In a Trail of Mists and Perfumes

or The Stranger (Neznakomka), a poem by Aleksandr Blok

Léon Bakst, an illustration for The Stranger, 1907, Moskow, Tretyakov Gallery

The Stranger (also The Unknown Lady, The Lady Unknown, The Unknown Woman) is my favourite poem, written in 1906 by Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), one of the greatest Russian poets. Legend has it that Blok, coming home one night in the haze of a drunken stupor, showed Lyuba¹, his wife, a piece of paper, where he had scribbled the first couple of verses. By the time he’d completed it, he’d sobered up, as the carefully crafted poem structure shows to the eye and the ear. Its plot is simple: the hero visits a restaurant in Ozerki – a somewhat notorious suburb of St Petersburg at the time – where, in a drunken haze, he sees the Stranger, a young woman who walks through the room, then sits alone by a window. Is she real, or a dream, an epiphany? Here’s the poem, in its transliterated Russian original version, and in Vladimir Nabokov’s literal translation (we’ll get to that):

Po večeram nad restoranami

Goryači vosdukh dik i glukh,

I pravit okrikami p’yanymi

Vesennij i tletvornyj dukh.

Vdali nad pyl’yu pereuločnoj,

Nad skukoj zagorodnykh dač,

Čut’ zolotitsya krendel’ buločnoj,

I razdaëtsya detskij plač.

I každyj večer, za šlagbaumami,

Zalamyvaya kotelki,

Sredi kanav gulyayut s damami

Ispytannye ostryaki.

Nad ozerom skripyat uklyučiny

I razdaëtsya ženskij vizg,

A v nebe, ko vsemu priučennyj

Bessmyslenno krivitsya disk.

Nabokov:

In the evenings, the sultry air above the restaurants

is both wild and torpid,

and drunken vociferations are governed

by the evil spirit of spring.

In the dusty vista of lanes

where reigns the suburban tedium of clapboard villas

the gilt sign of a bakery — a giant pretzel — glimmers,

and children are heard crying.

And every evening, beyond the town barriers,

in a zone of ditches,

wags of long standing, their jaunty derbies askew,

go for walks with their lady friends.

From the lake comes the sound of creaking oar locks

and women are heard squealing,

while overhead, the round moon,

accustomed to everything, blankly mugs.

The first 8 stanzas unfold like a tracking shot: in the first 4, we see Ozerki’s main street, with its cafés and taverns. The air is heavy with a stifling heat which seems unlikely for a spring evening in northwestern Russia. (St Petersburg’s latitude is less than 7 degrees to the south of the Arctic Circle.) Could this be a hint that something unusual is about to happen? We find the same stifling heat at the start of Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment – though the action in the plot takes place in July – and which imbues the novel with the frenzied pace of a feverish nightmare.

But nothing as dramatic is happening in this place, in fact, there’s a suffocating sense of dullness, interrupted by snippets of human presence – children crying, women squealing, the expert wits or, as in Nabokov’s translation, wags of long standing flirting with their ladies. The night is dimly lit by the gilt sign of a bakery, and by an indifferent moon.

I každyj večer drug edinstvennyj

V moëm stakane otražën

I vlagoj terpkoj i tainstvennoj

Kak ya, smirën i oglušën.

A ryadom, u sosednykh stolikov

Lakei sonnye torčat,

I p’yanicy s glazami krolikov

‘In vino veritas!’ kričat.

I každyj večer, v čas naznačennyj

(Il’ èto tol’ko snitsya mne?),

Devičij stan, šëlkami skhvačennyj,

V tumannom dvižetsya okne.

I medlenno, projdya mež p’yanymi,

Vsegda bez sputnikov, odna

Dyša dukhami i tumanami,

Ona saditsya u okna.

I veyut drevnimi pover’yami

Eë uprugie šelka,

I šlyapa s traurnymi per’yami,

I v kol’cakh uskaya ruka.

Nabokov:

And every evening my sole companion

is reflected in my wineglass,

as tamed and as stunned as I am

by the same acrid and occult potion.

And nearby, at other tables,

waiters drowsily hover,

and tipplers with the pink eyes of rabbits

shout: In vino veritas!

And every evening, at the appointed hour

(or is it merely a dream of mine?),

the figure of a girl in clinging silks

moves across the misty window.

Slowly she makes her way among the drinkers,

always escortless, alone,

perfume and mists emanating from her,

and takes a seat near the window.

And her taut silks,

her hat with its tenebrous plumes,

her slender bejeweled hand

waft legendary magic.

We move now (5 stanzas) inside one of the restaurants, where we observe the scene through the poet’s senses: we hear drunkards yelling, we smell the cheap alcohol fumes, taste the acrid liquor, see the poet’s reflection in it.

