The Flaxen Wave

Wisdom from Pasternak

2012-02-18T14:34:00.000-08:00

Portrait of Boris Pasternak (Yuri Annenkov, 1921) / Image courtesy of WikiPaintings

“I believe, as do many others, that closeness to the originalis not ensured only by literal exactness or by similarity of form: thelikeness, as in a portrait, cannot be achieved without a lively and naturalmethod of expression. As much as the author, the translator must confinehimself to a vocabulary which is natural to him and avoid the literary artificeinvolved in stylization. Like the original text, the translation must create animpression of life and not of verbiage.”

– Boris Pasternak (“TranslatingShakespeare,” 1956, trans. M. Harari)

What They Said in Kansas City

2012-02-09T19:10:00.000-08:00

Statue of Winston Churchill near the conference hotel in Kansas City / Image courtesy of ChrisM70

Each fall, a group of translators gathers somewhere in NorthAmerica for the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association.I’ve gone twice now to the ALTA conference, and I can’t imagine a morewelcoming community for a beginning translator. In particular, those whotranslate from Russian and suchlike languages have gone out of their way tomake me feel at home. And I truly appreciate their company. For someone like mewho often has no real connection with other translators for months at a time,ALTA can be downright exhilarating.

My second ALTA conference took place in November of lastyear in Kansas City, and ever since then I’ve been meaning to write up a quickpost giving a few highlights from the gathering. Well, somehow the busyness ofeveryday life has prevented me from even writing something “quick,” but a nasty coldthat kept me home from work today has given me a little free time to organize mythoughts.

So before I lose my notes and forget the particulars, here is a list ofwhat I thought were some of the key moments in Kansas City:

Observing Jim Kates’ excitement over using theKing James Bible as resource for translating Genrikh Sapgir’s Russian poemsinto English. Kates says that Sapgir interprets the Book of Psalms for a Sovietreality, which strikes me as very similar to the method of Timur Kibirov, a poet from the following generation.

Listening to Katherine Silver’s description of theprogram at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, or BILTC(pronounced “Biltsy”), which sounds like a literary translator’s heaven. I hopeto be end up there someday—and not by metempsychosis.

Sitting rapt as Bill Johnston wowed me with hiscomplex yet perfectly clear explanations of how to translate style and syntaxin Slavic texts. (Comma splice, anyone?)

More on comma splices: hearing Russell Valentino, editorof The Iowa Review, give us hisnotion of translation as “disarming the bully.” If you are writing the samecomma splices into your translation that exist in the source text, you should askyourself, “Why am I reproducing this?” Valentino says that their mere presence inthe source is not a good enough reason. You must be able to articulate a ‘why’. (Naturally, this rule applies to any stylistic feature, not just comma splices.)

Overhearing a conversation in the hotel bar onthe utility of the so-called ‘hyphellipsis’. (See the fourth resolution in this New Year’s list.)

Taking part in a panel on “Great Translators andthe West’s Love Affair with Russian Literature” along with two women I happento admire greatly, Marian Schwartz and Lisa Hayden, a.k.a. Lizok.

(Marian presented on ConstanceGarnett, whose Edwardian style she appreciates, even though she believes thatnewer translations of classic works will always be necessary. Regarding Garnett’s outmodedEnglish standing in for Tolstoy’s Russian, Marian said, “We’ve got a barriernow that didn’t exist at the time.” So thank goodness we’ve got superb translatorslike Marian to boost us over that barrier. As for Lizok, she spoke about AnnDunnigan, another Tolstoyan—though an enigmatic one—who held “accuracy andgrace” in high esteem, and it shows in her translations. Lizok supposed that Dunnigan’s style might have had something to do with her background as an actressand speech teacher.)

Watching an evening screening of The Woman with the 5 Elephants, VadimJendreyko’s poignant—yet somewhat puzzling—profile of Svetlana Geier, whotranslated Dostoevsky’s five “elephants” into German. (Lizok wrote about thescreening here.)

Hearing this zinger from Chad Post, who writesfor Three Percent, which takes itsname from the estimated number of translations published in the U.S. eachyear: “We should change the name of our blog to, like, ‘Zero’.” (I.e., thingsare not getting any better.)

…and hearing this rejoinder from Jon Fine, ofAmazon.com, on the near absence of literary translations in the Americanmarketplace: “The three percent problem is, for us, a white space.” (I.e., Amazon sees it as a business opportunity.) I think this is good news, but can you ever reallytrust an eight-hundred-pound gorilla?

Speaking of ThreePercent, this year’s ALTA conference will take place in its hometown ofRochester, New York, in early October. The city is also home to Open LetterBooks and the University of Rochester, which offers both graduate andundergraduate programs in Literary Translation Studies. All around, it should make a great setting for the conference. And incidentally, some say this year’s gathering will include arave in an abandoned subway…

Timur Kibirov (b. 1955)

2012-01-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

Timur Kibirov (Dmitry Rozhkov, 2011) / Image courtesy of Википедия

[NOTE: For my ownpurposes, I recently wrote a biographical statement for Timur Kibirov, aRussian poet whose work I have been translating and hope to publish as a booksomeday. Since no good bio exists for Kibirov in English anywhere online, I amposting what I came up with here.]

Timur Kibirov (bornTimur Yur'evich Zapoev), who ranks among the most influential of contemporaryRussian poets, was born in 1955 and began publishing his poems in the 1980s. Inthe late Soviet period, he was closely associated with underground poets likeLev Rubinstein, Dmitri Prigov, and Sergey Gandlevsky, and critics have oftenidentified his work with postmodernism and conceptualism. Mikhail Ardov claimsthat “Kibirov has been and remains the best, most talented poet of ourpost-Soviet era,” and Andrei Nemzer and Mark Lipovetsky call him “the voice ofan entire generation.” [1]

Kibirov is the author of thirteen poetry collections,including When Lenin Was Young (1995), Amour, exil (2000), and Inthe Margins of “A Shropshire Lad” (2007), his remarkably free translationof A. E. Housman’s classic work. His poetry blends irony and sincerity insurprising ways, with parody and pastiche among his common modes. Readers areoften drawn in by his playful reinterpretations of classic texts, includingancient myths, canonical literary works, Soviet ideology, and—mostrecently—religious dogma. Nemzer and Lipovetsky claim that Kibirov’s poeticstrategies have proven “broader than the conceptualist (or postmodernist)deconstruction of authoritative cultural languages and traditions. … Perhapsthe most confessional poet in contemporary Russian literature, he invariablyachieves an effect of striking sincerity.”

Recently, Kibirov has applied his trademark mix of irony andearnestness to a new subject: his Christian faith. His newest collection, Greekand Roman Catholic Songs and Nursery Rhymes (2009), contains poems all centeredon the theme of religion. Mikhail Ardov believes that “nothing like this newcollection has ever existed in Russian poetry,” and Andrei Nemzer calls it Kibirov’s“best (and definitely most focused and harmonious) book.” This collection alone,Nemzer claims, “would be enough to justify the existence of contemporary[Russian] literature.”

Kibirov has won many honors, including the “Anti-Booker”award (1997) and Russia’s prestigious “Poet” prize (2008). In 2010, hepublished his first novel, Lada, or Bliss: A Chronicle of True and HappyLove, for which he won the Znamia award. English translations of hispoems have appeared in The Poetry ofPerestroika (Mortimer & Litherland, 1991), Third Wave: The NewRussian Poetry (Johnson &Ashby, 1992) and Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology (Kates& Bunimovich, 2008).

In a 2008 interview, Kibirov said, “The only thing that a poet needs to dois write good poems. What this means, I can’t begin to judge; no one can knowthis, there are no criteria… And whether a poet uses Old Church Slavonic or thecurrent slang is simply a matter of technique.”

[1]Andrei Nemzerand Mark Lipovetsky, “Timur Iur'evich Kibirov,” Russian Writers since 1980, eds. Marina Balina and Mark Lipovetsky(Detroit: Gale, 2004), 137-48, print.

Not Just Pretty Words

2011-12-29T14:06:00.000-08:00

Image courtesy of Gvideon

I have known for a while about Konstantin Gadaev’s film thatshows Sergey Gandlevsky and Timur Kibirov discussing poetry as they drink teaon a Russian train, but only today did I finally get around to watching it. Midwaythrough the half-hour film, Kibirov offers this definition of literature (and byimplication, of poetry in particular), which I find compelling:

“В армии я понял, что - может, потому, чтовпервые на самом деле столкнулся по-настоящему с реальностью ... Я вдруг понял,что вот тот любимый мной ... ‘дискурс’, [то есть,] язык серебряного века,что он не может эту реальность описать. Я впервые понял, что такое ‘литература’,что это - не просто красивые слова, а нечто встреча реальности с индивидуальнымязыком.” - Тимур Кибиров

“In the army I understood – maybe becausethat was the first time I had really run into reality … I suddenly understood that …the very ‘discourse’ that I loved, [that is to say,] the language of the SilverAge – that it could not describe that reality. For the first time I understoodwhat ‘literature’ was, that it wasn’t just pretty words, but some kind ofmeeting of reality with an individual’s language.” – Timur Kibirov

The film features Kibirov reading several of his poems, while Gandlevskyacts as interviewer, asking questions on art and politics that prompt Kibirovto reflect on decades of his poetic experience.

