Dear All,
First of all, I would like to apologize for my hysterical
behavior and cordially thank my friends on the List who supported me
in these difficult days of emotional stress. I was very touched by your
posts and the many emails I received off List. Thanks to the help of Brian
Boyd and others, there is a chance that the precise and
poetical Russian translation of Ada will finally
appear.
He [Van] threw the cone at a woman of marble bending over a stamnos but
only managed to frighten a bird that perched on the brim of her broken jar...
kitayskaya punochka (Chinese Wall Bunting)
In the Aleksandrovskiy park of Tsarskoe Selo there is
kitayskaya derevnya (a stylized Chinese village). On the other hand,
a statue of the girl with a broken jar (Perette, the heroine
of La Fontaine's fable LA LAITIÈRE ET LE POT AU LAIT, made in bronze
by the sculptor Pavel Sokolov, 1816) in the Ekaterininskiy park of
Tsarskoe was immortalized by Pushkin in his hexameters (written in
1830):
Царскосельская статуя
Урну с водой уронив, об утёс её дева
разбила.
Дева печально сидит, праздный держа черепок.
Чудо! не сякнет
вода, изливаясь из урны разбитой;
Дева, над вечной струёй, вечно печальна
сидит.
punochka is the bird snow-bunting, but is also
a little pun on kunochka ("pussy")
Alexey Sklyarenko
