The Ratcatcher: A Lyrical Satire 0810118165, 9780810118164

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowlegements
Introduction
CANTO I
CANTO 2
CANTO 3
CANTO 4
CANTO 5
CANTO 6
Notes
Further Reading

Citation preview

:-\.ngel ... Classics

rfHE RAl'CAl'CI-IER

is now regarded as one of the .greatest Russian 1mcts of the . twentieth century, along with Blok, Pasternak,.\ landclstam and :-\khmato,·a. Born in .\loscow in t 8l)2, of a classicist father, who became famous as the fimndcr of what is now the Pushkin .\luscum of Fine Arts, and a pianist mother who w~mtcd her to h~n-e the musical career she herself had renounced, 'horn not into life hut into music', Ts,·ctae,·a wrote poetry from childhood on and at the age of sc,·cntccn published a H>lume of poems at her own expense which got some positi,·c reYiews. At nineteen she married Sergcy Efron, of a family which had been associated with the re, olutionary terrorist organisation The People's \\'ill; she g~l\"e birth to two daughters, in 1912 and J5 lines being taken out of the I 965 edition to preYent SoYict readers associating the rats with the Bolshc,·iks. It is only since the adYent of pcrcstm1}a in 1986 and the freedom of research, criticism and 1n1blishing that ... which it brought, ... this work has at last come into its own in Russia. Although she admired the Sn11bolist Blok and the Futurist ... . .\ layako,·sky ( \\"horn she praised despite the general cmign: hostility to e,·erything So,·iet), loYed and felt close to the modernist neo-Romantic Pasternak, 1-cYered the more classical .\landclstam and :\nna :\khmatm·a (that other celebrated Russian woman poet with,, hom she is sometimes fruitlessly compared), Ts,-ctae,a is not, fina Hy, like any oft hem. She \\Tote poems to, and pro~e about, a)) these poets, and she did ha, c something: in common" ith most of them, sharin~, fcff instance, the S~ mbolist con,·ic.\ l..\:'\Y OF TI IE \\"RITERS

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tion of another •higher' dimension of being, Pasternak's belief in a uni,·crsal force of inspiration (she too can he callclutionary poet all the same. You '"e got our tempo.'s As i\1lirsky wrote: ' ... though an anti-Comrnunist, Marina Tsvetae,·a is animated by a high and generous spirit of ren>lt that is hardly in tune with the hmj!;rl fceling·s. ,,, 1

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L.cgcnd and sources In the summer of the year 1284 the German town of I larncln was so badly overrun by rats that the Burgomaster promised a large sum of money to

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anyone who would remoYe them. A colourfully dressed wandering Piper turned up and, by playing on his pipe, lured all the rats away and drowned them in the RiYer \Veser. But the reward was refused him and he went away angry, to return - some say at noon or at seven o'clock on 26 June dressed as a hunter and with terrible face and strange red hat. This time, playing his pipe, he lured away all the town's 130 children over the age of four, together with the Burgomaster's grown-up daughter, and disappeared with them into the side of a mountain. Only two children sun·i,·ed: one blind and one dumb. These are the main facts in the legend as told by the Brothers Grimm, 10 undoubtedh·- one of Ts,·etae\'a 's sources. There have been n1an,·- other ,·ersions of it, with n1inor Yariations. Ts,·etaeYa's chief divergences from the Grimn1 ,·ersion are these: (i) the promised reward is the hand of the Burgomaster's daughter in marriage; (ii) the Ratcatcher is huntsman-like from the beginning (though without the terrible face); (iii) the children are drowned, with no sun·ivors. In Russian literature there is ,·ery little about this legend. Among other German treatn1cnts of the subject, Tsvetae,·a certainly knew the poem ''The Ratcatcher' by Karl Simrock 11 which tells the whole story, Goethe's lyric poen1 'The Ratcatcher' 12 and Heine's 'The \Vandcring Rats' . 13 She may also have known a prose ,·crsion of it in Czech which was reprinted in Prague while she was there. H In Simrock's se,·en-stanza poem the reward is marriage to the Burgon1aster's daughter, and the children arc drowned, as in Ts,·etae,·a's; other, more interesting, similarities are that Simrock insists on a miraculous or wonderful quality in the Piper (the word '\Vunder' is used four times), and that he makes the town council denounce n1usic as at once friYolous and satanic. ~ lorcover, the lines Er blickt so wild Cnd singt so mild ...