A Nativity Poem by Joseph Brodsky

2011-12-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

Joseph Brodsky as a boy in winter (undated) / Image courtesy of Yale's Beinecke Library

NOTE: My English translation follows the Russian text of this poem, which is one of the first "Nativity poems" that Brodsky wrote. (I posted another one last Christmas.) This poem does not appear in the collection that Farrar, Straus and Giroux put out in 2001 under the editorship of Pyotr Vail.

* * *

Рождество 1963

Волхвы пришли. Младенец крепко спал.
Звезда светила ярко с небосвода.
Холодный ветер снег в сугроб сгребал.
Шуршал песок. Костер трещал у входа.
Дым шел свечой. Огонь вился крючком.
И тени становились то короче,
то вдруг длинней. Никто не знал кругом,
что жизни счет начнется с этой ночи.
Волхвы пришли. Младенец крепко спал.
Крутые своды ясли окружали.
Кружился снег. Клубился белый пар.
Лежал младенец, и дары лежали.

январь 1964

* * *

Christmas 1963

The magi had come. The infant soundly slept.
The star shone brightly from the vaulted sky.
A cold wind swept the snow up into drifts.
The sand rustled. A bonfire crackled nearby.
Smoke plumed skyward. Flames hooked and writhed.
The shadows cast by the fire grew now shorter,
now suddenly longer. No one there yet realized
that on that very night life’s count had started.
The magi had come. The infant soundly slept.
Steep arches loomed above the manger.
Snow swirled about. White steam rose in wisps.
With gifts piled near him, the child slept like an angel.

January 1964

Translated from the Russian by Jamie Olson

Russian (Women) Poets

2011-12-04T22:45:00.001-08:00

Detail from cover of An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets

Image courtesy of Carcanet Press

Recently, I’ve been enjoying reading a collection of Russian poetry whose very existence many of its contributors seem to object to: Daniel Weissbort and Valentina Polukhina’s Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets. Actually, the anthology began its life as an issue of Modern Poetry in Translation (no. 20, 2002) and only later came out as a stand-alone book; the version I have is the journal issue. Reading between the lines as I moved through it, I got the distinct sense that the poets and critics involved on the Russian side were mystified by the Western editors’ desire to segregate the women from the men. (Polukhina, though Russian, lives and works in England. She is married to Weissbort.)

In one of the issue’s several prefatory pieces, Tatyana Voltskaya reminds readers that medieval theologians would often debate whether women even had souls, and she takes the demand for anthologies of women’s writing as evidence that the issue of sexism has not yet been settled, even if the writers themselves find it irrelevant: “I cannot escape the feeling that the shadow of that accursed question, formulated by pedantic theologians, still hangs over us, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat.” The anthologists’ urge to respond (“They do have souls!”) is especially perplexing when you realize, she says, that “if one ignores the very summit (Brodsky, in particular), women-poets in Russia, in recent decades, have been better writers.” There may be no injustice, she implies, that needs to be remedied. Likewise, Aleksei Alekhin, another preface writer, finds the need for such an anthology baffling: “It has always seemed to me that divisions according to gender should apply only to changing-rooms and public toilets—because of natural bashfulness. In poetry, there is nothing to be ashamed of.”

As for the poet-contributors, one of them, Vera Pavlova, claims that the very category of women’s poetry is limited by its own ideology: “There is ‘women’s poetry’ and there is poetry, written by women. There’s hardly any connection between them. The first doesn’t interest me in the least, and the second I find enormously interesting.” Yunna Morits, another poet who was included in the MPT issue, objected so strongly to the nature of the anthology that she had herself removed from the book version before it was published.

Whatever your politics, you will encounter a great number of phenomenal poets if you pick up the anthology. And the translators whose work appears in it rank among the best. I have only two wishes: 1) that the Russian originals had been reproduced along with the translations, and 2) that more of the translators had made an effort to re-create the rhymes and metrical patterns of the source texts. Left without either one, we can only make vague guesses at how each poem must have sounded as we gaze at the blank face of its English incarnation.

Regardless, the poems are first-rate, and as a nod of admiration to my fellow translators, I’ve included some of my favorite lines below:

Beyond Siberia again Siberia,

beyond impenetrable forest again forest.

And beyond it waste ground,

where a blizzard of snow breaks loose.

- Regina Derieva, “Beyond Siberia again Siberia”

(trans. Kevin Carey)

It’s good when the breathing in the next room

is my sons’ and not a cell-mate’s;

it’s good to wake up, not groaning

at an envenomed reality.

- Natalya Gorbanevskaya, “This, from the diagnosis”

(trans. Daniel Weissbort)

Once I used to study languages dead for millennia,

Losing sleep over the other-worldly verbs:

My voice broke on the fall of a line-break

As it tried to keep up with night’s bolting car.

- Olesia Nikolaeva, “Once I used to study”

(trans. Catriona Kelly)

Holy Russia was what you talked about,

the drowned city of Kitezh,

where Saint Sergius shares his bread with a bear,

where at Easter the blessed Serafim

says, Good morning my delight,

where his smile lights stars in the noon sky,

where prisoners pray for their guards.

- Olga Sedakova, “Letter”

(trans. Catriona Kelly)

Under the weak northern lights

The sky walks on tumours.

The blockade eats up

The soul, like a wolf eats his paw in a snare,

Like a fish eats a worm,

Like bottomless wisdom eats words…

- Elena Shvarts, “A Portrait of the Blockade”

(trans. James McGavran)

Wave on Wave

2011-11-25T21:31:00.003-08:00

Installation of George Washington statue (1909) / Image courtesy of UW University Libraries

Within the past few weeks, I visited two superbly organizedtranslation gatherings: Wave Books’ “3 Days of Poetry” in Seattle, and theannual conference of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) inKansas City. In both places, I met a lot of talented people and heard a lot ofgreat ideas, and I want to be sure I get everything down before I lose my notesor forget key details. I’ll start with the Wave festival in this post, and thenI’ll move on to ALTA in the next one.

Wave’s weekend-long festival was held at the University ofWashington’s Henry Art Gallery, located just off Red Square (seriously!) andright next to the hulking statue of General Washington himself. The venuecertainly gave the festival a welcome aura of artistic inspiration, but I didhave a hard time hearing some of the speakers inside the high-ceilinged galleries.Nevertheless, one of the highlights of the weekend took place in those echochambers: Matthew Zapruder’s conversation with Sarah Valentine about Russianpoet Gennady Aygi.

Wave Books has just published Valentine’s translation of Aygi’s Into the Snow, and I’ve been leisurely making my way through thecopy I picked up at the festival. (First impression: outstanding.) In Seattle,Valentine described Aygi as an avant-garde writer well outside the mainstreamof Russian poetry. While the majority of Russian poets write formal verse withstrict rhymes and meter — most often, tetrameter-quatrain blocks — Aygi composed infree verse and used disrupted syntax and baroque Russian grammar. Zapruder,however, kept insisting that Aygi’s experimentalism would not seem at allchallenging for American readers accustomed to more radical poetic models.(Incidentally, Valentine explained that Aygi employed traditional forms only inone case: when he was translating into Russian from his native Chuvash.)

During the Q&A period, I asked Valentine to discuss thedifferences between translating free and formal verse, but she instead opted toidentify what she thought they both must have in common: a sense of play. Shesaid that translators of poetry need to “jiggle things around” in their drafts,always seeking that feeling they got when they first read the original. I’m notsure if “jiggling” is quite how I would describe my own translation process,but her advice has definitely got me thinking.

On both of the mornings I visited the Wave festival, AnnieJanusch, the translation editor for The Quarterly Conversation, ran sessions on practical aspects of thetranslation business: first on reviewing translated works, and then on editingtranslations. During the first session, Janusch noted that some progress has beenmade in recent years when it comes to book reviews of translated works; forexample, most reviewers no longer make the mistake of entirely overlooking thetranslator’s role in creating the English text, even if they only acknowledgethe translator with what she calls an “adverbial nod” (“ably translated by X”).But she cautioned reviewers not to “praise the author for the translator’swork”: if a sentence comes off particularly well in the English translation,one should remember that it was the translator who wrote that sentence, not theauthor.

Janusch also warned reviewers not to be too quick to accusetranslators of “clunkiness”; rather, one should consider what purpose anyperceived awkwardness or infelicity serves within the work. If the translatorchose to use a “clunky” phrase, why might he or she have done so? It is all tooeasy to use the unseen original as an excuse not to think hard enough about thenuances of the translation. At the same time, reviewers familiar with thesource text sometimes tend to resort to a tedious enumeration of the“inaccuracies” of the translation. Janusch argued that by the time atranslator’s work reaches publication, it has been vetted by enough editors’eyes that reviewers can safely set aside any skepticism about the translator’slinguistic skills. She challenged us to think about what makes the differencebetween a good translation and a brilliant one. Whatever it is, it’s notaccuracy.

