Translation comparison: Count Nulin

Ten years ago I said that Pushkin’s Count Nulin (Граф Нулин, 1825) didn’t get translated often enough to need a translation comparison, but I was wrong. By then there were already at least three published English translations, all as Count Nulin rather than Count Zero, a title some people use that translates the joke in the name. (If you know of other translations, not counting this apparently machine-translated text, let me know!)

I was curious how the translators handled five things.

Number one: horns. This playful long poem about one potential and perhaps one real extramarital affair starts with a husband going hunting, leaving his bored young wife with only the servants for company. In Russian, Pushkin plants the idea of the cuckold’s horns by mentioning the hunting horns (roga) in the plural in line 1 and the singular in line 12, just as the poet’s attention moves from husband to wife:

        Пора, пора! рога трубят;
        Псари в охотничьих уборах
        Чем свет уж на конях сидят,
        Борзые прыгают на сворах.
        Выходит барин на крыльцо,
        Все, подбочась, обозревает;
        Его довольное лицо
        Приятной важностью сияет.
        Чекмень затянутый на нем,
        Турецкий нож за кушаком,
        За пазухой во фляжке ром,
        И рог на бронзовой цепочке.
        В ночном чепце, в одном платочке,
        Глазами сонными жена
        Сердито смотрит из окна
        На сбор, на псарную тревогу.

The earliest translation I know of is by Robert C. Stephenson in 1954 (and Stephenson says his is the first in English):

        Hallo, hallo! the horns resound;
        The whippers-in in hunting coat
        Are long asaddle; every hound
        Tugs at the leash and bays full throat.
        Out steps the master, on the stoop
        Stands arms akimbo, takes their measure,
        Nods his approval of the troop,
        And beams with frank but lofty pleasure.
        Inside his caftan, tight as a drum,
        He buttons up a flask of rum,
        Hooks to its loops of bronze his horn,
        Tucks in his sash a Turkish knife….
        Against a window-sill his wife,
        In nightcap, nightdress and a shawl,
        Leans gazing down with sleepy scorn
        Of men folks and their dogs and all.

Antony Wood in 2002 keeps Pushkin’s order of knife, rum, horn in lines 10–12:

        Time to be off! Loud blows the horn;
        The whippers-in in hunting dress
        Have mounted promptly with the dawn,
        The close-leashed borzois prance and press.
        The master of the house appears,
        And pausing in the porch awhile
        He looks about; his visage bears
        A broad, proprietorial smile.
        He wears a girded Cossack coat
        In which a Turkish knife is stowed,
        A rum-flask hangs beneath his throat,
        A horn upon a bronzen chain.
        His night-clad wife, with sleepy eyes,
        Looks from her window, vexed, it’s plain,
        By canine din and huntsmen’s cries…

Betsy Hulick in 2011 also puts the horn last:

        Ta-ra! Ta-ra! the bugles blow.
        Up since dawn, the hunters sit
        their horses chafing at the bit;
        the dogs are milling round below.
        The master sallies out, surveys
        the company: His easy grin
        reflects a candid pleasure in
        the little world that he purveys.
        His Cossack jacket, patched and frayed,
        is buttoned snug across his breast;
        a brandy flask, a Turkish blade,
        and horn equip him for the rest.
        Behind a foggy windowpane,
        hugging round her frame a shawl,
        his wife, with sleepy-eyed disdain,
        looks down on man and beast and all.

I like all three of these translations a lot and am impressed by how different they are from each other even as they all follow the Russian pretty closely, including in meter (iambic tetrameter). Wood, it’s true, manages to economize, combining Pushkin’s two lines on the wife’s clothes and sleepy eyes into “his night-clad wife, with sleepy eyes.” It looks like Stephenson is the only one who may have been thinking about a double meaning of roga, since Wood’s singular “horn” and Hulick’s “bugles” do less to call cuckolds to mind.

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Number two: the wounded… carriage. A nice example of Jennifer Croft’s “microsuspense” is Count Nulin’s arrival at Natal’ia Pavlovna’s house. Before we know how badly he was hurt when his carriage tipped onto its side, we get what could almost be a description of a wounded but determined Romantic hero:

        Забрызганный в дороге дальной,
        Опасно раненый, печальный
        Кой-как тащится экипаж;
        Вслед барин молодой хромает;
        Слуга-француз не унывает
        И говорит: “Allons, courage!”

