Поэма Александра Поупа «Элоиза к Абеляру»: История переводов и влияний

Poem by Alexander Pope

Eloisa to Abelard is a verse epistle by Alexander Pope that was published in 1717 and based on a well known medieval story. Itself an imitation of a Latin poetic genre, its immediate fame resulted in a large number of English imitations throughout the rest of the century and other poems more loosely based on its themes thereafter. Translations of varying levels of faithfulness appeared across Europe, starting in the 1750s and reaching a peak towards the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th. These were in the vanguard of the shift away from Classicism and towards the primacy given emotion over reason that heralded Romanticism. Artistic depictions of the poem's themes were often reproduced as prints illustrating the poem; there were also paintings in France of the women readers of the amorous correspondence between the lovers.

The languages into which "Eloisa to Abelard" was translated included French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Russian and Latin. Versions in the last of these, it is true, were hardly consequential. The future Rev. George Wakefield made one as an undergraduate exercise near the start of the 1740s. A specimen translation of several of Pope's works, including this epistle, was put forward as a proposal in 1747; then, having gained subscribers, Dr James Kirkpatrick published the whole two years later. J. Wright's Epistola Eloisae Aberlardo followed in 1787 but was dismissed as a waste of effort in the Monthly Review. The original letters on which Pope's poem was loosely based had been written in Latin of a high order in the first place. Turning it back into Latin (except as an academic exercise, according to the Monthly Review) was a self defeating exercise. In Europe there was a translation by Johann Joachim Gottlob am Ende (1704–77), several editions of which were published in Germany from 1742 onwards. But when it was sent to Pope himself by the author, he found it inelegant though faithful. In the following century a closer version in hexameters was published by the German Latinist Georg Ludwig Spalding (Berlin 1804). In Italy, meanwhile, Vincenzo Forlani's Latin version in elegiac couplets had accompanied a very free imitation of Pope's poem by Antonio Schinella Conti (Lucca 1792). This, however, was based on Conti's text rather than translated directly from the English.

