Poetic License, Textual Fidelity and the Liturgical Impulse in Aleksandr Sumarokov’s Early Spiritual Verse

The present essay considers the paraphrases of Psalms and other biblical and liturgical texts that Sumarokov composed between 1744 and 1769. He initially treated his paraphrases primarily as literary exercises: while taking care not to distort the Church Slavic and ipso facto Greek (Septuagint) source texts, he had no qualms about both expanding and abridging the original texts within the confines of traditional metrical and stanzaic structures. Subsequently in the 1760s, he began to experiment with variable iambic and trochaic lines in spiritual verse, though such forms are typically associated with less lofty genres such as fables and epigrams. His experiments in turn allowed him to achieve greater fidelity to the Church Slavic texts targeted for paraphrasis, and to bring his texts stylistically closer to the liturgical norms associated with the Church Slavic originals. At the same time, he strove to improve the fidelity of his own paraphrases of the Psalms by consulting German translations of the Hebrew (Masoretic) originals. Thus, Sumarokov paradoxically brings to his new translations of the 1660s the philological Protestant sensibility of German translations of the Psalter, and an Orthodox sensibility that favors the traditional Church Slavic register associated with the Psalter as a liturgical text. These new translations in free and frequently unrhymed iambs set the stage for the final, more radical experiments undertaken in 1773–1774.