For the session on editing translations, Janusch teamed upwith Kevin Craft, the editor of Poetry Northwest, who said that his magazine wants “translation to be a regularfeature of what we do.” Although the session was listed as “How to EditTranslations,” it probably should have been called “How to Prepare Translationsfor Submission to Literary Journals.” Essentially, Janusch and Craft pulledback the curtain to give us some idea of how journal editors approachtranslations, as well as how editors might think differently about translationsfrom other submissions. They both believe that translators should write aparagraph that frames their translations for the editor. Janusch recommendedthat translators try to describe “the reading of the poem” that theirtranslation carries out. Craft wants to see poems that convince him they havefully made the leap from the source language into English. Whenever he isconsidering submissions for Poetry Northwest, whether translations ornot, he looks for things that express “the dignity of the human voice.”

The session culminated in a friendly debate aboutfacing-page translations. Should the original be reproduced alongside thetranslation? Matthew Zapruder, who came to the session as an audience member,said that Wave Books doesn’t do bilingual editions because they invite nitpickycritiques from pedantic readers; he would rather present thetranslation — Valentine’s Aygi, for instance — as a unique work in English. Some inthe room thought that facing-page editions were most appropriate for languagestudents, while English-only editions like those put out by Wave emphasize theartistry of the translator’s work. Another translator I spoke with laterthought quite the opposite: he claimed that a facing-page edition frees himfrom the tyranny of the source text and allows him to make bolder moves inEnglish. As the session came to a close, Craft dismissed someone’s objectionthat providing the original with the translation (as his magazine does) treatsit as a “special-needs poem”; he argued instead that translators and editorsshould be advocates for the original language — particularly in monoglot America.

The festival wrapped up on Sunday night with “Translators onTranslation,” an event co-sponsored by Seattle Arts & Lectures, who broughtin an audience exponentially bigger than all the other sessions. The eventbegan with the three translators — Nikolai Popov, Red Pine, and Peter Cole — eachpresenting a few thoughts about translation and reading from texts they hadtranslated. Then, the ubiquitous Zapruder sat down with them and led adiscussion of translation issues.

Popov, who has translated Joyce and Celan, began by sayingthat he finds the task of the translator appealing because “unlike poetry …translation makes things happen”—that is to say, it bridges cultures. He findsit an “eminently practical activity,” since translators are quite simply “doingsomething to something” when they tinker with the language. Translation istherefore immediately satisfying. Red Pine (a.k.a. Bill Porter), the translatorof Chinese poetry, said that when he translates a poem, he imagines himself asthe author’s dance partner (“I want to be able to dance with that poet on thedance floor”), and if he is going to pull together a successful Englishversion, he has to ask himself, “What’s motivating that dance?” Finally, PeterCole, who translates from Hebrew and Arabic, tackled the question of sound. Isthe sound of the poem what gets lost in translation? Cole says no. In fact, he believes thattranslators are “ethically obliged to seek and embody” a poem’s sonic qualities. (Otherwise, what would the translation be? Not a poem.) Still, heacknowledges that not every element of a poem can be translated at once, so heasks his students, “What is the one thing that you want to get across?” Then hetells them, “In getting that one thing, almost genetically other things willcome through as well.”

As the Wave festival proved, when translators of poetry gettogether to talk about translation, they can go on for days. And things getcomplicated quickly. But Red Pine offered a bit of wisdom that Sunday nightwhich I hope I won’t soon forget: “When you translate a poem, you have to makea poem. That’s all.”

Keeping It Civil

2011-11-22T15:15:00.001-08:00

From the Times:

The “Citizen Poet” project — conceived by three friends after a night of heavy drinking — is pushing the edges of Internet programming in Russia, delivering political satire to an audience that numbers in the millions rather than the thousands. It has also tapped into the sour response of many Russians to Mr. Putin’s plan to return to the presidency, a mood made darker by the absence of any viable course of action.

Unless poetry counts as a course of action.

For videos, etc., see the project's website and YouTube page.

Mamin-Sibiryak's "Fly"

2011-11-16T07:47:00.001-08:00

Cover of Fall 2011 issue of Chtenia / Image courtesy of the magazine

In yesterday's mail, I got my copy of the fall issue of Chtenia, which includes my translation of one of Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak's "Alyona stories" (Аленушкины сказки, 1896). These were stories that the author originally told to his little girl, who lost her mother when she was still an infant. The one that I translated is called "Tale of How There Once Was a Fly Who Outlived the Others" ("Сказка о том, как жила-была последняя муха"). For a taste of the story's mood (grim), you might have a look at animated-film director Alyona Oyatyeva's adaptation on YouTube.

Melamed: The More Libre, the Less Vers

2011-10-28T23:09:00.000-07:00

Cover of Russian edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (trans. Igor Melamed) / Image courtesy of РГГУ

One of the keyconcerns of The Flaxen Wave, which is also a key concern for anyonetranslating poems from Russian to English for an American audience, is bridgingthe gap between Russian poetry, where strict rhyme and meter are the norm, andAmerican poetry, where free verse dominates. This problem often occupies mymind, but I rarely knowhow to take it on directly. American translators of Russian verse have battedaround the question of form for decades, and even though I don’t intend to enter into that debate at themoment, I do sometimes find it helpful to consider Russian perspectives on thematter.

Not long ago, Iread an interview in Ex Libris withRussian poet and translator Igor Melamed, whose thoughts on form seem to memore or less representative of the status quo in Russia. (Incidentally, this year Melamedpublished a Russian translation of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s LyricalBallads.) When asked why he doesn’t use free verse in his ownpoetry, Melamed spoke of the “reckless creative freedom that dominates Westernpoetry and has practically killed it.” Like Frost, he would never considerplaying tennis with the net down:

It turns out that the more libre you have, the less versyou end up with. Meter and rhyme are a welcome burden that keeps verse fromfalling apart and that, strange though it may seem, makes an impact on poeticthought as a whole. … Russian poetry has a viable enough rhythmic potential thatwe don’t need to hitch up our pants and go running after Eliot or Éluard.

When Russian poets—even those who translate poetry fromEnglish—hold such extreme views on poetic form, how does one even begin tothink about translating their work for American readers, who judge rhyme andmeter as old-fashioned at best? Personally, I feel obliged to stay somehow faithfulto the form of the Russian original, but I strive to bring the poem to life ina particularly American way—and my ear has been shaped by years and years ofreading American free verse. In fact, if any poet’s influence landed me where Iam today, it was Eliot, Melamed’s straw man.

What can a translator do? It’s an impossible situation. On the onehand, you’ve got Russians like Brodsky, who thought that verse meters were“spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted,” and on the otherhand, you’ve got John Ashbery, who thinks that poems should proceed “by fitsand starts and by indirection,” and who distrusts poetry that is “arranged inneat patterns.” How do you bridge that gap?

Dream or Nightmare?

2011-10-21T23:16:00.000-07:00

Moscow metro logo / Image courtesy of Wikipedia

[From yesterday’s edition of the newspaper Rossiyskaya gazeta]

Until the end of October, the loudspeakers of the Moscow metro will broadcast poems about autumn.
The underground chambers will resound with the lines of Turgenev, Tyutchev, Lisyansky, Dementyev, and others. The poems will be performed not by actors, but by subway announcers.
The “Underground” has also arranged other literary surprises.
“Muscovites spend a lot of time on public transportation,” explained Svetlana Tsareva, press secretary for the Moscow metro. “In order for time to pass usefully, a ‘literary train’ has been launched on the Filyovsky metro line. The walls of its cars are decorated with excerpts from the works of Dante, Boccaccio, and other Italian greats. So it will make for a happier ride.”

[Translation mine]

Translation Comes to Seattle

2011-10-07T16:25:00.000-07:00

Next month, Wave Books will hold its second annual “3 Days of Poetry” festival at the Henry Art Gallery on the campus of the University of Washington. The first one actually took place in April 2010, during National Poetry Month, so their year seems to have stretched out to about nineteen months. Will the third annual festival be in June 2013?

Since the festival is just up the road from Olympia, I might have gone anyway, but this year’s theme, “Poetry in Translation,” virtually assures that I’ll be there. And the list of participants is impressive. It includes presentations and readings by the likes of Matthew Zapruder, Sarah Valentine, Alissa Valles, and Michael Wiegers, the executive editor of Copper Canyon Press—an institution, like Wave Books itself, that seems to loom genially behind the scenes of the festival.

Perhaps most exciting, the program wraps up on the evening of Sunday, November 6, with “Translators on Translation,” a panel organized in collaboration with Seattle Arts & Lectures. Zapruder will moderate the panel, and the three participants will be Bill Porter (who translates under the pseudonym “Red Pine”), Nikolai Popov, and Peter Cole. Popov, who now teaches at the University of Washington, translated Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Bulgarian back in 1981, and Cole, among other things, has translated the selected poems of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, who passed away earlier this week.

This promises to be an excellent weekend to spend in Seattle!