He looks so wildhAnd sings so mildly ...

n1ay have inspired her description of the Piper at the moment of the refused reward: Lips smile. Brows wild ... as well as the \\·hole semi-demonic conception of this figure. Goethe's three-stanza poem is a cheerful song sung hy the wandering player who calls himsclf 'Ratcatcher '. 'Chi)dcatchcr' and '~ laid en-

I \TNO/){ king, and engaging in polemic ,,·ith pre,·ious works. Verse satire has a long tradition in Russia; T's,·ctae,·a was ine,·itabh·. conscious of Griboedc)\·'s .great ,·crsc-comech. IVoe_{i-0111 I fit (1825), Pushkin's satirical poe11~)' such as Co1111I 1V11/i11, The

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Lill le I louse in Kolo11111a, The Gahrieliad, Tsar :Vikita am/ bis For~)' Daugli/ers ( 1820s) and of ~ekraso,·'s long poem 11 '/w ran !i-,:e 11,c// in Russia? ( 1870s). Her n1ixing of styles - the serious with the frin>lous, the fantastic with the realistic - is hardh- her own in,·ention. Prose satire has flourished in Russian literature too; more than one critic has spoken of 'fsYctae,·a 's "dead souls', implying a comparison between her Hamlin citizens and the Russian landowners in Gogol's non:l of 184-2. At the time when she was writin lines) depicts their market, the

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irruption into it of hordes of rats ( who turn into ren>lutionaries) and the announcement of a reward for their rcmo,·al; Canto~ (561 lines) introduces the Piper: he entices the rats and leads them away to drown in a pond, pretending it is India; in Canto 5 (567 lines) the Town Councillors make speeches against 111usic and reduce the reward from marriage with the Burgomaster's daughter to a pa pier-mac he flute-case; in Canto 6(301 lines) the Piper lures the town's children away and drowns them.

CA;\;TO 1:

/fa 111/in Tomn

From the start the tone is ironic. These staid folk nc\'er sin and do not sta\' up to watch the con1ct (in a pocn1 of H)23 Ts\'ctae,·a had written: 'for the path of comets is the poet's path'). Caring only about food, n1oney, rank and propriety, they h,n·c no ·soul' - and no music: the only references to music in this canto arc to the absence of anv clarinet in the town and to 'Schumanns' -a term of contempt. Beggars, too, arc kept out of the town, and this will he recalled at the end of the last canto when the Piper is explicitly referred to as a 'beggar'. At a nun1hcr of places in the work the narrati,·c ( or dialogue, which soon takes o,·cr as Ychiclc of story-telling) is interrupted hy a lyrical or satirical expatiation on a single topic: the first is here, in the form of an Ode to the Button. Buttons, descendants of the biblical fig-leaf, represent the desire to keep things contained and hidden, and arc thus central to what rrs,·etac,·a has to say. This will be particularly explicit in Canto 5 when a flutecase is offered to a man who defines artists as haters of all wrappings. Ts,·ctae\'a thinks antithetically and makes this clear at the outset. There exist the satanic and the (all too) godly, the musical and the non-nu1sical, the artist and the philistine, the naked and the o,·erdressed, huttonless honesty and buttoned-up hypocrisy. 'God's children's buttons arc all done up/Those of the goat arc not.'

