Immediately upon returning to Petrograd in the summer of 1918, Gumilev began thinking about new opportunities for literary work. Neither he nor his family had any sources of income other than literary ones: bank accounts had been nationalized, and the money in those accounts had become worthless; the house in Tsarskoye Selo and the estate in Slepnevo had to be abandoned — the poet’s relatives settled in the district town of Bezhetsk.

From August 16 to 21, Gumilev visited Bezhetsk and introduced his mother, sister, and brother to his new wife. Within a few months, the entire family moved from Bezhetsk to Petrograd. Considering what was happening in the city, this was not the smartest decision. The whole family (eight people! — although Alexandra Stepanovna only visited from Bezhetsk) settled with Nikolai Stepanovich, who had been living since May at 26/65 Ivanovskaya Street, apartment 15, in the abandoned apartment of Sergey Makovsky and apparently was financially supported by him. A. A. Freygang-Gumileva “managed the household,” meaning she stood in queues.

Some relief in this almost catastrophic situation came for Gumilev in the form of a contract with the publishing house “Prometey,” founded back in 1907 by a certain N. N. Mikhailov. The publisher bought the rights from the poet for “Romantic Flowers” and “Pearls” and reissued the books at the end of the year. The house at 25/65 Ivanovskaya Street (now Marata Street). Gumilev lived here in 1918–1919. But all this would happen in the fall; in the summer of 1918, Gumilev wrote “The Tent” and translated “Gilgamesh.” Apparently, at this time, he believed that a “geography textbook in verse” and a translation of the Assyrian epic could support him for a long time. The idea of translating “Gilgamesh” had arisen a year and a half earlier under the influence of conversations with Shileiko. But Gumilev translated from a French literal version and hardly discussed it with Vladimir Kazimirovich during the work — he presented the finished work to the expert for judgment. This was, of course, a way of psychological compensation: to achieve victory over a “fortunate rival” on his professional field.

Gumilev himself described his working method as follows:

Wishing to make the translation acceptable to all lovers of poetry, I allowed myself to restore by conjecture missing parts of some lines, to remove tedious repetitions, to combine into a whole episodes separated by lacunae, and, when I was confident that I was speaking about the same as the author of the poem, to fill in the too annoying gaps in the surviving tablets with a few phrases…

According to Akhmatova, the “Gilgamesh” by Shileiko and Gumilev was offered to “Russkaya Mysl” (“Russian Thought”), but Struve “was stingy.” However, this testimony is doubtful: by August-September, when the translation work was completed, the magazine had already been closed. Nevertheless, Gumilev’s work did not disappear. A year later, his work was published by the Z. Grzhebin publishing house.

A copy was presented to Blok with the inscription: “To the last lyric poet, the first epic.” Other Gumilev translations appeared in the publishing house “World Literature,” where the poet himself worked from the fall of 1918.

Gumilev was invited to the publishing house’s board (located at Nevsky Prospect, house 64, and from 1919 — at Mokhovaya Street, house 36), more precisely — to two of the three boards: the Western Department (together with Blok, Akim Volynsky, Lozinsky, Chukovsky, Zamyatin, A. Levinson, Gorky himself, and others) and the Poetic Board. There was also an Eastern Board, to which Gumilev brought in Shileiko. In the Western Board, Gumilev headed the “French Department.”

During his work at “World Literature,” Gumilev translated thousands of lines of French and English poetry. He edited even more lines. As an editor, he earned two thousand rubles a month — enough for twenty-five boxes of matches. The meager pay forced him to translate too much, and some memoirists (including Odoyevtseva) assessed the translators’ work at “World Literature” as “shoddy work.”

Gumilev’s article “On Poetic Translations,” included in a brochure, begins as follows:

There are three ways to translate poetry: in the first, the translator uses a meter and rhyme combination that comes to mind by chance, his own vocabulary often alien to the author, and at his discretion either lengthens or shortens the original; clearly, such a translation can only be called amateurish.

