Morn's pleasant hubbub has awoken

In doing some research for the introduction to my translation of Osip Mandelshtam's Tristia (forthcomng in December. Hey, if Terry Teachout can do it, why can't I?) it struck me to investigate more closely the nuances of the title of another O.M.'s works: Shum vremeni or The Noise of Time, as rendered by Clarence Brown. This investigation led me to this notation by Vladimir Nabokov in his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin on the word shum, commenting on his translation of Prosnulsja utra shum prijantnyj as "Morn's pleasant hubub has awoken":

"An analogous line occurs in Poltava (1828), pt II, 1.3.18: razdalsya utra shum igriviy, 'morn's frisky hubbub has resounded.' Compare these epithets with those used by English poets, e.g., Milton's 'the busy hum of men' and John Dyer's 'the Noise of busy Man.'

Generally speaking, the sense of shum implies a more sustained and uniform auditory effect than the English 'noise.' It is also a shade more remote and confused. It is at heart more of a swoosh than a racket. All its forms — shum (n.), shumniy (adj.), shumyashchiy (part.), shumet' (v.) — are beautifully onomatopoeic, which 'noisy' and 'to noise' are not. Shum acquires a number of nuances in connection with various subjects: shum grooda, 'the hum of the city,' 'the tumult of the town'; shum lesov, 'the murmur of woods'; shumyaschiy les, 'the sough of forests,'; shumniy ruchey, 'the dinning stream'; shumyashchee more, 'the sounding sea,' the rote, the thud, and the roar of surf on the shore — 'the surgy murmurs of the lonely sea,' as Keats has it in Endymion, 1.121. Shum may also mean 'commotion,' 'clamor,' and so forth. The verb shumet' is poory rendered by 'to be noisy,' 'to clatter.'

Sigh...this is what I do on vacation...but worse! This is what I might be doing for the rest of my life. While all mildly interesting on this warm June morning, that job at the Greenpoint perogi factory somehow seems a bit more interesting.

Comments

[Tatyana]

Somewhat OT:
Hi, Kevin
Wandered here thru Alexei @ russiandilettante. I looked at the Tristia translation and have a little correction (if I may? as a native speaker?)
in regards to 'zelenyi puch', which you translated as "green feathers". In my opinion, this is closer to the original word (and to the original meaning: have you ever seen/enhaled poplar fuzz? choking)
He didn't mean leaves, if that what you were thinking. IMHO.