CANTO 2:

The /Jrea ms

lla,·ing got the I lamliners to hcd, the poet now spies into their drean1s, pro\'ing that there is no sin or excitement there either. In his rich house 'stinking' of cleanliness the Burgomaster and his wife dream, like everyone else, of their boring e,·cryday life. As if unable to stop herself~ the poet imagines setting all this on fire, and the red of the 'red cockerel' (tneaning

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fire) suggests .\loscow with its red ~remlin walls, and 'red' ren>lution. \\'l. kno\\" from Canto I that no one in Hamlin thinks of arson and now poetry's easy entry into homes and dreams is likened to an inYasion by fire~ so poetry is allied both with 1-cYolution and with elemental danger. Greta, the Burgomaster's daughter, is an exception to the uniYersal deadness of the imagination. Her dream-longings, which conclude the canto, mark the beginning of the subsidian·- theme of her romance with the Ratcatcher. ~

CA~TO

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3: The .-/.j/lictio11

Rather n1orc than a third of this canto dcYclops the description of the town up to the arri,·al of the rats: its liYely market and the gossip, which comes round to Greta again.:\ satirical o

and holy fool~ he is also hunter, Green .\ Ian, Dionysus, the diabolical unknown. \\"hen outlining her planned characters, 'I\Yetae,·a had jotted in her notebook: "The 11 untsman - I )eYil and Seducer - Poe It]''. 2-t (Ts,-ctac,·a \\as, of course, not afraid of the Dc,·il, whom she claimed to ha\'e seen in her childhood.)2~ :\ho,c all, the Ratcatchcr is the Artist, with an aura of the di,·inc. Indeed, God I limsclf is quoted, in Canto I, saying (in German) to the hiding :\dam: \\lcnsch, wo hist lduJ?' ,-\'lutatis 11111ta11dis, this is Ts,-ctae,·a's 0\\11 appeal throughout the work: where arc you, man, among the distractions, indulgences, disguises and clutter of .,·our life? "" Can't .You hear the music? E,·crnhing in The Ratcatd1cr radiates from this . -on c high ambiguous ,·alue and points to the figure of the Ratcatchcr who embodies it. ~

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/11 the To11,11 I !all

Pasternak thought Cantos -t- and (), and the market part of Canto 3, the best~ Canto 5 he liked the least: \1 tormenting chapter' taking us, he felt, away from our closeness to the Piper. It is true that the lyrical, until the ,·cry end, is absent from Canto 5. But it is surely as excellent a piece of writing as anything in the pocma, a witty, angry, quasi-realistic piece clcYerly placed bet ween the two episodes of magical seduction. It is an exposition, and an exposure, of all the ways the unmusical think up to prc,·ent any i1n·asion of music into their li,·es. 'l'he theme is the place of art in ordinan· lifc. The speeches made against music arc in three kinds of n,ice. First there is the philistine pol~ phony of Councillors declaring that no decent person could marn· a musician - music is tri,·ial and helon1,!s at life's margins. Second is the ,·oice of the Burgomaster, i.e. of political authority, which has to admit its enemy's po\\er: music is fire, Furies, wild beasts, de,·ils, ren,lt. :\ t this point something like 'I's,-ctaeYa 'sown n>ice states - in a "poem' of its own - that in l lamlin there is no •r, no experience of suhjecti,·ity, while for her there is 011(), the 'I': •

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I is an applet rec laden with fruit To the brim ...

Strange)~ interrupting the dramatised narrati, c, this passage is her reminder that those whose opinions she is regaling us with haYe no con-

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ception of the reality of being. The third Yoice is that of a Councillor known for his 'romanticism, and custon1ary defence of the arts. J\ lusic, says he, insincerely, is ethereal, it is way aboYe the ordinary mortal, and therefore cannot possibly he c0111bined with e,·eryday life. '.Vlarriage/Of Hamlin to genius would be as ,,·rong/As a nightingale's to a cabbage'. The irony is, of course, that in Ts,·ctae\'a ,s scheme of things he is quite right. The Piper cannot truly desire such a n1arriage, entailing as it ,,·ould do a settled hon1e and statesmanlike duties in the ciYic hierarchy; he can only desire to desire it (without the entailments)- after all, his passion is for the horizon. All the same, he is furious at the refusal to honour the pledge to him and his reply to the Council is Ts,·ctae,·a 's own credo. Thus the 'n1instrcl' (the artist) 'is the ripper of wrappers/ Off e,·erything under the sky!' -and you should even, he says, 'Break all the flutes! It's in us/ Not in them, that sounds are sung.' 1