It would be hard to place the subject (“carriage” or “coach”) last in its clause in English, as Pushkin could thanks to Russian grammar. Stephenson comes close, though:

        Mud-crusted from long traveling,
        And sadly battered out of plumb,
        In limps a coach on tired spring.
        Behind, a sprig of Russian gentry,
        Limps too, but not his valet, non!
        That hero cries, “Courage, allons!”

And so does Wood, although he lets the verb come after the subject:

        Bespattered with the journey’s dirt,
        Somehow, severely bruised and hurt,
        The sorry carriage crawls along.
        Behind, a youthful gentleman
        Limps. His undaunted serving-man,
        A Frenchman, cries: “Courage, allons!”

Hulick doesn’t worry about keeping the word order but also finds a way to keep it funny:

        The muddied carriage, wounded sore
        like some poor casualty of war,
        is dolefully lugged across the yard.
        The master follows, limping hard.
        His man Picard, more hale of limb,
        moves up to say: “Courage!” to him.

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Number three: dosada. As I understand it, dosada is a negative emotion you feel when the world is not as you wish it were, and you don’t have the power to change it. [Update 6/21/24: Dmitri Manin gives a better definition in the comments: “it’s the feeling when the world didn’t live up to your expectations, even though they were perfectly well-founded. You feel cheated, and that’s досада.”] Dictionaries give words like “annoyance,” “vexation,” “displeasure,” “disappointment,” “pique,” but nothing is quite right. It’s an important word for Pushkin, especially in whimsical poems like this one and Ruslan and Liudmila (Руслан и Людмила, 1817–20).

In Count Nulin the word comes up three times, always as something felt by the title character. Here are some phrases the translators use around those occurrences of dosada, though it’s not always possible to say which words, if any, are supposed to correspond to it.

Stephenson 1954: “reluctantly and vexed,” “seethes with lordly rage” [this seems to cover both styd and dosada], “the doleful count”; elsewhere we get “pique” for Nulin’s gnev, perhaps because of the frequency of dosada

Wood 2002: “the dizzy, disappointed guest,” “the cut to self-esteem so deep,” “both furious and forlorn” [with “forlorn” coming from pechal’nyi, and “furious” or the combination from s dosady?]

Hulick 2011: “he nods reluctantly,” “his nerves so raw, his pride so vexed,” “very sorry” [this may, together with “remains unmoved” two lines later, render upriamitsia, with s dosady falling by the wayside]

Maybe the translators didn’t think the repetition was important (though to my mind it’s noticeable in the original). If they had to choose between connecting these passages to each other or keeping a light and natural-sounding rhythm, I’d say they all made the right choice by choosing meter. But I would have loved to see both!

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Number four: Natal’ia Pavlovna/Natasha. By the end of the poem it feels like the poet has invited the reader to laugh along with Natal’ia Pavlovna and her young neighbor Lidin at the ridiculousness of failed lover Count Nulin, and to a lesser extent at the husband. In a different poem we might first have been given the chance to mock a young woman hungry for news of Parisian fashion and herself quite uninformed, but that didn’t happen here. When in each translation of the poem does it become clear that we’re going to be laughing with the wife instead of at her?

In Stephenson the setup is ambiguous (is she bored with country life and books suitable for women as anyone would be, or is she shallow?), but her side of the conversation with Count Nulin over dinner is all sensible questions and polite efforts to evade his singing and his company. We clearly see her dissatisfaction with him before she says it’s time for bed:

                                        They rise,
        The youthful hostess very gay,
        The count with nothing more to say
        Of Paris—to his own surprise,
        All wonder at her charms, all eyes.
        The evening passes uneventful,
        With him not quite himself and her
        Now radiant but, as it were,
        Now downcast as if half resentful.