Continued Canonization

2011-09-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

Cover of Osip Mandelstam: 50 Poems (Persea Books, 1977),

translated by Bernard Meares with an introductory essay by Joseph Brodsky

This year saw the release of new editions of work by the two poets who are, by my reckoning, the two major voices of twentieth-century Russian poetry: Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. To at least one of these judgments, Brodsky himself would have agreed: he thought that Mandelstam’s poetry would “last as long as the Russian language exists,” as well as that Mandelstam’s stature as an artist could be measured by “the quantity and energy of the evil directed against him.” I can’t think of many artists who could beat Mandelstam in that contest.

The publisher Progress-Pléiade has now put out the third volume of Mandelstam’s Complete Collected Works and Correspondence (Полное собрание сочининий и писем), edited by N. G. Zakharenko and compiled by Alexander Mets, which completes the set. The first two volumes included Mandelstam’s poetry and essays, and this newest one contains notes, sketches, prefaces, and letters to family and friends. Some of these documents have apparently been published in this edition for the first time.

To mark the publication of the final volume, Ex Libris published a long piece in June by Boris Romanov called “Nostalgia for Mandelstam” («Тоска по Мандельштаму»). The article was not so much a review as it was an essay on the poet’s significance and the reception of his work over the decades, from the “typed samizdat sheets” that Romanov read as a student in the 1960s to the myriad editions that exist nowadays. Romanov mentions several other landmark volumes along the way, including the 1973 Poet’s Library edition that accused Mandelstam of failing “to get over all the ‘birthmarks’ of the past” and his own 1983 anthology of sonnets that ultimately contained only half of the Mandelstam poems that Romanov had hoped for. (As justification for the cuts, his publisher at the time said, “They have begun to publish too much of Mandelstam.”) But only in the final paragraph does Romanov say anything about the new edition in particular, and then he merely makes a general statement about its relevance:

We have always been accompanied by nostalgia for world culture, for Mandelstam, and for the new poet who is ‘as prepared for song as he is for glory’. Our nostalgia seemed especially acute during the Soviet years. Oddly enough, it accompanies poetry readers even now. This is why the new edition prepared by Alexander Mets of Osip Mandelstam’s complete collected works and letters will be gratefully read and reread.

As for Brodsky, the late Lev Losev edited a two-volume edition of his poems (Стихотворения и поэмы), which just came out in the New Poet’s Library series published by the Pushkin House in St. Petersburg. Those who have reviewed it – including Andrei Nemzer, who methodically analyzes the new edition as a cultural phenomenon – tend to focus on the friendship between Brodsky and Losev. (After all, it’s not every day that one poet makes friends with another poet that happens to be a scholar who devotes over a decade to editing the first poet’s body of work.) And everyone recognizes how unfortunate it is that Losev did not live to see the product of his labors. In an interview for OpenSpace.ru, Anatoly Barzakh, a member of the Poet’s Library editorial board, said that the new edition was “not only a ‘monument’ to Brodsky, but a ‘monument’ to Losev as well – his last work, one that speaks perhaps as much about him as it does about Brodsky.”

Reviewers also wonder what the new publication might mean for the Poet’s Library series (now “New,” apparently), whose role in literary canon-forming was so essential during the Soviet years but whose fate is no longer clear. Nemzer wonders, “Do we have a Poet’s Library … or not?” Its status at the current moment, not to mention down the road, remains uncertain, and he closes his review by calling for new volumes in the series by more modern poets. Likewise, during the interview with Barzakh that I mentioned above, Gleb Morev claims that “the publication of this collection of Brodsky is important not only for readers and researchers,” but for the entire series:

To my mind, this is also a crucial edition for the Poet’s Library itself. The first of the classic writers of uncensored literature from the second half of the 20th century has been published. It is perfectly natural that the first one was Brodsky: the ‘winning’ features of his biography are such that, if this book had gone against the unwritten rule that the Poet’s Library not publish living writers and had come out in the first half of the 90’s, when he was alive, nobody would have been surprised.

In any case, most agree that the new edition is a finely made object that brings together all of the poems from Brodsky’s six published volumes, as well as a selection of “poems not collected in books.” (That section includes a variant of “Odysseus to Telemachus” that I would love to see.) Ilya Abel, in a blog post for Echo of Moscow, describes the aesthetic experience of unwrapping the new book for the first time:

When you carefully remove the cellophane in which the publisher carefully wrapped the two solid volumes – no longer the familiar blue of the previous series, but now green – you see the wonderful white of the paper on which the books were printed and you smell the as-yet-unfaded odor of typographic ink. Most likely, this edition will not languish on the shelves of bookstores. And not because there was an entirely small print run of only 1500 copies. But because for the first time, really, Brodsky’s poetry has been presented how it deserved to be presented for decades.

And I find it hard to argue with that.

Akhmatova & Brodsky via Venclova

2011-08-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

Tomas Venclova (photo by Algimantas Aleksandravicius, 1998) / Image courtesy of fototapeta.art.pl

In a recent interview on Radio Svoboda, billed as a "conversation not so much about poetry as about politics," Lithuanian poet and Yale professor Tomas Venclova nevertheless made several literary connections that are worth stopping on. Venclova was a close friend of Joseph Brodsky, and on several occasions he also sat and talked with Anna Akhmatova. These titans of twentieth-century Russian poetry both came up in Venclova's conversation with interviewer Mikhail Sokolov (as did Pasternak). According to Venclova, here is what the two writers had to say about poetry and politics:

“Joseph Brodsky told me that poets should not become involved in the dissident movement. Not because it is bad; being a dissident is good and necessary. And not even because it is dangerous, but because it takes up too much time and keeps you from writing poems.” (Иосиф Бродский мне говорил, что диссидентством поэту заниматься не надо. Не потому, что это плохо – это хорошо и необходимо быть диссидентом. И даже не потому, что это опасно, а потому что это занимает много времени и мешает писать стихи.)

“Akhmatova taught us to have a contemptuous relation to the powers that be. This was clear to anyone who talked to her, and he or she would also learn to have a contemptuous, perhaps even arrogant relation to all of this. But Akhmatova once said — I remember one political comment she made in a conversation we had: ‘The younger generation, like Brodsky who is now coming up (she also mentioned Rein, Bobyshev, Naiman, you know the group, Gorbanevskaya), they understand a lot, but they will never understand what filth and blood all of this grew from, what filth and blood my generation passed through. They will not understand this. Now the times are tamer.’ ” (Ахматова учила такому презрительному отношению к властям. Это было ясно каждому, кто с ней общался, и человек тоже учился этому презрительному, может быть даже высокомерному отношению ко всему этому. Но было совершенно очевидно, что это нечто чудовищное, к чему примиряться ни в коем случае не надо. Но Ахматова сказала однажды, я помню одно ее такое политическое высказывание в разговоре: "Молодое поколение, вот растет Бродский (она упомянула еще Рейна, Бобышева, Неймана, вот эту группу, Горбаневскую), они многое понимают, но они никогда не поймут, из какой грязи и крови это выросло, какую грязь и кровь прошло мое поколение. Этого они не поймут. Сейчас времена более вегетарианские".)

[translations mine]

Soft Clay

2011-07-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

Alexander Kushner (by Alexei Balakin, 2007) / Image courtesy of Новая литературная карта России

“And the Russian language is arranged in such a wonderful way—it’s like a kind of soft clay that was created especially for poems: we’ve got shifting stresses, we’ve got wonderful suffixes. … It’s a very soft language. Take grammatical cases alone, or free word order within sentences: in our language, the subject can come at the very end, which doesn’t exist anywhere else. And it’s a shame that we’re moving over to vers libre, to free verse, and giving up on rhyme. I hope it doesn’t actually happen.”

– Alexander Kushner, interview on Radio Liberty (April 2010; translation mine)

«И язык русский устроен замечательным образом, он - как такая мягкая глина - специально создан для стихов: у нас ударения переходящие, у нас суффиксы замечательные. Одно дело - “нога”, другое - “ножка”, “пыль” и “пыльца”. Очень мягкий язык, падежи одни чего стоят, свободный порядок слов в предложении - у нас подлежащее может быть в самом конце, такого нет нигде. И жалко, если мы перейдем на верлибр, на свободный стих, откажемся от рифмы. Я надеюсь, что этого все-таки не произойдет.»

– Александр Кушнер, интервью на Радио Свободе (апрель 2010)

More from Gandelsman

2011-07-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

Since winning the Moscow Count prize last month, Vladimir Gandelsman has been showing up everywhere. OpenSpace.ru posted videos of him reading a poem of his own and a poem by Lev Danovsky, and several new poems were just published in Новый журнал (The New Review) and Октябрь (October). In the first selection, I particularly liked the poem "Элегия" ("Elegy"), which seems to contemplate the absence of none other than the poet himself: "To sink my teeth so deeply into the world that it ... cannot let me go. / What a floor this is! / Hardwood, pine, ice, sea, sky, / or what have you – without me you're empty and feeble!" ("Так впиться в мир, чтоб он ... меня не отпустил, – / каков настил! – / дощатый, хвойный, ледяной, морской, небесный, / любой – ты без меня пустой и пресный!")

