Published in the first decade of the twentieth century, Andrei Belyi's four Symphonies mark the emergence of one of the major prose stylists of Russian literature and demonstrate the habits of polarization and juxtaposition that fueled Russian symbolist thinking. Symbolism strove to see the unseeable, to say what words cannot capture, to touch worlds beyond human reach. It was for this reason a somewhat inherently experimental idiom, premised on the potential of as yet untested artistic methods to reveal as yet unapprehended truths. The Symphonies embody this paradoxical approach and the utopian energies of their author at the beginning of his career; they can be understood as a series of explorations into the proposition (which would remain fundamental to Belyi's understanding of symbolism) that there are separate realms of existence and meaningful links between them. Belyi's Symphonies test whether something is to be gained by casting “ordinary” experience in terms of centaurs and dragons; by relating the psychological experience of alienation to the gap between appearance and reality in science or in mystical practice; by trying to illuminate the cycles of human feelings and experiences with the patterns of artistic composition; and, most obviously, by applying some of the principles of music to literature.
The peculiar challenge of translating this sort of work is to preserve the text's clarity and its elusiveness, its elegance and its awkwardness. Belyi's Symphonies can be a thrilling pleasure to read; part of the thrill and the pleasure involve imagining not only the worlds sketched out in the texts, but also the ideas and aims of the author as he arranged his material in this unusual way. For works like these, even the plainest, most matter-of-fact sort of reading requires a hefty load of conjecture. Words, sentences, and larger sections cannot be assumed to function as they do in ordinary language or in any existing literary form (and this is by design) so the text's potential meanings and reverberations lack the guiderails that might insure against gross misunderstanding in reading—or translating—less aggressively innovative texts. Jonathan Stone's achievement is impressive: re-enacting Belyi's lexical repetitions without allowing them to become more (or less) obtrusive than they are in the original, and judiciously evoking some of Belyi's word play without turning the work into a distracting English-language game. He reproduces the distinctive combination of over- and under-determination that is so striking in the original.
Another challenge is to know how much introducing to do in the introduction and how much information to provide in the endnotes. Too little, and all that comes through is the strangeness of the work. Too much, and one risks preconditioning the reader's experience of works that were clearly and perhaps above all meant to be capable not only of inspiring many different readers’ responses but also in some sense of “being” many different things. To my mind, Stone gets this just right as well: enough background and ground-level interpretation to give the reader a start (and a reason to start), not enough to make the texts feel like a set of homework assignments with an answer key.
Belyi's particular aspirations entailed the harmonization of empirical, rational, evocative, and mystical aspects of symbolization, and in this respect the work of translation is similar: the demands of denotation and suggestion, content and form, idea and feeling, and presence and potential bear simultaneously on the project and must all be coordinated with minimal loss and maximal effect. With this daunting task, on these challenging texts, Stone succeeds brilliantly.