Since they were of French origin, interest in the story of Eloise and Abelard there predated that in Britain. An account of their "life, love, misfortunes" and a translation of their letters from the Latin by Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy was published in 1687 and frequently reprinted, becoming the major source for subsequent literary reworkings. It served, for example, as groundwork for Pierre François Godard de Beauchamps’ three verse epistles exchanged between the former lovers in Les Lettres d’Héloise et d’Abailard mis en vers François (1714). Hughes had only published his English versions of the original letters in 1713, followed by Pope’s epistle in 1717. French translations of "The Rape of the Lock" began in the 1750s, stimulated by the complete edition of Pope's work of 1751. The first was a prose version by Anne Marie du Boccage (Berlin 1751); it was followed in 1757 by Gabriel François Coyer's (1707 1782); by the Duchesse d’Aiguillon (1700–72), published from Geneva in 1758; and in the December 1773 issue of the Mercure de France by Dattin de Chartres. In verse the pioneering work was a very free version by Charles Pierre Colardeau (Paris 1756). More an adaptation in Alexandrins, it retained its popularity over the following decades "despite its high flown language and impersonal tone, its languor, its elegant circumlocutions and conventional epithets". Its success, according to a later preface, "brought to birth a torrent of little poems under the title Heroides, Epistle, Letter, most of them forgotten by now"; indeed, Colardeau was to contribute to the flow with his own Armide à Renaud: Héroide (Paris 1759). But enough of those solely dedicated to Eloisa and Abelard remained to furnish omnibus collections of what purported to be their long correspondence. These subsequent compilations, taking Ovid's Double Heroides as their model, consist of strings of paired letters furnished by diverse authors that serve as context for translations of Pope's poem not only by Colardeau but subsequent versions as well. They include Lettres et épîtres amoureuses d'Héloïse, avec les réponses d'Abeilard, traduites librement en vers et en prose (Paris 1770), of which there was an augmented London edition in 1780. The first volume of this contained a biographical essay and Latin based versions of the letters, followed in the second by a dialogue between translations of Pope and of French imitations. Contained there among other inclusions, Colardeau's version of Pope is paired with one of the earlier verse epistles in Abelard's name by De Beauchamps. A closer translation of Pope's poem by Aimé Ambroise Joseph Feutry (1720–89), first published in 1758, is replied to by Claude Joseph Dorat’s 1760 imitation, Epître d’Abeilard à Héloïs. Louis Sébastien Mercier’s ‘imitation’ of Pope's epistle (published in 1763) is followed by a later revised reply by Dorat dating from 1767. The succeeding Épitre d’Héloïse à son Époux, an imitation of Eloisa's response to the Historia Calamitatum, devised by Sébastien Marie Mathurin Gazon Dourxigné (1720–84) but dependent on Pope for its occasion and Gothic setting, is followed by a reply by André Charles Cailleau. Bernard Joseph Saurin’s 1765 ‘imitation’ of Pope appears without reply but has as companion piece scenes from a play based on the story. Other earlier works uncollected there include a response from Abelard by Henri Lambert d’Herbigny, Marquis de Thibouville (1710–84), published in Paris in 1758, and translated versions of Pope such as that of 1767 by Édouard Thomas Simon (1740 1818) and that of 1771 by Maximilien Henri, Marquis de Saint Simon (1720–99). Translations into other Romance languages came much later than in France and demonstrate at times a dependence on the French example. In Spain, at least, there was resistance from the ecclesiastical establishment, where treatment of the theme was condemned by the neo classical Jesuit Juan Andrés for its wild, pre romantic imagery and for its blasphemous exhibition of love between those in holy orders. Once books began to appear from the press, the Inquisition stepped in and banned them. These included Juan Maria Maury’s translation into ottava rima (Malaga 1792) and a very free adaptation of Colardeau’s already free French version, Cartas de Abelardo y Eloisa (Salamanca 1796), together with a reply from Abelard of the translator’s own invention. The works are now ascribed to Vicente Maria Santibañez and were reprinted in the 19th century in the kind of omnibus editions using the double Heroides format that were still being reprinted in France. The earliest Portuguese translations to appear were the Carta de Heloize a Abailardo (Porto 1785), followed by Epistola de Heloyza a Abaylard: composta no idioma inglez por Pope e trasladada em versos portuguezes (London 1801), a version in nine syllable verse which has been credited to José Nicolau de Massuelos Pinto. Many more followed in the first half of the 19th century and are increasingly mediated through the French imitators of Pope. The first imitation in Italian was Antonio Schinella Conti’s Elisa ad Abelardo: Epistola, a very free piece in terza rima beginning "Abelardo, Abelardo! O quanto amore", which was frequently anthologised. The 1792 Lucca edition of the poem also incorporated Vincenzo Forlani’s version in Latin elegaics on opposite pages. Thereafter, as in France, Conti’s poem was incorporated into a frequently reissued life and letters edition, where it was accompanied by Pope’s poem in English and Colardeau’s in French. Other versions were published soon after: in 1804 by Creofilio Smintéo, beginning "In queste solitudini profonde", and in 1814 by G. B. Boschini, beginning "In queste oscure e solitarie celle".