Counting on Gandelsman

2011-06-15T23:13:00.000-07:00

Vladimir Gandelsman / Image courtesy of Стороны света

This week, poet and translator Vladimir Gandelsman won the Moscow Count award, an annual prize of fifty thousand rubles (about $1800) given for the best book of poetry published that year by a Moscow press. The book in question is Ode to a Dandelion (Ода одуванчика), which was put out by Russkii Gulliver and includes poems that the poet wrote between 1975 and 2007. Gandelsman cut his teeth among the Leningrad poets in the 1970s, who were under the sway of Joseph Brodsky, and since he immigrated to the U.S. in 1990, he has divided his time between New York and St. Petersburg. Besides writing his own poetry, Gandelsman has translated many English and American poets into Russian (though none of those translations appear in the new book), including Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Anthony Hecht, and even Dr. Seuss (Кот в шляпе). Radio Svoboda listeners may also know him from his frequent contributions – often about contemporary poetry, especially Brodsky – to Alexander Genis’s American hour on the program “Over the Barriers” (“Поверх барьеров”).

English translations of Gandelsman’s poetry have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Metamorphoses, and John High’s Crossing Centuries, but none of those texts are available online. Therefore, to give you a taste of Gandelsman, I’ve translated (very hastily) the final two stanzas of “Ode to a Dandelion,” the title poem of his prize-winning book:

If you move at all, fluff will fly from

the dandelion, that unlucky flower.

I remember my mother’s whisper:

“Giving birth…” (about my aunt) “…she died.”

And then she’d do some sewing.

Or, let’s say, she’d sweep the floor.

An act of dispersion.

There, she’s done it.

Like a lamp, flickering as it hangs,

I’ll carry it off into a vacant lot,

and just then the light of

the dandelion will meekly fade.

Gone, beyond our ken.

Blow! It will tremble just a bit,

you’ll hear a distant clatter,

and out it will go.

(Шевельнись - и слетит с одуванчика / пух, с цветка-неудачника. / Помню шепот / мамы: "...роды..." - (о тетушке) - "...умерла". / Села штопать. / Или, скажем, пол подмела. / Распыления опыт. / Вот он, добыт. // Точно лампу, моргнувшую на весу, / на пустырь его вынесу, / и вот-вот свет / Одуванчика сгинет безропотно. / Там, где нас нет. / Дуй! - он дернется крохотно, - / в мире что-нибудь лязгнет, - / и погаснет.)

Laureate for the Little Ones

2011-06-09T16:53:00.000-07:00

J. Patrick Lewis / Image courtesy of the Poetry Foundation

As I learned from a podcast yesterday, the Poetry Foundation has named J. Patrick Lewis the new Children's Poet Laureate, a role he will fill for the next two years. (He was preceded by Jack Prelutsky and Mary Ann Hoberman, whose speculative stuff I love reading to my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter.) The poetry excerpted in the podcast had immediate appeal for me – as it apparently does for kids as well, once it makes its way past those whom Sylvia Vardell calls the "adult gatekeepers in between" – but what really caught my attention was Vardell's description of Lewis as a former "professor of economics in Ohio and a scholar of Russian history as well." It turns out that several of Lewis's books for children have been inspired by Russian folklore, including At the Wish of a Fish, an adaptation of the classic tale По щучьему велению (As the Pike Wishes). In his scholarly days back in the 1970s, Lewis also helped to compile a volume called The USSR Today : Current Readings from the Soviet Press. This is clearly a man of great talent and wide interests!

One of Lewis's best known poems seems to be this one, "One Cow, Two Moos" (you can also watch him read it here), though he admits in the podcast that sometimes younger children find it bewildering:

   We used to have a single cow,
   We called her Mrs. Rupple.
   But she got struck by a lightning bolt,
   And now we have a couple.

   She's walking sort of funny now,
   Oh pity her poor calf.
   Old Mrs. Rupple gives no milk,
   She gives us half-and-half.

As a reader of poetry, Lewis says, "I am always looking for that ‘ah ha!’ moment, and I like to bring that to children as well." I think that the 'ah ha!' moment must come in this poem with the rhyme-word "couple," which seems to me a fine example of Lewis's technical proficiency and sense of timing. Pushkin would be satisfied. In fact, if someone wants to make a connection between Lewis's Russophilia and his calling to write children's poetry, as Curtis Fox and Sylvia Vardell tried half-heartedly to do in the podcast, this just may be it: while the vast majority of Russian poems are formal, what audience is there in mad-for-free-verse America for that sort of thing? Children may be the only ones left.

Translation Back in "Poetry"

2011-05-24T14:59:00.000-07:00

Cover of Poetry (June 2011) / Image courtesy of the Poetry Foundation

Today is one of those days when I’m happy to be proven wrong: I wrote last month about the apparent demise of Poetry’s annual translation issue, but when I picked up my mail today, I found a fresh copy of the magazine with the welcome words “The Translation Issue” emblazoned on its cover.

The issue contains some familiar names and some not-so-familiar ones—both among the poets and the translators—and Flaxen readers will likely want to start with Philip Metres and Dimitri Purstsev’s translations of poems by Arseny Tarkovsky (the director’s father) and Stephanie Sandler’s translations of Elena Shvarts—the ones I’ve been waiting for. (On the Poetry website, both poems are conflated as one, and "Shvarts" is spelled "Shvartz." The second poem begins with the phrase "I was thinking.") The issue also includes translations by H.L. Hix and Jüri Talvet of Estonian poet Juhan Liiv. And to give a local plug, Olympia poet Lucia Perillo is represented here with a translation of a Rilke poem (“Song of the Dwarf”).

The editors of the magazine have moved their translation issue from April to June, but that too seems like an improvement. What better month than June to lie around reading poems in translation? For an academic like me, it’s the freest, rosiest month of the year. I look forward to spending more time not only with the poems, but with the translators’ notes, which always harbor gems of practical wisdom. Let’s hope the editors give us the same opportunity in 2012.

Where Poems Come Alive

2011-05-10T10:19:00.000-07:00

One of the best features of OpenSpace.ru, an altogether fantastic site, is "Стихи вживую" ("Live Poems"), where well-known authors read a poem of their own and a poem by someone else on camera. You could watch and listen to these clips for hours, but one place you might begin is the page with the two videos of Timur Kibirov, whose poems I've been translating lately. (That's where I like to begin, anyhow.) Enjoy!

MPT: Poetry and the State

2011-05-08T21:37:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Modern Poetry in Translation is out, and the theme this time around is "Poetry and the State." In their introduction to the issue, editors David and Helen Constantine argue that the "relationship between poetry and the State must always be – because of the autonomy of the former and the unfreedom of the latter – at the very least uneasy." They say that poetry claims as its right "the freedom to be plural, various, to entertain and essay all possibilities of being human." As an editorial criterion, this turns out to be a smart one, since it allows poets of various political stripes to be represented.

Of particular interest for Flaxen Wave readers are poems by Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who had vastly different relationships with Soviet power. The Mandelstam poems, including the infamous "Stalin epigram" and excerpts from the Voronezh notebooks, were done by three different translators: Andrew Mayne, Peter France, and Alexander Cigale. As for Mayakovsky, the poem published in the issue is the canonical "Verses about a Soviet Passport," translated by Steven Capus. The issue also includes Sasha Dugdale's interview with Larisa Miller and a batch of Ukrainian poets in translations by Steve Komarnyckyj from the aptly named "Executed Renaissance" (as the editors put it, "poets so important, they shot them").

Not much of the issue is available for reading online, but you can have a look at Komarnyckyj's translation of Mykhailo Draj-Khmara's "Swans" (Лебеді), a poem that at first blush seems apolitical but which supposedly led to the poet's arrest and subsequent death. Swans as symbols may seem harmless, but I suppose these were the risky lines: "They destroy cynicism and despair / With their unconquered song." It didn't take much, back then and back there, to get one into deep trouble.

Ism vs. Ism

2011-04-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

Drawing by Nikolai Gumilyov / Image courtesy of Novaya Gazeta

Today marks 125 years since the birth of Nikolai Gumilyov, one of the founders of Acmeism—a poetry movement that seems to find its parallel among the Anglo-American modernists in Imagism. The Acmeists defined themselves against another group of Russian poets, the Symbolists, about whom Osip Mandelstam wrote the following in his 1912 essay “The Morning of Acmeism” (“Утро акмеизма”):

The symbolists did not make for good house occupants. They loved to travel, but they felt unwell, not at home in their own bodies. … One can build only in the name of “three dimensions,” since any structure depends upon them. This is why an architect must be a good house occupant, but the Symbolists were poor craftsmen. To build means to do battle with emptiness, to hypnotize space.

The Acmeists saw themselves as doing practical, material work with language and even called their group a “workshop” (“цех”). In his 1913 essay “The Legacy of Symbolism and Acmeism” (“Наследие символизма и акмеизм”), Gumilyov explained that the poets in his movement sought “a greater balance of power and a more precise knowledge of the relationship between subject and object than had existed in Symbolism.” As I say, when reading statements like these, I can’t help but think of the Imagists, who advocated “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” and the use of “absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation” (Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” 1918). Appropriately, what the Acmeists found objectionable in Symbolism—that is, abstraction—is the same problem that Ezra Pound is said to have helped another poet grounded in symbolism, W. B. Yeats, to remedy.

