The poem below is the result of exasperation.  I recently went online in search of poetry by Arseni Tarkovsky (Andrei Tarkovsky’s father whose poems were used in many of his son’s films).  I found a website with the Russian texts in minutes.  Finding their English counterparts proved trickier.  Finally, I came up with this—a version of Ignatievo Forest by Virginia Rounding (warning: page displays in code in Mozilla).  Apparently this is one of the few efforts to bring Arseni Tarkovsky’s poetry to English speakers.

Ms. Rounding’s ham-fisted rendering is a lazy word-for-word carbon copy, and not a very accurate one at that.  Granted, the poem contains some difficult words (e.g. “наволгшей”, meaning roughly “swollen with moisture” but understood by Ms. Rounding as having something to do with the river Volga).  However, consulting any good Russian dictionary, or absent that, a literate native speaker, would have yielded the correct meaning.  I think Arseni Tarkovsky’s elegant verse deserves much better than such perfunctory treatment.  To this end, I attempted my own translation, although I’m afraid I may be simply churning out more crap.  English is my second language, after all.  I tried my best; it took me two days.

Post scriptum.  Finally watched Nostalghia tonight.  The Italian heroine reads Tarkovsky’s poems in Italian.  The main character, a Russian poet, tells her to throw the book away because art cannot be translated.  Balls!

(See also First Rendezvous, Message.)