CANTO

6: The Children's Paradise

On a rough draft Ts,·etae\'a pencilled: '\\Tho will wake up the alarn1-clock and free us fron1 time?' 2'' Her own dislike of mechanical tin1e-counting was so great that she once said a major joy of her life was 'not to hear a n1etronome'. Into the ringing of the alarm-clock that wakes a child for school floats an unprecedented sound: the flute. Two opposed significances ccllide, and straight away it is the flute that wins. Once again eYerything is told through sounds- the music, the shouts of the children as they rush after it, their separate ,·oices, the promises the flute seen1s to make. Yet its Erlking-like enticen1ents arc, strangely enough, not uni\'ocal. For one thing, the Piper interrupts his attracti,·e offerings with occasional hints at the children's actual watery destination: 'excellent places for rowing and fishing'; 'and - a bath for you all' ... For another, still more unexpected, what he offers is emphatically dh·ided as between girls and boys. For girls: dolls, thimbles, docs, weddings, beads, passions, jewellery; for boys: guns, skittles, steeds, wars, bullets, games, flints. The distinction is particularly marked in 'Sounds for the girls and n1canings for boys' ('sounds, being this poet's highest ,·alue) and still more in 'Pleasure for boys, and for girls - hcaYy care ... / Joys for the boys, for the girls despair,: hardly designed to keep the girls following hin1! \Yhy then do they follow him? In retrospect, most of what the Piper offers the children resembles in kind what they would haYe had if they had stayed at home, only more cunningly adapted to their taste: the materialism of toys and

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trinkets, and (to offer an interpretation of 'pleasure ... despair') ordinary sexual relationships. Is this, then, all that they arc able to want? It is often supposed that Ts, etac,·a secs the children as especially capahk of freedom, c\'en as her kin, potential poets. 1\ sign of this could be their great immediate joy in breaking free of school and home, so different from the rats' slcrn, co111pkx response (though the fact is that the rats arc being induced to lca,·c a life they \\Trc enjoying, which is not the case "·ith the children); and Ts,ctacYa certainly made remarks outside the pocma "hich show a great respect for children's honesty and sense of loyalty. \\'ithin the poema, howc,·cr, that initial lcn-c of freedom docs not noticeably continue. :\n analysis of the t" cnty-four reasons the children gi,·e, one by one, as to" hy they arc fllowing the Piper - n:ry like a collection of answers to a questionnaire - shows that eight arc indeed the desire for romance, at·r N11111·11/;i11gcr, L·ditcd, transl.Hed, and with commentaries by .\laric1,ui"L' Bott, \\ith a 1.dos'ian In (iunthcr \\\trzens, II ima .\'/a11 1s1tsdu·r .·ll11w11ad1 Somlcrhand 7, \'iL·nna 1r anyone!'

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~1 ts ' a sin . ... , ~she should be ... , 4 Ha-ha-ha ... ' 4 Hee-hee-hee ... ' 4

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Look at her, just skin and bone ... ' All dried up, it seems to n1e!' Come and have a buttered scone!' Come to coffee, come to tea!'

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So they close The women's club. Hotpot hissing On the hob.

