I have come to you to greet you
To tell you that the sun is up:
The sun’s hot light now waits to greet you
And trembles through the leaves and sap;
To tell you that the forest is awake,
Ferociously awake ……..
( trans. James Green copyright 1982)
Afanasy Fet was born in 1820 in Russia. His father was a landlord and member on the nobility but as Afanasy was illegitimate he could not inherit his father’s estates or title. He attended Moscow University and in 1845 joined the military. As a young man he met and fell in love with Mariya Lazich. Shortly after they met she was burnt to death in her bed. Both Mariya’s death and his own exclusion from the nobility were to dominate his life until he died in1892. Fet spent most of his life trying to succeed in his ambition of becoming a member of the nobility and this was his only reason for joining the military. When he eventually received his commission the law which would have allowed him to become a member was changed so that he now had to reach the rank of major. This was to happen to him several times before he finally succeeded at the age of 54. He was regarded by many as a rather ridiculous figure and years later he would make a point of walking around Moscow in the middle of a hot oppressive summer in the full dress uniform of a court chamberlain. Just so that people might realize that he was a member of the nobility.
Apart from his poetry he also translated Schopenhauer. Tolstoy would give his unpublished work to Fet for his opinion and approval. Mandelstam considered him to be the greatest Russian poet of all time. He believed in ‘ art for art’s sake’ and felt that poetry should reflect only itself. Because of this he avoided any reference to the outside world in his poetry , most of which was regarded as ‘nature poetry’ and wrote mainly of the landscape of his day to day life. Much of this poetry while nominally about nature is really concerned with Mariya Lazich….
In a wooded and neglected region
The midnight snowstorm swirled
A branch sizzling on the fire.
We sat together…..
Little of his work is available in english. A slim volume from which these extracts is taken was published by Angel Book in the UK in 1982 with the title ” I have come to you to greet you”. A very fine volume of criticism ” The Imagination of Spring: the poetry of Afanasy Fet” was published in 1966 by Yale University Press. It contains translations of his poetry but these are literal word for word translations but even so are well worth reading…..
But beneath me in a springlike ripple
Moved the resonant earth.
Relatively few people have ever heard of Fet and fewer still have read him but he is regarded as the greatest lyric poet that Russia has produced and perhaps the greatest the world has seen.
