Penguins.

Back in 2009 I posted a translation of a Bunin short story, Книга [Book], because I loved it and there were no English versions online; now I’m doing the same for another Bunin story, Пингвины [Penguins]. I sometimes pick up my fat Bunin collection and flip through to find a story I haven’t read when I don’t feel like tackling a new novel yet; a couple of weeks ago my eye fell on the odd title Пингвины at the top of p. 1114 in the table of contents and I thought I’d give it a try. It was so unusual and gripping it wouldn’t let go of me, and I finally had to translate it (and wound up memorizing a good chunk of it in the process). It’s perhaps a slight spoiler to say it’s an account of a dream, but that quickly becomes apparent; the thing about dreams in fiction is that they’re usually either tediously Freudian or pointless echoes of something in the main narrative — if your hero is being beset by enemies, I don’t need to wade through a dream about a bear attacked by hounds, thank you very much. But this has nothing in common with such fictional dreams; it’s self-contained, and its purpose seems to be to give as vivid a picture as possible of what dreaming is actually like, at which it succeeds brilliantly. The sudden changes of locale and of mood, the uncertainty, the intrusions of the inexplicable: it’s all there. (Gurzuf and Bakhchisarai are towns in the Crimea; Pushkin wrote poems about both.) And the ending is very funny.

The Russian text is here, or if you prefer the old spelling (as it was published in his 1931 collection Божье древо [Southern wormwood]) here. Obviously I had to make a lot of difficult translation choices; I’ll just mention that I rendered карагач [karagach] etymologically as “black elm” (I don’t think there is such a term in English) because, as my wife pointed out, if I had “karagach” it would just be a meaningless lump in the English text, whereas the Russian reader at least knows it’s a tree. For general context on these short plotless stories, I’ll quote a perhaps relevant bit from the note on Книга [Book] here: “Бунин всю жизнь был убежден, что художник должен все им виденное и пережитое записывать” [Bunin all his life was convinced that an artist should write down everything seen and experienced by him]. And I’ll also quote something vitalir wrote on flibusta: “Люблю Бунина. Может быть Россия Бунина для меня и есть град Китеж, не знаю. […] Блядь, народ, как можно не прочитать Бунина?” [I love Bunin. Maybe Bunin’s Russia is the city of Kitezh for me, I don’t know. … Fuck, people, how can you not read Bunin?]

It started with my being once again thirty years old — I saw and felt myself in exactly that happy period; I was again in the Russia of that time and in everything that characterized that time, and I was sitting in a train, going for some reason to Gurzuf… Then I felt that something was bothering me. It would seem that everything was fine — going south, sitting comfortably and at my ease in a small first-class compartment of an express train… But Pushkin died long ago, and in Gurzuf now it’s dead, empty, I suddenly told myself — and I saw, I understood, that not only in Gurzuf but everywhere it was frighteningly dead and empty. A kind of especially melancholy autumn — here in the south it was still autumn — and an astonishingly quiet, noiseless day. The train was traveling fast and full, but somehow full of inanimate people. And those unusually even steppes through which it was traveling were also lifeless and boring, as though their existence no longer had even the slightest meaning. That happens even in waking life: everything in the world sometimes seems frighteningly lifeless, insignificant.

“No,” I thought, “something isn’t right. I’ll have to abandon the train.”

I suddenly remembered that I was very fond of Bakhchisarai — after all, Pushkin once lived there as well, he was even a khan there in the fifteenth century — and I decided to get out in Bakhchisarai and continue on horseback, over the mountains, and I immediately did so. But I had somehow failed to notice Bakhchisarai, and in the mountains it was ghastly — wilderness, desert — and it was already getting dark. It was all stony ravines and crevasses, and all forest, forest, gnarled, stunted, already nearly bare, strewn with little yellow leaves: “It’s all black elm,” I thought, investing those words with a kind of secret and ill-omened meaning. And the horses are running somehow too evenly, and the coachman in his seat is so immobile and impersonal that I can hardly even see him — I only sense him and am afraid, because God knows what’s on his mind… The only hope is dinner in Yalta, I thought. I’ll ask for boiled mullet and white Abrau…

And then I saw Yalta, its dachas graveyard white among the cypresses, its shoreline promenade and the greenish seawater of the bay. But now it became completely terrifying. What had happened to Yalta? It was twilight, it was getting dark, but for some reason there wasn’t a single light anywhere, there was no one walking on the promenade, once again there was quiet, silence everywhere… I sat down in the empty and nearly dark restaurant and waited for service. But no one came; everything was empty and astonishingly quiet. In the depths of the room it was completely dark, and beyond the glass of the large window by which I was sitting a wind was coming up, low rain clouds were billowing, and time and again, thundering like cannon shots against the promenade and rising high into the air with their long foamy tails, came the waves. All this was so strange and frightening that I made an effort of will and leaped out of bed: it turned out I had fallen asleep without undressing or putting out the candle, which had nearly gone out and was now illuminating the room with a dark flickering light, and it was after one in the morning. And I leaped down, terrified: what was I going to do now? I had slept soundly and I could foresee no end to the night, and beyond the windows was the din of a downpour, and I was utterly alone in the whole world, where the only person not asleep was Davydka! I hurried to Davydka’s wineshop on Vinogradnaya. The night was so impenetrable and the rain was coming down so violently in its darkness that the wineshop seemed the only place alive not only in all of Poti — now I was in Poti — but on the whole coast of the Caucasus, even in the whole world. But when I finally reached him after running along some narrow, dirty, and lonely side streets, Davydka had already come out to close the shutters on his wretched little window and was about to put out the light and lock the door.

“But listen,” I said to him, feeling a terror that had already become deadly, “if you lock up and put out the light, what am I going to do? Where can I go? Even steamships don’t come here in winter!”

But Davydka only clicked his tongue and implacably, with that quiet imbecility of which only a Caucasian is capable, shook his dark close-cropped head.

“You can walk on the pier,” he said. “The main lighthouse will shine there all night.”

And here I am on some fearful precipice, humped and craggy, where you can hold on only by flattening yourself against the unusually tall and round white tower and pressing your feet on the cliff. Above, in the slowly revolving light, smoky from rain, with frenzied squeals and shrieks, fighting like seagulls, whirl innumerable funereal penguins. Below is a pitch-black abyss where something immeasurable howls and roars, hummocky, swirling, like some antediluvian octopus, moving heavily, with a sharp tang of oyster freshness, and at times rising in whole waterfalls of spray and foam… And above — penguins, penguins!