flowing champagne For my darling Lobster and I Are friends again...
...Duty was his Lodestar" becomes: Duty was my Lobster, my Lobster was she, And when I walked with my Lobster I was happy...
...His Eugene Onegin is an almost 20th-century anti-hero, passively accepting circumstances, refusing to intervene...
...Many small poets plunge into the largest frog pond and are lost forever in the crowd...
...Just as she found freedom in a restricted life, this poet thought of childhood as an emancipated state, achieved in spite of the structures of schools and guardians...
...Still, he puts into his heroine's mouth a speech parodying the cares of statecraft that allows royalty no freedom??except that of complete mastery over the bodies and souls of their subjects...
...In lieu of a biography, there being little life to tell, editors Jack Barbera and William McBrian have brought out Me Again (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 358 pp., $15.95), a compilation of her stories, essays and reviews, letters, and a few verses omitted from her Collected Poems (1976...
...Thanks to D.M...
...Count Nulin" is a delicious farce about the diversions of some bored aristocrats at a country estate...
...and she Is warm and fresh beneath her sable fur, Pressing your hand...
...She did...
...Her own is wilfully idiosyncratic, sometimes more so than need be...
...Thomas, The Bronze Horseman andOther Poemswill win Pushkin a broader English-speaking audience...
...its slush And stench??the boring thaw...
...Stevie Smith was not a great poet, and she certainly knew it...
...Pushkin's world is as diversely populated as Shakespeare's or Dante's and the voices that speak out of his poems are eloquent??be they Tsar or serf, aristocrat or gypsy...
...When under suspicion for promulgating liberalism in his serious verse, he wrote fairy tale poems like "Tsar Saltan" or "The Golden Cockerel," folklore that continued to plead for justice...
...Often she wrote nonsense poetry in the Lewis Carroll model, parodies of the "moral" verse that British schools wallow in...
...Flaunt your beauty, Peter's City, and stand unshakable like Russia," he exhorts his home...
...I like stern winter better, I love her snows: how smoothly, rapidly, and freely The sleigh glides when you're with a friend...
...The reference is to Ovid, patron saint of all poets who must sing their song in an alien land...
...The poet's life was wasted in dissipation and futile gestures, the last of which was the duel that killed him...
...Me Again is a fascinating demonstration of the value of realizing one's limits...
...in such poems, compassion reveals an adult sensibility, profound and moving...
...Further, with the great Russian writers of most eras Pushkin shares the ability to speak for the voiceless in a country where it has always been difficult to say anything not sanctioned by the state...
...As a girl, Smith used to decide on Sunday mornings what hymn she would choose, then sing it at church, "and it did not matter at all that everybody else was singing something different...
...Banished by his Emperor, he had to leave /His southern home," but continued to pine for his lost city...
...Nevertheless, Thomas has undeniably created a strong, convincing voice for the Russian poet in English??exhibiting the same skill he used to recreate Sigmund Freud's style so brilliantly in The White Hotel...
...This is because Pushkin created characters, images and forms so enduring in Russian literature that they have exerted their distinctive influence upon subsequent writers, from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to Akhmatova, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn...
...Never marrying, she remained dependent on the aunt who had raised her and continued to keep house for her...
...19 October is a spirited attempt to alleviate the frustration and melancholy caused by his rustication to southern Russia (where the Tsar hoped, says Thomas, Pushkin could "purge himself of the liberal sentimentsofsomeofhispoems...
...Amorous intrigue was merely one of the freedoms Pushkin valued, however??the longer poems are much concerncJ with the abuses of power...
...Pushkin's sympathies are broad...
...his madness makes him a kin to the idiot in Boris Godunov, a holy fool able to see truth hidden from the sane...
...and then goodbye...
...By staying home, Smith provided herself with a perfect "room of one's own" to write in...
...All Poetry has to do is make a strong communication," she once wrote...
...The little monsters plot to kill their governesses, and push each other out of windows...
...When he lay dying,/Heasked that his dead body should/Becarriedtothe south: even / His bones, he thought, would hate to lie / In this foreign place...
...This handsome book is illustrated with the charming childish doodles that always accompanied her writing...
...When one sees the children of her stories and is exposed to her own youthful memories, one understands why...
...She valued a higher independence above everything, and ferociously attacked all ideologies: The Fabian expediency ofG.B.Shawandthe Anglican theocracy of T.S...
...Augustus banished him to Tomi on the Danube, not far from Bessarabia, where Alexander I had sent Pushkin and where "The Gypsies" is set...
...On Poetry GIRLISH MUSES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL p ?ushkdm is more alive to Russians than Shakespeare or Wordsworth is to us," D.M...
...Thomas says, as translator, "What I have tried not to do is dress [her] up in flounces...
...In spite of this, she wrote a number of comic pieces in a class with Edward Lear or Carroll, as well as a few outstanding serious ones...
...c V^tevie Smith was one of those poets, like Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson or Christina Rossetti, whose life was confined to a narrow environment...
...All the poet has to do is listen...
...But one day my Lobster and I fell out, And we did nothing but Rave and shout...
...In "The Bronze Horseman" Pushkin anticipated both Nikolai Gogol's realism and Andrei Bely's surrealism...
...it took the novel years to catch up with this story in verse...
...Smith rejects the dubious lodestar image in favor of the lobster not only because of a similarity in sound, but also because most of us secretly see Duty as something of an irascible crustacean, liable to pinch at any minute...
...The great Russian poet was equally at home with comedy and tragedy...
...Beneath this personal drama of wronged love is an attack on the "compassion" of the Tsar himself...
...They'reonly free /To promise, weep, implore.../They're free to teach you to fly out at midnight, / Hearing their call, and stay with them till dawn / Behind the mill...
...For example, the verses in memory of Amalia Riz-nich, with whom Pushkin had an intense love affair, lament his inability to feel sorrow at the news of her death...
...She lived in the poky London suburb of Palmers Green from early childhood until her death in 1971 at the age of 69...
...By contrast, "The Bronze Horseman" paints a grim picture of St...
...The young woman tells her father with bitter sarcasm: "Princes aren't free to choose,/As girls are, by their hearts...
...In a parody of "The Rape of Lucrece," the heroine foils her ravisher merely by slapping his face, then flirts with him the next morning over the breakfast table as if nothing had happened...
Vol. 65 • June 1982 • No. 13