The Acmeists included two figures well known to American readers—Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, who was married to Gumilyov—and two others who I think may be somewhat less familiar—Mikhail Kuzmin and Georgy Ivanov. As for Gumilyov, he famously met his end in 1921 at the age of thirty-five when he ran afoul of the Bolsheviks, placing him on that seemingly endless list of Russian poets about whom we wonder, “What else might they have done if they’d lived just a bit longer?”

For a taste of what he did do, have a look at the poem “The Giraffe” (“Жираф”), available on the AGNI site in a skillful translation by James Stotts. Here is an excerpt:

… far, far away, on the distant shores of Lake Chad,

There roams a most majestic giraffe

Blessed with a handsome build and graceful carriage

And a coat painted hypnotic, magical patterns,

With which none but the moon above dare compare

When her light falls down to be scattered and rocked on the waters,

Passing like a blazing sail far out at sea

As she runs by, nimble and carefree as a bird in flight.

(Trans. James Stotts)

Apollon Davidson, whose article about Gumilyov appears in today’s Novaya Gazeta, explains that this poem and others like it inspired him to “become an Africanist,” even though the poet’s books were banned in the Soviet Union until 1986. Luckily, Davidson’s family had copies that had been printed before the ban, and he began reading them during his prewar childhood in Leningrad. As an adult, Davidson tried to get some of Gumilyov’s texts published, but to no avail:

How I wished that Gumilyov could be “rehabilitated”! In the early sixties, at the time of the “thaw,” I thought, “And now will it happen?” I decided that it would be easiest to do it by beginning with his African travels and poems. I came to an agreement with an Eastern Studies journal. They also thought that it would happen soon. … But it never came out.

Only during Perestroika did Gumilyov’s poems begin to be made available. And Davidson gladly reports that these days he sees more and more students developing an interest in the poet.

I’ll end this post with two poems that have always struck me as remarkably similar: one by a Russian Acmeist, and one by an Anglo-American Imagist. They both depend upon concision and seem to differ mainly in the type of image—aural or visual—that they convey:

Звук осторожный и глухой

Плода, сорвавшегося с древа,

Среди немолчного напева

Глубокой тишины лесной...

(The mute and cautious sound / of a piece of fruit fallen from a tree / amid the unceasing chorus / of the forest’s profound silence. – Osip Mandelstam, 1908)

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

– Ezra Pound, 1913

Translation in "Poetry"

2011-04-12T22:20:00.000-07:00

Detail of cover for "Poetry," April 2006 (Nathan Theis, "Voice") / Image courtesy of the Poetry Foundation

For a few years, there was no periodical publication I awaited more eagerly than Poetry’s annual translation issue. It came out each April, and it contained work by major poets in translations done by some of the best literary translators working today. From 2006 to 2009, I would open the April issue and encounter poems from familiar voices and new ones alike: Marina Tsvetaeva in a translation by Sasha Dugdale, Saadi Youssef by Khaled Mattawa, Rainer Maria Rilke by David Ferry, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill by Paul Muldoon, and Osip Mandelstam by John High and Matvei Yankelevich, just to name a few of my favorites.

Alas, those days are no more. I’m not foolish enough to hazard a guess at what went through the minds of the editors and publisher of Poetry, but for whatever reason, they chose to stop putting out the April translation issue. Still, the magazine has been including more and more translations in their regular issues. Last month’s pages contained translations of work by three writers, including a spellbinding set of poems by the fifteenth-century Indian poet Kabir (translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra), and the April issue features John Ashbery’s translations of prose poems by Arthur Rimbaud. In Poetry’s podcast for the current issue, the editors asked Ashbery why he had decided to translate the nineteenth-century Frenchman, and he replied, “I was just translating it originally for the pleasure of doing it, as I sometimes do with French poetry, and perhaps as a kind of exercise to see if it might have some kind of impact on my own poetry.”

In fact, even before he began translating these poems, Ashbery seems to have been reading Rimbaud through his own poetics—that is, through Ashbery’s poetics. In his note to the poems, Ashbery refers to “the simultaneity of life” as an essential condition of modernity, but when the editors asked him about that phrase in the podcast interview, he said, “Well, it’s probably much more my notion than it is Rimbaud’s. … I guess it could be construed as an attempt to describe how poetry seems to happen to me—a sort of a sudden changing and flooding which erupts and is something completely new and inexplicable.” An honest reply, to be sure, but I wonder if placing oneself at the center of a translation project is such a good idea. (I write this, by the way, as a longtime admirer of Ashbery’s poems.)

Word has it that next month’s issue of Poetry will include Stephanie Sandler’s translations of two poems by Elena Shvarts, the Russian poet who passed away last year. I can hardly wait to see them. As it happens, Sandler’s translation of Shvarts’s “We are birds in migration” (“Мы – перелётные птицы”) was featured this past Sunday on the Boston Review site, which is posting a new poem each day for National Poetry Month.

Several years ago, I heard Elena Shvarts read in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was hosted by the University of Michigan’s Slavic Department, and since then I have always kept an eye on her work. Her engagement with historical and personal trauma fascinates me. In fact, I once tried my hand at translating one of her poems, “What to Do with an Orphan (Instructions)” (“Что делать с сиротой”), a distressing text whose middle lines I am excerpting here:

What do you want to say? That an orphan’s a measure—

the measure of all other measurable things?

That’s not it at all. I’ve somehow been mesmerized—

orphans work better than worms when you’re fishing.

Use them to catch fish from the flowery depths

or creatures so white you can’t believe that they’re birds.

In the sleepy water, even God would be tempted—

they say He’s really biting in the reeds.

(Что ж, ты хочешь сказать, сирота – это мера, / Мера всех измеримых вещей? / Ничего не хочу, в сироту только верю – / Как в наживку – он слаще червей. / На него ты поймаешь белую в обморок птицу / Или рыбу в придонных цветах, / А на сонной воде может Сам им прельститься – / Бог клюет хорошо в камышах.)

NOTA BENE (5/25/11): It turns out I was mistaken: the translation issue is back!

Aflatuni on Post-Soviet Identity

2011-03-04T09:21:00.000-08:00

Sukhbat Aflatuni (May 2009) / Image courtesy of A. Stepanenko and Interpoezia

In doing some reading lately on Sukhbat Aflatuni (a.k.a. Yevgeny Abdullaev), the influential Russian-language poet from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, I came across an interview with him that I thought worth translating and excerpting here. Aflatuni is one of the writers, along with Andrey Volos, Gary Shteyngart, Lara Vapnyar, and David Bezmozgis, who Julie A. Buckler claims have prompted scholars to broaden their conceptions of Russian culture. In the interview, he makes several intriguing comments on how he views his own cultural identity and his position as a poet.

Here’s how the interviewer, Sandzhar Yanyshev, initiated the conversation:

Sukhbat, after what happened in the former Russian [sic] colonies, when the country itself emigrated from under one’s feet and people found themselves emigrants in their own homes without taking a single step, many native speakers of Russian preferred to “return” to the place where Russian language and culture reside—that is, they left for Russia. You, a Russian poet and Russian philosopher, stayed. Why?

And here is Aflatuni’s reply:

Every poet has his diagnosis… Some leave, others get stuck with their wings in their nests. Notice that I don’t say, “Every poet has his fate.” Fate is something heroic, something theatrical. But how is it that one can exist when we’re talking about a mix of passions, habits, dreams—that is, the very things that hold us to the place where we were born? That’s a diagnosis. It’s some kind of Oedipal complex. We all circle around it—the homeland—irrespective of whether we “left” it or didn’t leave it. You circle it, I circle it. We zigzag differently and our circling bears different fruit, but it’s the same mechanism of unquenched attraction to that place where you breathed your first breath and cried your first cry. […] And as for where language resides… Language, like the speech organ with which it shares a name [the word язык means both “language” and “tongue” in Russian], is always inside the author. If it’s outside, then it’s no longer language, but rather some kind of microphone or loudspeaker. For me, Russia, and especially Moscow with its literary salons and thick journals, is the acoustic environment, the amplifier, that allows me to be heard and not just mumble something into my scarf.

I find it fascinating that Aflatuni sees the question of Russian identity as a disorder that must be diagnosed—and he implies that everyone suffers an “Oedipal complex” about their home, not just writers on the periphery.

Incidentally, if the theme of ethnic and linguistic identity among Russians in the post-Soviet world is one that catches your interest, consider reading Denis Gutsko’s novel I Speak Russian (Русскоговорящий), which won the Russian Booker prize in 2005 and concerns a Jewish-Georgian native speaker of Russian who fails to attain Russian citizenship after the fall of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the book has not yet been translated into English, but you can find an English summary of it on RussiaProfile.org. (If Gutsko’s novel ever does get translated, its title might be given as something like Russian Speaker or Russian Native Speaker.)