At first French mediation of the poem was dominant in Germany via collections of Pope’s works that, though published from German presses, were translated directly into French. Among these was included the 1751 prose rendering by Anne Marie du Boccage already mentioned. The first German language Brief der Eloise an den Abelard, published anonymously in 1760, was in fact based on Colardeau’s translation, the French text of which appeared opposite the German alexandrines. Several more translations from the original English followed, though they were of varying quality. Between 1779 1804 no less than ten appeared in both verse and prose. Two of the most prominent, by Gottfried August Bürger and Johann Joachim Eschenburg, were frequently published, in some cases together, both from German and from Austrian presses. Burger’s Heloise an Abelard, more an improvisation than a translation, was followed in its Swiss edition (Zurich 1803) by Pope’s original; from the same press in 1804 appeared J. Rothstein’s free prose version, accompanied by Colardeau’s French translation and Pope’s poem as well. In Russia Pope’s "Eloisa to Abelard" appealed to the literary Sentimentalism that served as a prelude to Romanticism. The first translation was Epistola Eloizy ko Abelardu, tentatively ascribed to Mikhail Kheraskov, which was published five times between 1765 and 1791. The next, the 1794 Éloiza k Abelardu by Vladislav Ozerov, was in fact a translation of Colardeau's work. Likewise, Vasily Zhukovsky‘s version of 1806, produced at the height of interest in the theme, also drew its main inspiration from France. "No other literary work was more popular, in Russia as in France, than the epistle of Eloisa to Abelard. [His translation] was very free, in the French fashion, by which it was quite possibly inspired." The connection of the Polish Listy Heloizy i Abeilarda (Kraków 1794) with Alexander Pope was at a distant remove. The work of Stefan Chomentowski and Tomasz Kajetan Węgierski (1756 1787), it consists of versions of Colardeau's reworking of Eloisa's epistle to Abelard and of his reply as imagined by Dorat. The choice of French models, and the fact that the book appeared while the Polish state was in the final throes of the partition crisis, is referable to the politics of national renewal instituted as part of the Polish Enlightenment. On the other side of the Baltic, Scandinavian translations began with Göran Rothman’s Eloisas bref til Abelard (Stockholm, 1765), to be followed in Sweden by the translations of Pehr af Lund (Stockholm, 1782), Joachim Wilhelm Liliestråle (Uppsala, 1782) and the anonymous and much freer Eloisa till Abelard (Uppsala 1822). There was no Danish version until the start of the 19th century, when Steen Steensen Blicher published his Elegie til Abailard efter Pope in the journal Tilskuer in 1817.

The more popular English treatments of the Eloisa and Abelard story, particularly the poems by Pope and Cawthorn, continued to be reprinted in the opening decades of the 19th century, bringing fresh imitations in their wake. They began with John Gwilliam's "Paraclete, or the Sorrows of Abelard and Heloise", a long epistle from Heloise in couplets that appeared first in The Mourning Wreath (London 1813) and was reprinted next year in The Bower of Bliss. Of two later reworkings, J. Treuwhard's Abelard to Eloisa, a moral and sentimental epistle, was privately printed in 1830. The Epistle from Abelard to Eloise, originally published in 1828 by Thomas Stewart (of Naples), was in heroic couplets and prefaced by a poem to Pope. The Hughes letters, along with Pope's poem and a selection of imitations, were now beginning to be reprinted in the United States too and also brought poetic responses in their train. That by Joseph Rodman Drake, written before 1820, is a short lyric in octosyllabics with the message that shared suffering will lead to shared redemption beyond the grave. Though it carries the title "Abelard to Eloise" in a holographic copy, it was also published without it after his death. John Witt Randall's "Abelard and Eloisa", published in 1856, is a sequence of six poems, written in various forms and fashioned more as poetical addresses than letters. They follow the story of the lovers from courtship to death, and sections 2, 3 and 6 are spoken by Eloisa. At the end of the century there appeared a further Abelard to Heloise (1891) by the young Italian immigrant to California, Lorenzo Sosso. Two women also took up the subject later. Christina Rossetti's "The Convent Threshold" (written in 1858) is, according to one source, "a thinly disguised retelling of Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard", although others are more cautious in seeing an influence. The poem is a surging monologue of enlaced rhymes in octosyllables, driving along its theme of leaving earthly passion behind and transmuting it to heavenly love. It is also a rare example of a woman being allowed her own voice without male intervention. The Australian writer Gwen Harwood went on to use the situation as a weapon in the gender war. Writing under the assumed name of Walter Lehmann in 1961, she placed two modernistic sonnets, "Eloisa to Abelard" and "Abelard to Eloisa", in a magazine without its male editors realising that the letters of their first lines spelt an offensive message.