...Crabbe. its narrative Letters in particular, "Peter Grimes," has proved especially popular and has often been anthologized. In fact, in 1945 Benjamin Britten (with Montague Slater as librettist) wrote an opera about its hero, and in 1971 Michael Marland wrote a further dramatic version of the poem. (2)

Crabbe's story is about a man, Peter Grimes, who lived in a Suffolk coastal town. As a boy he rebelled violently against his pious father, and as a youth, in order to pay for his cards and ale, he "fish'd by water and he filch'd by land." (3) As a grown man, seeking to exercise complete control over a human soul, he secured three apprentice boys in succession and abused them horribly, until he became responsible for each boy's death. At length the town ostracized him, and, compelled to live alone by the "bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree" (174), he gradually went mad. In his madness he ran, terror-stricken, till seized and taken to the parish poorhouse. There, "a lost, lone man, so harass'd and undone" (256), with sympathetic women crowding about his death-bed, he described the visions he had had of his father and two of the boys who came to him repeatedly and tried to lure him to his death. Finally he paused in his story, then "cried, / 'Again they come,' and mutter'd as he died" (374-5). The most striking aspect of the story is that while exposing Peter's cruelty unflinchingly Crabbe somehow manages by the end of the poem to arouse a surprising amount of charity for him.

There is indeed something fascinating about "Peter Grimes" and about the man it describes. It is not surprising, therefore, that the poem has been repeatedly reprinted, or that it has been adapted in various forms. What may be surprising, however, is that "Peter Grimes" made an appearance in nineteenth-century tsarist Russia, through the efforts of three leading Russian men of letters.

Aleksandr Vasil'evic Druzinin (1824-64), a prominent writer, critic, and specialist in English literature, introduced George Crabbe (1754-1832) to Russia in the 1850s with his critical biography of the English poet. Crabbe's work, which Druzinin said was not known either in Russia, Germany, or France, exactly illustrated (he believed) his own critical theory that art should not be subjected to the needs of society, but should instead describe reality. (4) Crabbe was the "first toiler in the field of moving his native literature closer to the depiction of actual life" (pervyj truzenik na poprisce sblizenija svoej rodnoj slovesnosti s izobrazeniem dejstvitel'noj zizni). Nor was Crabbe's importance confined to English literature: he was instead "the most natural writer of our century" (o samom natural'nom pisatele nasego stoletija). (5) To support this judgement and the various analyses he made of Crabbe's works, Druzinin supplied translations of several excerpts. His labours must have stimulated interest in Crabbe, for two other noted translators soon began publishing Russian versions of the English poet. Nikolaj Vasil'evic Gerbel' (1827-83) translated portions from poems earlier than The Borough, (6) as did Dmitrij Egorovic Min (1818-85), who then proceeded to publish a translation of the whole of "Peter Grimes" in 1862. (7) A few years later Gerbel' reprinted "Piter Grajms" along with other of Min's translations (and his own) in his anthology of English poets, Anglijskie poety v biografijax i obrazcax.

It was particularly appropriate that Min should translate "Peter Grimes." (8) He published much original poetry in leading literary journals and proved so acceptable a translator that, after translating Crabbe (and Schiller's "Das Lied von der Glocke" in 1856), he proceeded to publish translations of Byron's Siege of Corinth (1873, 1875), part of Byron's Don Juan (1881), Shakespeare's King John (1882), and Dante's Inferno (1885). In addition, he published translations of selected poems from Wordsworth, Tennyson, William Morris, and Uhland. But it was not alone in writing poetry that his activities and interests paralleled Crabbe's: like Crabbe, Min was a practising physician, receiving his first medical degree in 1839 and his advanced medical degree in 1851. In fact he published many medical and scientific articles, and not long after translating Crabbe he became a professor of forensic medicine at the University of Moscow. Evidently he was trained in close observation, as was Crabbe, who pursued botany to the point of publishing a treatise in the subject, and, again like Crabbe, as a physician he would have had the opportunity of observing the development of insanity at close hand.

Yet, ironically, Min, who would appear to have been admirably well suited to be a translator of Crabbe's poem, presents a Piter Grajms who is quite a different character from Crabbe's Peter Grimes. It is precisely because of this difference that the Russian translation makes such an interesting study in comparison: how could such an intelligent and well-qualified translator make such a radical alteration in total effect, especially when he offered what appears to be a fairly literal translation? The answer is to be found in scores of little details which, in their accumulation, greatly affect the various devices Crabbe used to shape the reader's response to his poem and its hero.

One of the more important of these devices appears in the person of the narrator. Crabbe's narrator quickly, though unobtrusively, emerges as completely trustworthy. When Peter, who rebelled against his father and abused him vilely, grieves on hearing of his death, the narrator quietly suggests the reason for the grief in a little parenthesis tucked into the couplet:

His father's love he scorn'd, his power defied, But, being drunk, wept sorely when he died. (10-11)

The same clear-eyed, slightly sardonic perception reappears shortly after, when the narrator indirectly presents Peter's defence for his verbal assault on his father, saying that Peter, "with oath and furious speech, began / To prove his freedom and assert the man" (22-3). About the relation between Peter's growing thefts and his attitude towards people, the narrator says:

And as these wrongs to greater numbers rose, The more he look'd on all men as his foes. (49-50)

The order in the statement is what makes the comment and shows the perception: the narrator does not say that Peter regards men as his enemies and consequently robs them; rather he first robs them and then regards them as his enemies, seeking, evidently, to justify his conduct to himself. Nor is Peter the only one on whom the narrator turns his clear-eyed perception. He describes the men who bind orphans to virtual slavery as "undisturb'd by feelings just or kind" (61). About the townspeople he says that none inquire how Peter treats his first apprentice, none do anything to help the boy, none remonstrate with Peter: in fact, when they hear the boy's cries, they calmly say, "Grimes is at his exercise" (69-78).

Min's narrator, unfortunately, is not so perceptive. Where, for instance, Crabbe's narrator ascribed the reason for Peter's grief at the time of his father's death to his "being drunk," Min instead says, conventionally, that Piter "shed a few tears from sorrow" (proslezilsja s gorja). (9) Min omits altogether Crabbe's wry remark about Peter proving his freedom and asserting the man; moreover, Crabbe's perceptive couplet about Peter's justifying his thefts by looking "on all men as his foes" Min reduces to a simile: "Thus, engaged in dishonourable business, / He took leave of people like his worst enemies" (Tak, promysljajuci necestnymi delami, / Rasstalsja on s ljud'mi kak s zlejsimi vragami).

In the place of Crabbe's ironic perception, Min takes the quietly asserted moral orthodoxy of Crabbe's narrator and turns it into moral fervour. When Peter, newly bereaved, recalled his conduct to his father, for instance, the English version reads:

... he felt the shame: -- How he had oft the good old man reviled, And never paid the duty of a child. (13-15)

In Min's version it reads thus, with the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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