Rows of ,·egetables, the morals Laudable, the cellars Full ... ~ilcasure! A hol,· call! OYer-proud - you 'II fall. Over-laugh - you 'II weep. EYen a prince n1ust keep FaYour and ire controlled: Over-despotic? ReYolt! O,·er-sheepish? A fold! Zuriel ist u11gesu11d. .\leasure! .\1oderation! Logic! Over-eat - get colic. (Over-scratch - a bald head.) O,·cr-fast and Y, 1/1e 'oue' A literal translation would be 'Perceives in the word "e,·eryone" only one letter, the "yat".' The 'e' in the Russian word for 'e,·cryone' (i·se) used to be written with a different letter, known as \at' - this was one of the letters remcwed from the alphabet shortly after the Re,·olution to simplify Russian spelling. Ts,·etae,·a always clung to the old orthography and takes the opportunity here to say so. Rather than produce a wholly opaque stanza I ha,·e made it refer to the syllabic 'one' in •e,·eryone'. Page 89: si.r.ft'e/ tall On the assumption that Ts,·etae,·a is thinking here of ~layako,·sky, with his physical height, his often shouted ,·erse and his adoption of the Sm·iet cause, for which he wrote and drew slogans, I have changed 'arshin' (about 71 centimetres) to 'six feet'. So while she mav mean the size of the letters, I ha\"e added the idea of the poet's own height. Page 90: Geld isl Saud '~lone,· is sand'. Page 91: C11bd·a11111 'unknown'. Page 91: JJ11sika111 •musician'.

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NOTES

Page 92: biirga/irh "bourgeois'. Page 92: 1-f )'111e11 The god of marriage.

.I Page 92: " 111hae 110 s1C,mess . .. " \\'ords from the Orthodox funeral scn·icc. Page 95: Geben -_/i-isst, I Leh' hei.ut spar' "Giving eats [away your goods], [To] live means [to] save [up].' Page 96: '>Ill thi11gs are but s(e:11s" A deliberate misquotation of the words from the end of Goethe's Faust, Part II: "Alles Vergangliche /1st nur ein Gleichnis' ('Everything transitory is only a likeness'), words often dwelt on hy Symbolist poets. Page 97: mht11 the ice stops.fl011 1ing i.e. when everything freezes over.

CANTO 6 The Children's Paradise Page 101: ,Horgemupp' Breakfast broth. Page 103: Saadi The thirteenth-century Persian poet, especially famous for his book of poetry called "Gulistan' ("The rose garden'). Page 107: Hus Jan Hus ( 1369-q 15), the great Czech religious reformer, burnt at the stake for heres\". Page 108: Ch1:J1.Wlite . .. Ch1:J1soprast• Names for various green and golden-green semi-precious stones.

Further Reading English translations ,fTsretaera 's rase :\II the following arc well worth reading: ( 1) Selected Poems, translated by Elaine Feinstein, London 1971, 6th edition 1999 (c. 90 poems). (2) The Demt'.me of the Smaus, translated by Robin Kemball, Ann Arbor 1980 (62 poems)- these arc the poems about the \Vhite Army mentioned in my Introduction; the ,·olume contains an interesting essay on Russian ,·ersification and four pages of analysis of metres and stanza forms. (3) St'lected Poems, translated by David ;\lcDuff, Ncwcastlcupon-Tyne 1987 (88 poems). (.t,) /11 the ·111111ost Hour rf tlu: Soul. Selected Poems translated by :'\ina Kossman, New Jersey I 989 ( I 08 poems); Poem the End: Selected lVarratire and L)'rical Poems b,·. the same translator, including... 'Poem of . the End', ":\'cw Year's Greeting' (addressed to Rilke) and 'Poem of the Air', Dana Point C:\ 1998. (5) -1/ier Russia, translated by ;\lichacl Naydan with Sla,·a Yastremski, Ann Arbor 1992 ( 152 poems). These translators represent a ,·ariety of approaches, and to sample them all might be a good way to build up a sense of the originals' quality.

