Poetry corner: Taras Shevchenko's "Don't Wed"

The most 'dudes rock' moment in Ukrainian romantic poetry

I haven’t updated in a while because I’ve been working on my next longform article, but I’ve had this sitting in my drafts and figured I might as well post it in the meantime as a sort of break from my usual type of content.

Poetry was a huge part of Soviet humanities education, much more so than in the West. The cynic in me will tell you this was because this enabled a great deal of time to be dedicated to the rote memorization of verses and pondering the beauty of language, which was a safer thing for Soviet citizens to focus on than the various political, historical, and philosophical themes one might encounter in prose. And yet, there was an undeniably impressive byproduct in that people from all walks of life, including my purely STEM-educated mom and grandparents, could recite entire volumes of Pushkin from memory. Having grown up with little inclination toward poetry myself, I am far from a model Soviet child in this regard (I’m not particularly good at chess either, alas), but occasionally I do come across one that strikes me. I also used to think of myself as having a bit of a knack for translation, having encountered English early enough to be fully comfortable in it without ever quite losing the detached clinical precision that often characterizes a learned second language. Apart from a couple of freelance projects years ago, professional translation is one of my many ‘paths not taken’ in life, but every few years I still get the inexplicable urge to try my hand at translating a poem.

Which brings me to Taras Shevchenko, the 19th century poet widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of Ukrainian culture. Modern readers may be surprised to learn that he was also highly regarded in the USSR, where he was considered a “people’s poet” due to his ardent opposition to serfdom and identification with Ukraine’s oppressed peasantry. Amid the culture wars that gripped Ukraine following independence, it was a slightly perverse point of pride that the largest and most magnificent monument to Shevchenko stood not in the nationalist West but in my ‘Russian-speaking’ hometown of Kharkiv, where the formidably whiskered poet strides atop a massive pedestal flanked by a winding row of figures representing all of the masses - soldiers, workers, farmers, cossacks, serfs. Along with the now-removed Lenin statue, it formed some of my most vivid memories of childhood. Clearly, I was not the only one to feel this way - the monument is so treasured that during the current war, volunteers covered it with sandbags to protect it from bombing.

Translating Shevchenko does pose one slight difficulty - I don’t actually know the language he wrote in. Ukrainian was mostly spoken in rural areas, and although my family knew it, no one ever bothered to teach it to me outside of perfunctory and quickly forgotten classes in elementary school. Nevertheless, as much of a political faux pas as it may be to acknowledge these days, Russian and Ukrainian are in fact closely related as East Slavic languages, and I’ve had enough exposure to the latter that I can get the sense and feel of what’s being said.

This particular poem is known by its first line - “Don’t marry a rich woman” - and the less additional personal commentary I make about that, the better. I’ve made an effort to maintain some of the admittedly loose rhyme scheme, perhaps at the cost of having the final product sound a bit like a limerick. As with many translations of Russian poetry and literature, I found the existing English ones to be too stilted and formal, delivered in the tone of a Victorian professor rather than the rustic and conversational feel of the original, where you can almost smell the horilka on the cossack’s breath as he leans in to impart his life wisdom with only the slightest hint of pain in his eyes.

*****

Original:

Не женися на багатій,
Бо вижене з хати,
Не женися на убогій,
Бо не будеш спати.
Оженись на вольній волі,
На козацькій долі,
Яка буде, така й буде,
Чи гола, то й гола.
Та ніхто не докучає
І не розважає —
Чого болить і де болить,
Ніхто не питає.
Удвох, кажуть, і плакати
Мов легше неначе;
Не потурай: легше плакать,
Як ніхто не бачить.

My translation:

Don’t find yourself a rich wife,
Or she’ll just kick you out,
Don’t find a poor one either,
That you’ll lose sleep about.
Embrace life without care,
The cossack’s share,
Whatever comes will come,
Though it may strip you bare.
No one to entertain
Or beg you to explain—
To ask you where and what’s
The cause of all your pain.
They say that it’s more bearable
To weep with company;
Don’t make me laugh: it’s easier
With no one there to see.