Headnote
"Отвергнутая любовь (перевод с испанского)" ("Rejected Love, Translated from the Spanish") appeared in 1883, one of the brief comic sketches Chekhov filed under the pen name Antosha Chekhonte for the humor magazines of his student years. The piece is a burlesque of the moonlit-serenade convention of sentimental fiction, complete with a false attribution: the subtitle claims the story is "translated from the Spanish," a stock device of the period for signaling exotic romance, and Chekhov plays the whole scene absolutely straight – orange groves, nightingales, a swooning hidalgo under a lady’s window – until the joke lands.
The gag is structural as much as verbal. A love-struck hidalgo serenades a shuttered window through the night, his guitar strings snapping one by one, his devotion undiminished; when he finally breaks into a fragment of dog-Latin grammar (the kind of tag a Russian gymnasium student would recognize from his own textbooks, not from Spain), the fictional "translator" solemnly renders it as a threat of suicide – a note that is itself part of the joke, a parody of the pedantic footnoting common in the period’s serialized fiction, not a genuine apparatus. When the lady does appear, she delivers not a word of love but a landlady’s complaint about the noise, and the hidalgo’s tragic gesture that follows is disposed of in the flattest possible register: not a scene of grief but a police report.
Watch for the collapse of registers that gives the piece its shape: the overheated diction of Sections 1 through 5 (moon, heliotrope, "love, love!") against the bathos of the ending, and the Latin interjection sitting incongruously inside a scene that has advertised itself as Spanish. It is a minor, disposable piece by the standards of the mature Chekhov, but it shows the young writer’s ear for parody already fully formed – the same instinct for undercutting a genre’s own conventions that will later do more serious work in the mature stories.
Translation Original
1 (Translated from the Spanish)
(Перевод с испанского)
3 Through the shifting pattern of high-sailing clouds the moon looks down and floods with its light the loving couples murmuring in the shade of the orange and the bitter orange.
Сквозь изменчивый узор высоко плывущих облаков глядит луна и заливает своим светом влюбленные пары, воркующие под тенью померанца и апельсина.
4 The air, voluptuously sultry and close with the scent of heliotrope, grows still hotter from words of love and from songs. The gardens, the woods, and the waters, drifting quietly toward sleep, listen to the nightingale... Love, love!
Воздух, сладострастно знойный и душный от запаха гелиотропа, еще более раскаляется от слов любви и песен. Сады, леса и воды, тихо засыпая, внемлют соловью... Любви, любви!
5 Before the window of one of the little houses stands a handsome hidalgo. He runs his fingers over the strings, trembles, flames, and sings. The window is shut, but he does not lose heart: he is a Spaniard, after all! His song will set fire to the heart of the unyielding one, the window will yield to the pressure of a small hand obedient to its heart, and – the thing is as good as done!
Перед окном одного из домиков стоит прекрасный гидальго. Он перебирает пальцами струны, дрожит, пламенеет и поет. Окно закрыто, но он не унывает: на то испанец он! Его песнь зажжет сердце неприступной, окно уступит напору маленькой ручки, послушной сердцу, и – дело в шляпе с широкими полями!
7 The hidalgo sings for an hour, a second, a third... The east begins to whiten and grow rosy. On the guitar the strings burst one after another, the fifth, the third... On his handsome face sweat breaks out and begins to drip onto the hot ground, but... still he sings.
Гидальго поет час, другой, третий... Восток начинает белеть и румяниться. На гитаре лопаются одна за другой квинта, терция... На лбу прекрасного лица выступает пот и начинает капать на горячую землю, а... он всё поет.
8 "Plenus venter non studet libenter!" he sings at last. "Imperfectum conjunctivi passivi!" Translated, this signifies: "Oh, better kill me, but come out! If you do not come out, my blood will spatter your window! I am dying!" Translator’s note.
– Plenus venter non studet libenter! – поет он наконец. – Imperfectum conjunctivi passivi! В переводе сие значит: "О, лучше убей меня, но выйди! Коли не выйдешь, кровь моя брызнет в твое окно! умираю!" Примеч. переводчика.
9 Behind the window footsteps are heard. At last! The window flies open with a shriek, and in it appears a donna, lovely, marvelous, sultry... The hidalgo freezes in rapture and chokes on his happiness. Oh, wondrous moment! She leans half out of the window and, her black eyes flashing, says:
За окном слышны шаги. Наконец таки! Окно с визгом открывается, и в нем появляется донна, прелестная, чудная, знойная... Гидальго замирает от восторга и захлебывается счастьем. О, чудные мгновенья! Она высовывается наполовину из окна и, сверкая черными глазами, говорит:
10 "Are you ever going to stop, or not? It’s base and vile! You won’t let me sleep! If you don’t stop,
my good sir, I shall be forced to sleep with
the constable."
– Вы перестанете когда-нибудь или нет? Подло и гнусно! Вы не даете мне спать! Если вы не перестанете, милостивый государь, то я принуждена буду спать с городовым.
12 The window slams shut. The hidalgo stabs himself. A police report.
Окно захлопывается. Гидальго закалывается. Протокол.