Already in Stephenson’s “very gay” we can imagine her stifling her laughter at the silly Count, and by “uneventful” and “half resentful” it’s clear that she’s had enough of this long-awaited distraction and wants to be rid of him. Wood lets us continue to wonder a little longer whether Natal’ia Pavlovna is frivolous enough to be a match for Nulin:

        They rise. The hostess is in bliss.
        Paris forgotten now, the count
        Marvels at her: how sweet she is!
        The evening passes quickly by;
        The count is quite beside himself;
        His hostess’s expressive eye
        Now warms, now sinks in mute reply…

In Wood’s version we can on first reading see how Nulin, even if he were less of a fool, might imagine his interest in her is returned. You can almost say the same about Hulick’s translation, but I think Hulick does more to tip us off to the fact that we may be seeing the woman’s putative interest through the man’s wishful thinking:

                                        Natasha’s mood
        is carefree as the two repair
        to chairs beside the fire where
        they sip their afterdinner drinks.
        Forgetting Paris, Nulin now
        appreciably relaxes. How
        agreeable she is, he thinks.
        Time passes imperceptibly.
        The count is not himself at all.
        His hostess sometimes seeks his eye,
        then lets her own abruptly fall
        as if unwilling to meet his.

Rereading Pushkin’s text after these three translations, I think Wood and Hulick are right about the evening (time goes fast, not uneventfully), and I like what Hulick did with the elusive bit about the hostess’s eyes.

                                        Из-за стола
        Встают. Хозяйка молодая
        Черезвычайно весела;
        Граф, о Париже забывая,
        Дивится, как она мила.
        Проходит вечер неприметно;
        Граф сам не свой: хозяйки взор
        То выражается приветно,
        То вдруг потуплен безответно.

I’m not sure how potuplen bezotvetno sounded in 1825, but to me now these lines sound ambiguous: is she running hot and cold as a modest kind of flirtation, or is she fighting off laughter as she valiantly tries to live up to her social obligations? I think the poem works best if it could be the first option on first reading but must be the second one on rereading. In Stephenson (“downcast as if half resentful”) she already seems unhappy (more trying to make him go away than trying not to laugh), and in Wood (“His hostess’s expressive eye/ Now warms, now sinks in mute reply”) it sounds like actual flirtation even if we know how the poem ends. But Hulick’s “sometimes seeks his eye,/ then lets her own abruptly fall/ as if unwilling to meet his” is ambiguous in exactly the way the context calls for.

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Number five: Tarquin the cat. In a posthumously published note, Pushkin suggests that Count Nulin exists because he read Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594) and wondered what would have happened if Lucrece/Lucretia had just slapped Tarquin. In the poem itself he explicitly alludes to those characters right before an extended image of a cat stalking its prey. This is the passage that Robert Chandler quotes to show how wonderful and light Wood’s translation is, and I wanted to see what the other two had done here.

Russian text:

        В надежде сладостных наград,
        К Лукреции Тарквиний новый
        Отправился, на все готовый.

        Так иногда лукавый кот,
        Жеманный баловень служанки,
        За мышью крадется с лежанки:
        Украдкой, медленно идет,
        Полузажмурясь подступает,
        Свернется в ком, хвостом играет,
        Разинет когти хитрых лап
        И вдруг бедняжку цап-царап.

Stephenson:

        And groping, our new Tarquin dares
        What may ensue—rebuff, caprice,
        Alarm—in search of his Lucrece.

        Just so, spoiled darling of the house,
        The pet of some fond serving wench,
        A cat slides off the kitchen bench
        And edges closer to a mouse;
        Approaches with its eyes in slits,
        Back arched, and tail at nervous swing,
        Unsheathes its claws from tiny mitts,
        And makes at last its deadly spring.

I entirely agree with Chandler that Wood is brilliant here:

        Tarquin, in hope of sweet reward,
        Once more sets forth to seek Lucretia,
        Resolved to go through fire to reach her.

        Thus you may see a cunning tom,
        The mincing darling of the house,
        Slip from the stove to stalk a mouse,
        Creep stealthily and lowly on
        Towards his victim, grow slit-eyed
        And wave his tail from side to side,
        Coil to a ball, extend his claws
        And snap! The wretch is in his paws.

Hulick:

        this reincarnate Tarquin gropes
        past corners jutting left and right,
        to hie him toward the chaste Lucrece
        prepared for all contingencies.

        Even so, a snoozing tom,
        the darling of the help, will rouse
        from sleep, apprised that there’s a mouse
        nearby, and track it to its doom.
        With narrowed eyes, on silent paws,
        he closes in with untaught skill,
        crouches, leaps, and sinks his claws
        in flesh that twitches, then is still.

