ORR232_ Book.qxd

Comme il disait ces mots, as the reed spoke these words,
Du bout de l’horizon accourt from the horizon there roared
avec furie in fury
Le plus terrible des enfants the fiercest child
Que le nord eût portés jusque that the North Wind had ever sired.
là dans ses flancs.
L’arbre tient bon, le roseau plie. The tree stands fast, the reed bends;
Le vent redouble ses efforts, the wind redoubles its efforts,
Et fait si bien qu’il déracine with such effect that it uproots
Celui de qui la tête au ciel était the tree whose crown reached
voisine up to heaven,
Et dont les pieds touchaient à and whose feet dwelt in the
l’empire des morts. empire of the dead.
Pauline Viardot
Poem by Yuriy Mikhail Lermontov
‘У тёс’ Utës (The Cliff) [CD 1 Track 14]
(pub. 1868)
VLADIMIR CHERNOV
AFTER PUSHKIN, Lermontov (1814-1841) was the most influential
Russian writer of the mid-19th century. The author of A Hero of Our Time,
like Pushkin he had been killed in a duel, two years before Viardot’s first
Russian season. This poem, written in the last year of Lermontov’s life, inspired
Viardot to one of her most interesting songs. In it she seems to have captured
that mixture of irony and pessimism that is characteristic of so much Russian
poetry and music.
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