This happens every evening, and every evening, in a punctual yet surprising twist, a young woman visits this bleak place. She looks incongruous in her feathered hat with a black veil, and her silk dress, emanating arcane, fragrant mists.

I strannoj blizost’yu zakovannyj,

Smotryu za tëmnuyu vual’,

I vižu bereg očarovannyj

I očarovannuyu dal’.

Glukhie tajny mne poručeny,

Mne č’ë-to solnce vručeno,

I vse duši moej izlučiny

Pronzilo terpkoe vino.

I per’ya strausa sklonënnye

V moëm kačayutsya mozgu,

I oči sinie bezdonnye

Cvetut na dal’nem beregu.

V moej duše ležit sokrovišče,

I klyuč poručen tol’ko mne!

Ty pravo, p’yanoe čudovišče!

Ya znayu: istina v vine.

Nabokov:

And with a strange sense of intimacy enchaining me,

I peer beyond her dusky veil

and perceive an enchanted shoreline,

a charmed remoteness.

Dim mysteries are in my keeping,

the orb of somebody’s day has been entrusted to me,

and the tangy wine has penetrated

all the meanders of my soul.

And the drooping ostrich feathers

sway within my brain,

and the dark-blue fathomless eyes

become blossoms on the distant shore.

A treasure lies in my soul,

and I alone have the keeping of its key.

Those drunken brutes are right:

indeed, – there is truth in wine…

In the last 4 stanzas, the poet, lost in contemplation, looks into the stranger’s dark-blue eyes, and catches a glimpse of “an enchanted shoreline, a charmed remoteness.” He becomes the keeper of secrets, of someone’s sun, he holds now the key to a treasure.

A young Aleksandr Blok. Color by Klimbim. Look at those dreamy eyes …

Let’s go back to Aleksandr Blok. Born in St Petersburg in wealth and privilege, Blok was a precocious child, who had access to his family’s vast library, and was exposed to all kinds of new ideas and theories. Czarist Russia, around the end of the 19th century up to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, was – if not a beacon of freedom, justice, and equality – a culturally vibrant environment, producing great works of poetry, music, and art. Those nearly three decades were later called the Silver Age.

Though influenced by the Symbolist poets in the first, mystical phase of his career, Blok, not oblivious to the tumultuous changes and the social upheaval in Russia, which led to the first Revolution of 1905, treated more contemporary themes, such as the rampant industrialisation in St Petersburg, in his next poetry collections. In The Stranger, the conflict unfolding between the Platonic theory of ideal beauty and a dismaying reality resolves itself into a transfiguration, from a grim desolation to a revealed truth, an otherwordly beauty. Finding this rarefied ideal in the midst of squalor suggests an alchemical process, comparable to the extraction of gold from ore.

There’s never one way of reading a literary text. They are always in fieri, works in progress that evolve and take in new meanings, according to their readers and the times in which they live. This poem is not an exception. When it was first published almost 120 years ago, readers familiar with the principles of theosophical mysticism saw in the unknown lady a manifestation of the Eternal Feminine, Sophia² the Holy Wisdom, or Anima mundi.

In The Stranger, I read a description of the creative process, where the artist catches the sparks of an idea, gathers various interconnected (though not immediately recognisable as such) concepts, images, words, and gradually proceeds to build another world, to defamiliarise the everyday, to distillate a brand new vision, and a newly found sense of Beauty and Truth.

But what is this Ideal, this sense of Beauty and Truth, so emphatically capitalised? Is it that fleeting moment, when someone – an artist, a scientist, or just a human being – realises that tout se tient – everything is connected, that there is no real distinction between the daily grind of existence and the fantastic discoveries of imagination and thought? We live on a rock with fire at its core, spinning in a vacuum, how can this world be dull? How can our lives not be wonderful adventures? Or is it an epiphany in which we become aware, according to Proust of “a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one”?

A couple of words about Nabokov’s translation of The Stranger. Now, if you can’t read the lyrical, evocative original Russian text, you’re probably thinking, ‘What’s the big deal about this poem? Why do you like it so much, it just sounds devoid of any musicality, any sparkle of magic’, and you’d be right. Nabokov’s translation is literal, and sounds pedestrian and uninspired, the complete opposite of his writing style. But let’s read Nabokov’s considerations about the translation of poetry:

(…) there exist, roughly speaking, three types of translators (…): the scholar who is eager to make the world appreciate the works of an obscure genius as much as he does himself; the well meaning hack; and the professional writer relaxing in the company of a foreign confrere. The scholar will be, I hope, exact and pedantic: footnotes—on the same page as the text and not tucked away at the end of the volume—can never be too copious and detailed. The laborious lady translating at the eleventh hour the eleventh volume of somebody’s collected works will be, I am afraid, less exact and less pedantic; but the point is not that the scholar commits fewer blunders than a drudge; the point is that as a rule both he and she are hopelessly devoid of any semblance of creative genius. Neither learning nor diligence can replace imagination and style.