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Bonus: fun rhymes.

Stephenson: “‘…Invite the gentleman to supper./ I wonder if he’s hurt? Don’t stop!/ Run faster!’/ Natalie fluffs up her/ Exuberantly curly hair…” // “She rises to express/ Concern at all she heard and saw./ Count Nulin answers, ‘Nichevo.’” [!] // “Swings, at a buxom arm’s full length,/ A, yes, a slap—and what a stark one!—/ Full in the face of startled Tarquin.”

Wood: “He’s on his way to Petropole/ For show like some rare animal” // “Slowly, softly the door uncloses…/ Inside the bedroom, fitfully/ A lamp still burns, and palely glows as/ The mistress peacefully reposes,/ Asleep, or she pretends to be.”

Hulick: “…finds a tree/ to bed beneath as night draws on,/ rejoicing like a Myrmidon/ wreathed in leaves of victory” // “nor was this lapse a random quirk/ of nature. No. It had a cause:/ her years at Madam Falbala’s/ pension for gently-bred young ladies,/ where Slavic lares and penates/ were absent from the syllabus” // “Elated by the telltale sound,/ Natasha made a swift sortie,/ to check the likely roads around/ for traffic from the balcony” // “While she goes off/ to fluff a curl and give a puff/ to pillows on the best settee,/ and then she waits. For heaven’s sake,/ What’s keeping them? The time they take!/ But now they hove in view: i.e.,/ The muddied carriage, wounded sore…”

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Bottom line. All three of these translators seem like they enjoy Pushkin the way I imagine Pushkin enjoying Byron, and they find solutions he would smile at. They all take frequent small liberties with the precise meaning of words and lines to make the whole lively and light enough to have a similar effect on the reader as the original. If there were any out-and-out major errors in understanding, I didn’t catch them.

Stephenson is to be praised for translating something that, as far as I know, no one else had done. He’s good at keeping innuendo. The bit about horns above and another passage about Parasha the maid and Natal’ia Pavlovna’s husband (she “publicly at master rails,/ And privately with master sports”) come through very well in his version. He writes lines where it feels as if the speaker is spontaneously interrupting himself, which are perfect for this poem. In a few places I thought he was less precise than the later translators, and it felt like he wasn’t able to pretend to un-know the end of the poem while translating the beginning.

Wood’s translation seemed the most harmonious and disciplined, quite even in its exceptional quality. He made everything feel the most natural and immediate while probably staying the closest to the exact wording and order of the Russian text of these three. It felt like he’d given himself additional constraints—he let himself have fun, but not too much fun in terms of modifying details for attention-getting rhymes or resorting to frequent enjambments.

I thought Hulick’s translation reached the highest heights but wasn’t quite as even as Wood’s. Hulick seemed to have given herself permission to change more than Wood let himself change. Both of them are thinking about whether each joke will land and whether each line means the same thing in both languages, but Hulick prioritizes making things work: better keep the poem’s sense of fun than go for pedantic accuracy. For example, there is no maiden aunt in the Russian, just a reference to spending future income, but I’m not sorry that Hulick provided one in “shall I inform you who he is?/ Count Nulin, come from foreign haunts,/ where he has spent a fortune, viz:/ the one that’s still his maiden aunt’s.”

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The 1954 translation is in Robert C. Stephenson, “Pushkin’s ‘Count Nulin’: A Translation,” The University of Texas Studies in English 33 (1954): 69–79. Wood’s translation is in Alexander Pushkin, “Count Nulin,” in The Bridegroom, with Count Nulin and The Tale of the Golden Cockerel, trans. and afterword Wood (London: Angel, 2002): 17–32; it can also found in Pushkin, The Gypsies and Other Narrative Poems, trans. and intro. Wood (Boston: Godine, 2006) and Pushkin, Selected Poetry, trans. Wood ([London]: Penguin, 2020). I used the 2002 book for this post. Hulick’s translation is available for free online from the journal Cardinal Points. You can also buy a .pdf of the issue it’s in: see Alexander Pushkin, “Count Nulin,” trans. Betsy Hulick, Cardinal Points 3 (2011): 112–25.