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Translations ,~f'Ts,:etaera 's prost' I strongly recommend reading: some of the prose . .\larina Ts,·etaeva, .-I Captirt' Spirit: .Sdected Prose, translated by Janet .\larin King, Ann Arbor 1980, reprinted London 1983 and :\nn Arbor 1994, contains nineteen autobiographical pieces and one of literary criticism (namely 'Two Forest Kings', mentioned in my Introduction); the piece most closely related in theme to The Ratratd1a is '.\lother and .\lusic' (pp.172-87 in the 1994 edition). In my own translation, Art in the Light rf Conscit'11Ct'. Eight E.m:ys 011 Poet IT, Bristol 1992, also Cambridge ~1A 1994, I would especially recommend, as bearing on ideas implicit in The Ratcatd,er, the following essays: "The Poet on the Critic', 'The Poet and Time', "l\n> Forest Kings' and the title piece 'Art in the Light of Conscience'. Finally, eYeryone interested in TsYctacYa should surclv. read Boris Pasternak, ~farina Ts,·eta\'cYa, Rainer ~laria . Rilke, Lettas 1926, edited by YeYgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak and Konstantin AzadoYsky, and translated by \\'alter Arndt and \largaret \Vettlin, I ,ondon 1986 - both for the twenty letters it contains by Ts,·etae,·n herself and for the all-

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important letters Pasternak wrote to her in June and July of that year com·cying his impression of The Ratrntchcr (pp. IJ.J, q7-53 and iC>0-5).

II ,,rl..-s about TH·ttac-.·a Simon 1'.arlinsky's pioneering work Alariua Cretac1·a: Ha L~fe t111(/, ·lrt, Berkeley CA 196(,, is still worth reading, especially for the section on versification, although it is in many ways superseded by his second hook about her: 1\1ari11a Tn"etatTa: The II imwu. her II i,rld aud ha Poct,T, Cambridge 1985-a good introduction, both biographically and critically. Among other biographies I suggest reading ( 1) Viktoria Schweitzer, Tn·ttacra, translated by Robert Chandler and H.T \Villctts, edited hy A. Li\'ingstonc and containing numerous quotations from her poetry translated hy Peter ~orman; and (2) Lily Feiler, klarina T'i'l.'etm:ra, Tht Donhlt• Beat ,~fllca,:eu aud Hell, Durham and I ~om.ion 199.J - a shorter, more psychologically oriented book. The study by ftlichael ~'1.1kin, A·lariua Tsretaera: Potties of .·lppmpriatiou, Oxford 1993, considers her work in the light of its use of literary forerunners and traditions. G.S. Smith has written wilumcs cited abm-c can be found in .\farina Ts,-ctac,·a, lz.hra111wya pro:::.a 1917-1937 1· th:11/d1 1011wld1 [Selected prose 1917-HJ37 in t\H> ,·olumcs ], edited by :\. Sumcrkin, New York 1979; this has as its preface the original text of Brodsky's essay 'Poet i proza' [A poet and prose]. There arc two books den>ted to A·q•so/m.:those by I. .\lalinkm·ich and T Suni, cited in notes 15 and 30 to the Introduction. For a shorter, more concentrated study of K1)'solrr1:, sec Ye. Etkind, cited in note 18 to the Introduction. A useful biographical "·ork in Russian is Veronika Losskaya, 1\1ari11a Tq:ctacn, 1· :::.lti:::.11i Ii\larina TsYctac,·a in life], Tenafly NY 1989, "·hich puts together substantial quotations from memoirs and letters by people "·ho knc\\· her, and is not difficult reading. Also recommended arc Irma KudroYa, Poslc Rossi,'lAftcr Russia], .\loscow 1997, a work in two n>lumes of which the first, 1\fori11a Tn-ctaera. Gr)(fr d111d1bi11y li\larina Tsc,·ctae,·a. The years abroad], is about the poet's life, and the second, Slat·; o poez.ii i pro:::.c klari11y 7~TclatTr~y [Articles on the poetry and prose of i\ farina Ts,·ctae,·a ], is about her \\·ork; and a study of her ,-crse by L.V. Zubcn-a, Poe:::.1) a Alari11y Tn:ctan:rry; Li11g1·istid1csl..·1:)' aspckt, Leningrad I