"In the Highlands...

" by Robert Louis Stevenson

To begin with, for the analyses I’ve chosen the poem "In the
Highlands...", written by a brilliant british author Robert Louis Stevenson. So,
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), whose full name is Robert Louis
Balfour Stevenson, was a Scottish novelist, poet and author of fiction and
travel books. He managed to become not only a successful novelist in his
day, but also to stay in the heats of lots of people nowadays. Here are his
most well-known works: Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889) and A Child’s
Garden of Verses (1885), which had a great impact on the children’s literature
of the 19th century.

The paradigm of all the author’s works is deeply comprehensive. As

Stevenson was also the poet, he has written a lot of beautiful verses. "In the
Highlands..." is a poem, included to Stevenson’s Songs of travel and other
verses (1895), the XV in the book. Besides, this book was published
posthumously in 1896 (previously the first edition contained a list, dated July
1895, of books available from the publisher), which explains the date above. So,
returning to the poem, I should mention, that its Ukrainian translation was
published in Maksym Strikha’s book My favourite translations (2015). The title
of the translation is “Там, де гори мовчазні й високі...”.

IN THE HIGHLANDS...
(The first 8 passes where missed in order to suit the amount of symbols)

9. O to mount again where erst I haunted;

10. Where the old red hills are bird-enchanted,
11. And the low green meadows
12. Bright with sward;
13. And when even dies, the million-tinted,
14. And the night has come, and planets glinted,
15. Lo, the valley hollow,
16. Lamp-bestarred!
17. O to dream, O to awake and wander
18. There, and with delight to take and render,
19. Through the trance of silence,
20. Quiet breath;
21. Lo! for there, among the flowers and grasses,
22. Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
23. Only winds and rivers,
24. Life and death.
As the poem does not have an actual title, it is common to consider the
first line as one. Interesting, that the translator decided to turn 24 lines into 19 in
the Ukrainian translation. As for the Ukrainian title equivalent, I assume that the
translator did his best – not only he saved the original meaning, but also added
some mystery to the verses’ opening atmosphere.

R. L. Stevenson composed this verse using a tail rhyme (also known as

romance-six). By the way, there are an “extra” third line per every 4 lines,
which partially breaks the theoretical part of the tail rhyme, but in fact does not
affect the rhythm. Meanwhile, the translator “throwed out” these extra lines and
turned them into solid 4th, so in Ukrainian translation we get a mostly same
scheme and a clear tail rhyme (except the last stanza, where the translator
kept the third line untouched). Yet again, I consider this choice as the right and
the best one, since the translator saved the rhythm, even though he shortened the
quantity of lines.
 Speaking of the structure of the original, it’s important to mention, that
the translator made sure that the quantity of the stanzas remained the same as it
was in English version (6 in Ukrainian and 6 in English). By the way, there is an
imperfect vowel rhyme in lines 21-22 “А навколо — тільки буйні трави,
Тільки простір і вітри тужаві”, while the original does not contain it. In the
original, I would say that we can see both perfect vowel and consonant rhymes
in the end of each line. Besides, there is an enjambment in the original 11-12,
19-20 lines.

If to view the poem from the morphological side, it stands out a bit in the
eye of today’s reader. For example, Robert Stevenson used the shortened forms
of words, especially exclamations: “O to dream, O to awake; Lo! for there...”
(lines 9, 15, 17 and 21). Here, Lo! means “Look!”, O refers to Oh! [Collins
Dictionary]. Also, in the 13th line the word “even” is used, which is an archaic
word for “evening” [Collins Dictionary]. What is interesting and a bit
frustrating, translation is not rich in such highlights.

The author enriched the verse with lots of epithets in order to make a
picturesque scenery of the versus. Stevenson tended to love all those compound
adjectives, which actually build the rhyme in most case. Translator tried to
recreate the enrichment, thus in the Ukrainian language compound adjectives
are not as common as in English, he still succeeded in his attempt: