Vers libre from “Antigone”. An episode from the history of Russian free verse. Apollon Grigoriev – translator of the tragedy of Aeschylus

Abstract

The article considers an episode from the history of Russian free verse associated with the use of that type of national versification by Apollon Grigoriev in his early translation of Sophocles’ tragedy “Antigone” (1846). Vers libre appeared in the work of the young poet to create an equivalent to the socalled “lyrical meters”, that were used in the original to write the choir parts and two key monologues of the classical drama. The real rhythmic nature of those parties, consisting mainly of lines of different syllabic-tonic meters, is determined; however, a small number of verses in above fragments of the text do not lend themselves to traditional metrical interpretation and should be attributed to the transitional form of early Russian free verse – free verse on a syllabo-metrical basis. The place of the bold metrical experiment of the novice author among other ways of translating ancient choirs is shown in comparison with the predecessors (I. Martynov and A. Merzlyakov) and followers (S. Shestakov, V. Vodovozov, F. Zelinsky). It is also shown that later the vers libre used by Grigoriev to convey the specific musical meters of Sophocles were replaced by a more adequate verse form – syllabo- metrical logaedas proposed in 1914 by Zelinsky.