In 1896 ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ poem by Henry Longfellow, translated by Ivan Bunin, first time appeared in ‘Oryol Vestnik’. The newspaper published excerpts from May 2 to September 24, and by the end of the year, the full text of the poem was published as a separate book.
Bunin had been returning to work on this poem many times throughout his life. So, in 1898 he published a new version of the poem in the Petersburg children’s magazine “Vskhody”. A year later, the writer made major changes to the translation of “The Song of Hiawatha”, and an updated version of the work illustrated by Frederic Remington was published by the “Knizhnoe delo” publishing house.
Four years have passed, and the publishing house of the “Znanie” partnership released another Bunin’s translation of ‘The Song of Hiawatha’. The edition turned out to be exemplary: with fascinating illustrations, in a beautiful cover. ‘Longfellow is lovely’, wrote Maksim Gorky, a great aficionado of the work.
Bunin wrote in the ‘Translator’s preface’, which opened this edition: “The Song of Hiawatha” is considered to be the most remarkable of Longfellow’s works. It appeared in 1855. The impression it made was extraordinary: in six months it went through thirty editions, generated a lot of articles and imitations, and was translated into many European languages. First of all, everyone was struck by the originality of its plot and the novelty of the brilliant, strictly consistent form… But the main thing that forever strengthened the glory of ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ is the rare beauty of artistic images and paintings, due to the high poetic and humane mood. All the best qualities of the soul and the talent of its creator were reflected in ‘The Song of Hiawatha’. Longfellow devoted his whole life to serving the sublime and beautiful. He used to say: ‘Goodness and beauty are invisibly spread in the world’ – and he was looking for them all his life’.
One of the main motives of the poem was a call for peace, goodness, love and brotherhood:
“All your strength is in your union,
All your danger is in discord;
Therefore be at peace henceforward,
And as brothers live together”.
Bunin confessed that he worked on the translation of “The Song of Hiawatha” with special, ardent love each time. And contemporaries highly appreciated his work. So, on October 19, 1903, Bunin’s translation of the poem was awarded the Pushkin Prize and the gold medal of the Academy of Sciences.