Speaking of big questions of Russian identity, here is my translation of the second half of Aflatuni’s 2008 poem “two cities: Moscow and ‘Peter’,” which concerns the cultural sway of the two capitals (and maybe a third force):

Moscow and Peter: a strange marriage

she is a Scythian, he’s a Varangian

two cities: Moscow and Peter

two faces in granite—shattered—

two faces: thesis, antithesis

Moscow and Peter;

the train-station

moon, like a Muslim at his shop,

peers down at them with disdain

(Москва и Питер: странный брак: / она — Скифянка, он — Варяг // два города — Москва и Питер / два лика в треснувшем граните / два лика: тезис — антитезис / Москва и Питер; / свысока / на них глядит вокзальный месяц / как мусульманин у ларька)

Kibirov in Cardinal Points

2011-02-16T08:54:00.000-08:00

My translations of five poems by Timur Kibirov now appear on the webpage for Cardinal Points, the English incarnation of Стороны света, edited by Irina Mashinski and Oleg Woolf. They also published a short essay I wrote on Kibirov's poetry for their "Art of Translation" section. All of these texts will appear in the print edition in April (volume 12, number 3).

I wrote a little about Cardinal Points in another post, but here is how the journal describes itself:

The English version of the journal is entirely independent from the Russian one, called Storony Sveta (Cardinal Points in Russian). Whereas the latter has already had large and dedicated readership in Russia and beyond, the new Cardinal Points project is intended to reach out to the vast base of our readers who do not speak Russian, yet, have a strong interest in the Russian literature, particularly the 20th century works. It is often difficult to translate these works, which impedes appreciation of Russian literature by the non-Russians. But the genuine interest still exists and it greatly moves us, the fortunate native speakers.

If you'd like to see the Russian originals of Kibirov's poems, you can find them online either in Znamya or on Stengazeta. Kibirov also collected them in book form.

From the New World to the Old

2011-02-03T21:16:00.000-08:00

Photograph of Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott (undated) / Image courtesy of the Beinecke Library

I was pleased to read in the Guardian last week that one of my favorite poets, Derek Walcott, was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize for his recent book White Egrets (as if the Nobel Prize weren't enough). The prize is given for the best new poetry collection published in the UK or Ireland, but the candidates themselves can apparently live anywhere. (Walcott comes from the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, and among his competitors was the American poet Brian Turner.) In any case, Anne Stevenson, who chaired the panel of judges, called White Egrets a "moving and technically flawless" work.

As it so happens, Walcott has a Russian connection, which I wrote about in my dissertation: his friendship and collaboration with Joseph Brodsky. The two men first met in the 1970s and remained close until Brodsky's death in 1996. They both contributed essays to a book on Robert Frost, and Walcott translated several of Brodsky's "nativity poems" into English (with a crib, naturally). Rumor has it that he also helped Brodsky with his self-translations of the "Part of Speech" series after Daniel Weissbort was snubbed. And Brodsky appears several times in Walcott's work, including in "Forests of Europe" and The Prodigal.

Below are the opening lines of an unpublished poem, "Dedication," that Walcott wrote for Brodsky in the early 1980s. I happened to find it while rooting around in Walcott's papers at the University of Toronto a few years back. And if I can ever figure out how to get in touch with him, I'll ask the man himself to let me publish it for him. For now, this little chunk will have to do. Enjoy!

More strength and grace to your work
I send you now, Joseph, from
the sunshine poured to the brim
of this hemisphere, to cypresses
wrestling in Tuscany, to the calcified bread
of heaven within whose holes
the anchorites died like weevils.
Joseph, we wake to wrestle devils,
and an aching cavity. Wine is stored
in the ageing cellars of the heart,
manna blossoms in the spring orchard,
and through the grid of terraces
the ancient flame is lowered after winter
and all of Italy throbs in heat.

Kiktenko in Ozone Park

2010-12-28T09:11:00.000-08:00

Abstract post-graffiti calligraphy by Nuno de Matos / Image courtesy of Ozone Park Journal

Two of my translations of poems by Vyacheslav Kiktenko appear in the Fall 2010 issue of Ozone Park Journal, which is put out by the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at CUNY's Queens College. Susan Bernofsky, a brilliant translator, spent the fall semester as a visiting professor in the program, which she describes in an article she wrote for Words Without Borders.

With any luck, Kiktenko's Cyrillic texts will be posted on the Ozone site soon. For now, you can read the originals here ("Заброшенный парк" and "Мальчик стоит и дивится").

Thanks to ALTA, Roger Sedarat, and Jolie Hale for making this happen!

A Nativity Poem by Joseph Brodsky

2010-12-24T14:16:00.000-08:00

Photograph of Joseph Brodsky speaking / Image courtesy of Yale's Beinecke Library

NOTE: My English translation follows the Russian text of this poem, which is one of the first "Nativity poems" that Brodsky wrote. This poem does not appear in the collection that Farrar, Straus and Giroux put out in 2001 under the editorship of Pyotr Vail.

* * *

Рождество 1963 года

Спаситель родился

в лютую стужу.

В пустыне пылали пастушьи костры.

Буран бушевал и выматывал душу

из бедных царей, доставлявших дары.

Верблюды вздымали лохматые ноги.

Выл ветер.

Звезда, пламенея в ночи,

смотрела, как трех караванов дороги

сходились в пещеру Христа, как лучи.

1963 - 1964

* * *

Christmas, 1963

The savior was born

into fierce, brutish cold.

Shepherds’ small campfires blazed in the wasteland.

A blizzard seethed and battered the souls

of the humble kings who bore gifts for the infant.

The camels lifted their shaggy legs in sequence.

The wind howled.

The star, aflame in the night,

looked on as the paths of the three processions

converged on Christ’s cave like beams of light.

1963-1964

Translated from the Russian by Jamie Olson

Sketchy Poet

2010-12-13T11:18:00.000-08:00

Untitled drawing by Joseph Brodsky / Image courtesy of the the National Library of Russia

Today in St. Petersburg, the National Library of Russia opened a new exhibit called "Hourglass: Drawings by Joseph Brodsky," featuring unpublished sketches by the Russian poet from a number of sources: the library's archives, the Anna Akhmatova Museum, and private collections. The exhibit also includes copies of drawings that Brodsky made during his years in the United States, as well as some of his photographs. According to the library's press release, "The drawings reflect yet another aspect of Joseph Brodsky's talent and are an important resource for the study of his life and work." Besides the images, the library has on display manuscripts of poems, excerpts from letters, and notebook entries.

As it so happens, the walls of my office at Saint Martin's University are adorned with printed copies of two drawings by Brodsky: a self-portrait and a sketch of Derek Walcott. Both come from Yale's Beinecke Library, whose website allows anyone to view a number of Brodsky's drawings and photographs from his manuscript collection. (Just search using the keyword "Brodsky.")

If any readers of this blog happen to be in St. Petersburg and find the time to drop by the exhibit at the National Library, I'd love to hear what you think! Unfortunately, the exhibit will be short-lived: it closes on December 31.

Bella: Woman of the 'Sixties

2010-12-05T23:18:00.000-08:00

Bella Akhmadulina / Image courtesy of Novaya Gazeta

This past Monday, Russia suffered the loss of Bella Akhmadulina, another voice from that hugely influential generation of poets who emerged in the 1960s and quickly achieved celebrity status in the Soviet Union. Alongside Yevgeny Evtushenko, Robert Rozhdestvensky, and Andrei Voznesensky (who also died this year), Akhmadulina became, according to Radio Svoboda’s Elena Fanailova, a “feminine symbol of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’,” appearing on stage, in popular films, and in print.

One should not forget that many poets in the Soviet Union, even major ones like Joseph Brodsky, did not have the luxury of seeing their work appear on the printed page. In fact, Akhmadulina was not always in the good graces of the authorities either: her second collection, Chills (Озноб), could only be released in tamizdat—“over there”—by a Frankfurt publisher run by Russian émigrés. And after she contributed a poem to Vasily Aksyonov’s unsanctioned almanac Metropol in 1979, Soviet officials evidently “branded her a prostitute and drug addict” in retaliation. That’s quite a fall for someone who just a decade before had helped to fill stadiums with crowds hungry for poetry.

Ironically, she was also made “a target of official criticism,” explains William Grimes in an obituary for The New York Times, precisely because her poetry seemed “resolutely apolitical.” Only in a place like the Soviet Union would such a critique make sense. Where, on the other hand, did ideologically engaged poetry lead? Pyotr Vail writes, “Bella Akhmadulina alone, out of all the poetic heroes of the 60’s, happily avoided the dangerous convolutions of civic poetry that carried her more active colleagues God knows where. She was always a lyric poet, a particularly intimate writer.” And her disengagement from politics may have been her greatest literary strength. Vail continues, “Lyric poetry survives, sustained by the inexhaustibility of the simplest – but necessarily personal – feeling.”