In the second method, the translator acts similarly but provides a theoretical justification for his approach; he claims that if the poet being translated wrote in Russian, he would write exactly like this. This method was very common in the 18th century. Pop in England, Kostrov here translated Homer this way and enjoyed extraordinary success. The 19th century rejected this method, but traces remain to this day. Even now, some think it acceptable to replace one meter with another, for example, six-foot iambic with five-foot, to abandon rhymes, introduce new images, and so on. The preserved spirit must justify everything. However, a poet worthy of the name uses form as the only means to express the spirit. How this is done, I will now try to outline.

It is not the place here to present all the principles of translation set forth by Gumilev; suffice it to say that the norms he designated are still considered obligatory for poet-translators today without any significant changes. His main idea remains relevant:

…The translator of a poet must be a poet himself, and in addition, a careful researcher and insightful critic who, choosing the most characteristic for each author, allows himself to sacrifice the rest if necessary. And he must forget his own personality, thinking only of the personality of the author. Ideally, translations should be unsigned.

In fulfillment of this idea of anonymity, a practice of collective translation arose in Lozinsky’s studio at “World Literature.” This was quite in the spirit of the times but never took root. Translation remained an individual and authorial matter.

Gumilev also participated in the work of the Russian Board. Primarily, he was involved in compiling a list of Russian poets proposed for publication; his version of the list was “impressionistic” — in contrast to Chukovsky’s “historical” list. Gumilev himself compiled the volume of A. K. Tolstoy. Chukovsky told Luknitsky about this work in a satirical tone: “Gumilev… was completely incapable of any historical-literary work… When the collection was edited, he gave it to me ‘for review.’ According to Chukovsky, he found monstrous errors in Gumilev’s work. ‘Some poems were marked with an impossible date because Tolstoy died two years before those dates.’ When Chukovsky, having corrected these errors, informed Gumilev about them, ‘he made an angry face and said: “Yes… I am a very bad prose writer… But I write poetry a thousand times better than you!”’ Later, of course, he thanked his comrade for ‘saving’ his work.

If the monetary payment for work at “World Literature” was meager, cooperation in the “Soviet organization” gave the opportunity to receive food, firewood, and so on for free or at a low price. In the military-communist city, people did not “buy” but “received.” The complex relationships generated by this distribution system are mostly undocumented but reflected in numerous examples of “occasional literature.” An example is the “firewood” poetic correspondence.

The addressee of these poems was a certain David Samoylovich Levin, the supply manager of “World Literature,” who “supplied firewood to Blok but cheated others. Now Levin has started an album, and everyone is composing poems about firewood for him in turn.”

The first to address Levin with a message was Gumilev:

Levin, Levin, you are harsh,

We have no firewood.

You count out three hundred

Disgusting Lenin rubles.

Chukovsky, in feigned indignation, addressed the poets with a message:

Will the enamored descendants believe,

That our magical, radiant Blok

Could exchange the embrace of the Stranger

For a firewood ration.

A similar picture occurred with food rations; since this happened after 1917, Punin’s purely aesthetic rejection of Gumilev’s work could have physically tangible consequences for the poet: when the House of Writers, which managed ration provision for writers (with rations allocated depending on the creative significance of the person provided for), opened that same autumn, Punin demanded at a meeting that if Akhmatova was allocated a category “5” ration, Gumilev should receive no more than a “5 minus.” The piquancy of the situation lay in the fact that Levushka was dependent on his father. Thus, Punin, in love with Akhmatova and her poems, decided to feed the poetess better at the expense of her little son.

Gumilev had every reason to tell Odoyevtseva:

“Allow yourself only to be weak and kind, and everyone will jump on your throat and tear you apart. Like a wounded wolf is bitten and devoured by brother wolves, so are brothers in writing. The morals of wolves and writers are the same.”

Sources:

Valery Igorevich Shubinsky, Architect. The Life of Nikolai Gumilev