#Woe from wit

[ikkealuvzu]

Me and my friend made a русская литература au thing? Idfk... we got tsatski and onegin au 💀💀💀🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

[do-you-know-this-play]

[nirinnnnn]

INTROSPECTION

Alexander Chatsky (Vitaly Solomin ver

[rknchan]

english translation of ‘woe from wit’ hits different

[shimyereh]

Some of D. N. Kardovsky’s illustrations to Woe from Wit (1912).

Sources: 1, 2

[mynameisemma]

Sometimes I think that if Molchalin really had been just a shy and humble guy Sofya thought him to be, their relationship’s dynamic would have been like this

[sqnon]

[kaggsy59]

“Can any man remain in Moscow without softening of the brain…” #woefromwit # alexandergriboedov @RusLibrary

Woe from Wit by Alexander Griboedov Translated by Betsy Hulick

Back in 2018, I reviewed a fascinating book for Shiny New Books called Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar by Yuri Tynianov. That book was a fictionalised retelling of the life of an intriguing Russian author Alexander Griboedov; a friend and contemporary of Pushkin, he’s probably best known for his play, “Woe from Wit”. So when I heard the…

[solusaeternam]

[isobelline]

sofya : talks about molchalin all the time, defends molchalin from chatsky's remarks, faints when molchalin falls from a horse and injures his arm

chatsky : hMmMmMmMmM.... I wOnDeR wHo'S sOfYa In LoVe WiTh?????

[melon-phoenix]

Ok, I���m not saying anything, but have you ever thought of what a sweet, nice, badassed cinnamon pie Chatsky is?

[nirinnnnn]

Vitaly Solomin's Alexander Chatsky, with nosebleed, bruises and broken glasses

(originally posted on Lofter, Aug 29 2022

[sb-sun-brother-blog]

Запало в сердце мне это произведение и фильм

[shimyereh]

Some thoughts, now that I’m halfway through Woe from Wit. I’ve poked around in this text before, but this is my first complete, thorough read-through.

1. Griboyedov’s language is so interesting. It’s been a while since I’ve had to look up this many words while reading something.

2. Chatsky is a bit of an inverse Childe Harold! We don’t see his travels; this story is all about what happens after he comes back to society. There are also, of course, parallels between Chatsky and Onegin. Pushkin seems to have first read Woe from Wit in early 1825 (a friend brought him a copy while visiting him in his northern exile), and he references it as early as Ch.6 of his novel.

3. I’ve translated a few excerpts of Woe from Wit for the footnotes of my Onegin translation (Pushkin references this play several times), but I don’t see myself going for a full translation of it in future. I’m not obsessed enough with it to give it the focus it would need.

I feel like a good translation of Woe from Wit would have to lean strongly into adaptation territory. You *have* to mirror the structure, or you lose a lot of the character of the piece. But this structure is a special kind of challenge to translate.

Varying sentence length is key to making formally-structured poetry feel more conversational, and I’ve observed two contrasting models of how to do this. One is keeping a fixed meter but making liberal use of enjambment. The other is using mixed meter (fixed metric foot, varying line length).

Fixed meter with extensive enjambment is much more forgiving to a translator: you have some leeway to break lines semantically in a slightly different place without sacrificing the original feel. I make a point of mirroring key subdivisions within each Onegin stanza (i.e. watching for quatrains, couplets, etc. that have a self-contained feel), but the exact semantic content of each individual line is not so fixed in place.

But mixed meter, like Griboyedov uses in his play, unrolls the lines instead of wrapping them around. Completed thoughts are more often contained within the shape of a particular line. The translation of a particular sentence *has* to occupy the same number of syllables. When I translate something in this style, I have to go into a different sort of headspace, and be prepared to take more semantic liberties in order to capture the feel and the tone of the original.

[alicewonderful]

[lauratraseylikepaccoons]

Chatsky/Molchalin

“Woe from wit”