"Two pigeons lived like sons born of one mother. Neither would eat nor drink without the other; Where you see one, the other's surely near, And every joy they halved and every tear; They never noticed how the time flew by, They sighed, but it was not a weary sigh."
This gives the sense of Krylov's poem word for word, except for what is the most important touch of all in the last line. The trouble is that Krylov has written six lines which are as untranslatable as La Fontaine's four; and he has made them as profoundly Russian as La Fontaine's are French. Nothing could be more Russian than the last line, which it is impossible to translate; because it should run--
"They were sometimes sad, but they never felt _ennui_"--
literally, "it was never _boring_ to them." The difficulty is that the word for _boring_ in Russian, _skuchno_, which occurs with the utmost felicity in contradistinction to _sad_, _grustno_, cannot be rendered in English in its poetical simplicity. There are no six lines more tender, musical, wistful, and subtly poetical in the whole of Russian literature.
Krylov's fables, like La Fontaine's, deal with animals, birds, fishes and men; the Russian peasant plays a large part in them; often they are satirical; nearly always they are bubbling with humour. A writer of fables is essentially a satirist, whose aim it is sometimes to convey pregnant sense, keen mockery or scathing criticism in a veiled manner, sometimes merely to laugh at human foibles, or to express wisdom in the form of wit, yet whose aim it always is to amuse. But Krylov, though a satirist, succeeded in remaining a poet. It has been said that his images are conventional and outworn--that is to say, he uses the machinery of Zephyrs, Nymphs, Gods and Demigods,--and that his conceptions are antiquated. But what splendid use he makes of this machinery! When he speaks of a Zephyr you feel it is a Zephyr blowing, for instance, as when the ailing cornflower whispers to the breeze. Sometimes by the mere sound of his verse he conveys a picture, and more than a picture, as in the Fable of the Eagle and the Mole, in the first lines of which he makes you see and hear the eagle and his mate sweeping to the dreaming wood, and swooping down on to the oak-tree. Or again, in another fable, the Eagle and the Spider, he gives in a few words the sense of height and space, as if you were looking down from a balloon, when the eagle, soaring over the mountains of the Caucasus, sees the end of the earth, the rivers meandering in the plains, the woods, the meadows in all their spring glory, and the angry Caspian Sea, darkling like the wing of a raven in the distance. But his greatest triumph, in this respect, is the fable of the Ass and the Nightingale, in which the verse echoes the very trills of the nightingale, and renders the stillness and the delighted awe of the listeners,--the lovers and the shepherd. Again a convention, if you like, but what a felicitous convention!