Now comes the authentic poet who has the two last assets and who finds relaxation in translating a bit of Lermontov or Verlaine between writing poems of his own. Either he does not know the original language and calmly relies upon the so-called “literal” translation made for him by a far less brilliant but a little more learned person, or else, knowing the language, he lacks the scholar’s precision and the professional translator’s experience. The main drawback, however, in this case is the fact that the greater his individual talent, the more apt he will be to drown the foreign masterpiece under the sparkling ripples of his own personal style. Instead of dressing up like the real author, he dresses up the author as himself.

We can deduce now the requirements that a translator must possess in order to be able to give an ideal version of a foreign masterpiece. First of all he must have as much talent, or at least the same kind of talent, as the author he chooses. In this, though only in this, respect Baudelaire and Poe or Joukovsky and Schiller made ideal playmates. Second, he must know thoroughly the two nations and the two languages involved and be perfectly acquainted with all details relating to his author’s manner and methods; also, with the social background of words, their fashions, history and period associations. This leads to the third point: while having genius and knowledge he must possess the gift of mimicry and be able to act, as it were, the real author’s part by impersonating his tricks of demeanor and speech, his ways and his mind, with the utmost degree of verisimilitude.

Well, as much as I agree with one of my favourite writers, that is a rare occurrence indeed! In this instance, Nabokov works as the “exact and pedantic” scholar translator, having neither the chance to impersonate Blok’s “tricks of demeanor and speech, his ways and his mind” with his own gift of mimicry, nor to leave his interpretation.

For my Italian friends, I personally like this version, by F. Gabbrielli. Among the nine English translations you can find here, I think the one below, translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky, conveys the original meaning quite well:

The Lady Unknown

Of evenings hangs above the restaurant
A humid, wild and heavy air.
The Springtide spirit, brooding, pestilent,
Commands the drunken outcries there.

Far off, above the alley's mustiness,
Where bored gray summerhouses lie,
The baker's sign swings gold through dustiness,
And loud and shrill the children cry.

Beyond the city stroll the exquisites,
At every dusk and all the same:
Their derbies tilted back, the pretty wits
Are playing at the ancient game.

Upon the lake but feebly furious
Soft screams and creaking oar-locks sound.
And in the sky, blase, incurious,
The moon beholds the earthly round.

And every evening, dazed and serious,
I watch the same procession pass;
In liquor, raw and yet mysterious,
One friend is mirrored in my glass.

Beside the scattered tables, somnolent
And dreary waiters stick around.
"In vino veritas!" shout violent
And red-eyed fools in liquor drowned.

And every evening, strange, immutable,
(Is it a dream no waking proves?)
As to a rendezvous inscrutable
A silken lady darkly moves.

She slowly passes by the drunken ones
And lonely by the window sits;
And from her robes, above the sunken ones,
A misty fainting perfume flits.

Her silks' resilience, and the tapering
Of her ringed fingers, and her plumes,
Stir vaguely like dim incense vaporing,
Deep ancient faiths their mystery illumes.

I try, held in this strange captivity,
To pierce the veil that darkling falls
I see enchanted shores' declivity,
And an enchanted distance calls.

I guard dark secrets' tortuosities.
A sun is given me to hold.
An acrid wine finds out the sinuosities
That in my soul were locked of old.

And in my brain the soft slow flittering
Of ostrich feathers waves once more;
And fathomless the azure glittering
Where two eyes blossom on the shore.

My soul holds fast its treasure renitent,
The key is safe and solely mine.
Ah, you are right, drunken impenitent!
I also know: truth lies in wine.

I'll leave you with my favourite reading (in Russian) by Pavel Morozov – where his speaking cadence subtly changes from sluggish to enthralled. Then listen to this delightful young woman, Masha Matveychuk, I just love her voice, especially in the second part of the poem, and – last but not least – Dmitry Maksakov, all Slavic cheekbones and pale-blue eyes, in a somewhat theatrical but magnetic performance.

1. Lyuba - Lyubov’ Mendeleeva, was Dmitry Mendeleev’s daughter, the scientist famous for the periodic table of the elements. She became Blok’s wife in 1903 and he dedicated his first book of verses Stikhi o Prekrasnoj Dame (Verses about the Beautiful Lady, 1904) to her. In a happy coincidence for a Symbolist poet, her name seems to hold an ideal synthesis of science and mysticism. Lyubov’ means Love, or Charity, as in the three Theological Virtues – Faith, Hope, Charity. (In Russian – Vera, Nadežda, Lyubov’.)

2. Sophia in the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church, the feminine personification of divine wisdom as Holy Wisdom. (Ἁγία Σοφία; Hagía Sophía.)

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