Fanailova, the correspondent for Radio Svoboda, places Akhmadulina in a line of poets that includes Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, two key figures of the Silver Age. Others have also made large claims of canonicity: Sonia I. Ketchian, who was interviewed for the Times obituary, calls Akhmadulina “one of the great poets of the 20th century. … There’s Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak – and she’s the fifth.” One indication of her stature is the speed at which prominent figures in Russian culture have responded to her death. By Wednesday, the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg had arranged a special exhibition dedicated to Akhmadulina to open on Friday, and the prominent (if embattled) sculptor Zurab Tsereteli had announced that he would create two new sculptures for her—one to adorn her gravesite, and one to be displayed on the street where she lived.

For a taste of Akhmadulina’s poetry, English readers can turn to Zephyr Press’s In the Grip of Strange Thoughts (edited by Jim Kates), which along with work by dozens of other late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian poets includes two of her poems, both translated by F. D. Reeve. Here are the opening stanzas of Reeve’s translation of “Chills,” the long title poem of her 1968 collection:

I guess I’m sick, because this is the third day

I’ve been shivering like a horse waiting for the start.

Even my snobbish neighbor on the floor

keeps shouting, “Bella, you’re practically shaking yourself apart!”

“Pull yourself together! Your weird disease

makes the walls tremble and blows through all the cracks.

It gives my kids inflammation of the feelings

and rattles the dishes drying in the rack.”

And so I’d say to him:

“I’m shivering

more and more—without malice prepense.

But by the way, tell everyone on the floor

that this evening I’m quitting our residence.”

But the general unease rendered me so queasy

that I kept making stupid verbal slips,

one leg began to hop, and I couldn’t even

get a smile to form upon my lips.

Erofeyev on Tolstoy

2010-11-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

Photo of Leo Tolstoy by F. W. Taylor (c. 1897) / Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune just ran a piece by Victor Erofeyev to mark the hundredth anniversary of Leo Tolstoy's death. Erofeyev fascinates me: he has a way of writing clear, simple prose that nevertheless manages to get at profound truths. Two of his essays that appeared in The New Yorker have stuck with me for years, and both of them go right to the foundations of Russian culture: in one, he takes up the subject of vodka; in the other, Russian cursing. (Unfortunately, the magazine won't let you read them without a subscription to the digital edition. But for excerpts from the second essay, read this post by Languagehat.)

In the new piece, Erofeyev claims to get a "physiological pleasure" from reading Tolstoy, since the novelist's words "generate smells, sounds, vibrations of feelings and moods." I suppose that's as good a definition of 'realism' as any. But most importantly, Erofeyev draws a distinction between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that, from my perspective, hits right on the mark:

André Gide in an essay on Dostoevsky wrote that Tolstoy obscured the greatness of Dostoevsky. But with time, the prevalent view among intellectuals came to be that Dostoevsky’s mountain was higher than Tolstoy’s. Yes, Dostoevsky has clear goals and defined action. The curtain opens and we watch how a godless existence leads inexorably to sin and evil. Crime becomes punishment. By contrast, when Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina throws herself under a train, what is it? Her punishment? High tragedy? The fate of fallen women? A delirious stream of consciousness? There is no answer. For that, in Tolstoy’s logic, you go to the police, not to the writer. In Dostoevsky, life is subservient to thought. In Tolstoy, thought is in a constant spin, like the grenade that will explode and take the life of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.

As I said, Erofeyev has a knack for expressing something simple, clear, and profoundly true. The next time I teach Russian literature, I may just have to assign this piece to my students.

The "Blackamoor" of Peter the Great

2010-11-14T22:34:00.000-08:00

Statue of A. S. Pushkin in St. Petersburg (on Pushkinskaya St.)

[Note that the original title of this post was "The 'Negro' of Peter the Great." See the comments section for details.]

Curiosity about Pushkin's lineage seems as strong as ever: Serge Schmemann writes in The New York Times that an African historian, Dieudonné Gnammankou, has discovered that the Russian national poet's great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was probably born in the late seventeenth century in central Africa - not the more palatable Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, as Russians had thought. When he was seven years old, Gannibal was kidnapped, possibly by a neighboring chief, from the ancient sultanate of Logone-Birni (in what is now Cameroon), and given as a gift to the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople. The Russian ambassador then "acquired" him and presented him to Peter the Great.

Precisely because of his blackness, Gannibal's close relationship with Peter has long held profound interest for Russians and - it seems to me - has contributed to their conception of his great-grandson as possessing literary gifts of an almost otherworldly origin. (That relationship also accounts for Gannibal's patronymic, Petrovich, or "son of Peter.") The racialist thinking that predominates in Russia nowadays can often be unsettling, regardless whether the group under examination comes off looking good or bad, and Pushkin's case is no exception. The implication seems to be that his dash of African blood somehow honed or magnified his Russianness, thereby nurturing him toward his destiny of becoming the greatest of Russian poets.

At any rate, the historian Gnammankou's research led to a ceremony this week in La Fère, France, where "luminaries of the town and province" rubbed shoulders with "high representatives of Russia and Estonia, as well as the ambassador of Cameroon and the sultan of Logone-Birni." They all gathered to celebrate the life of Gannibal, whom Peter the Great dispatched to study military science at the French town's artillery academy in 1716.

But that was before Peter's death and Gannibal's subsequent exile to Siberia. Things often go that way in Russian history, don't they?

Solzhenitsyn for School Kids

2010-10-29T22:48:00.000-07:00

Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his wife Natalya / Image courtesy of Novaya Gazeta

[This is my translation of the first part of an article that appeared in today’s edition of Novaya Gazeta. The second part, which I do not give here, included an interview with Natalya Solzhenitsyn, the author’s widow.]

From Novaya Gazeta (October 29, 2010)

In December 1973, in Paris, the first publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic literary investigation burst onto the scene. His contemporaries wrote, “Maybe someday we will consider the appearance of Archipelago as marking the beginning of the fall of the communist system.” And, “This book could become the key book of a national rebirth, if the Kremlin manages to read it.”

The former came to pass. What about the latter? Actually, in September 2009 The Gulag Archipelago was incorporated into the federal education standard for Russian schools. And in January 2011 it will become part of the curriculum: the publisher “Prosveschenie” has put out a one-volume text, The Gulag Archipelago: Abridged Edition. This version is expressly for schools.

The one who spearheaded the introduction of Archipelago into the school curriculum was Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In doing so, he has made the best investment in the battle against the falsification of Russian history.

But the prime minister's meeting with Natalya Solzhenitsyn in the summer of 2009; his words, “We must study and promote [propagandirovat'] your husband’s work”; her response, “Let’s just study it”; the decision to introduce Archipelago into the curriculum – all of this was described by practically the entire Russian press. And so was the initial reaction of the nation, the mournful howl of bloggers from the back row of the Russian Internet: “Wasn’t War and Peace enough?”

Maybe it wasn’t enough. Since 1905, when Dostoevsky and Tolstoy came into the curriculum, we have lived through quite a lot… And it can’t be explained through War and Peace.

Snobbery

2010-10-01T16:38:00.000-07:00

An unusual advertisement appeared in the September 27 issue of The New Yorker. At the top of the page, readers saw a word printed in Cyrillic characters—«Cноб» (“snob”), though the «С» was backwards—followed by an intriguing sentence in English: “Ask your Russian friends to read it to you.” The ad also reproduced the cover of a magazine with the same word, Сноб, positioned as its title. All of the contents and contributors on the cover were listed in Russian. Likewise, the ad announced in Russian—and only in Russian—that the current issue could be purchased at Barnes and Noble. So who is the audience of this Russian-language publication that advertises in The New Yorker and addresses its potential readership in two languages?

Well, according to its website, Snob is a magazine “for people who live in different countries, belong to different cultures, speak different languages, but think in Russian.” A couple of weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal ran a story about the magazine with comments by Snob’s deputy editor in chief, Masha Gessen, who explained its global reach: “Russians living abroad have been rediscovering Russia … [They now feel] secure enough to go back to the culture that unites us.”

Its perceived Russian audience is cosmopolitan, and so are its competitors. Snob seeks to place itself on a par not with Russian newspapers or thick journals, but with “high-minded” Western magazines like Vanity Fair and—you guessed it—The New Yorker. With any luck, this means that some of the best Russian writing will find a new audience. Indeed, Snob hopes to provide readers with material that rewards them with “pleasure from the very process of reading.”

Of course, nothing these days is just a magazine. Snob bills itself an “international media project for Russian-speaking professionals around the world.” Trying to sort through the various dimensions of this “project” has already bored and irritated me. I just want to read their stuff, not pay extra to use a social-networking site or join an “invitation-only club.”

Will they publish poems? Unfortunately, I don’t know yet. I can’t tell from Snob’s website whether the current issue has poems in it, but I’ll keep a watchful, hopeful eye on their pages and report back on any significant poetry features. For the moment, prose contributions by the likes of Zakhar Prilepin and Olga Slavnikova should keep me busy.

On “Unity” (of the Scatological Sort)

2010-09-23T22:01:00.000-07:00

Russian toilet used in Mir space station / Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The State Historical Museum in Moscow has a curious exhibit running until October 3 called “Where the King Walked” (as opposed to where he “rode” or “was carried”). So where did the king walk? To the toilet, of course. That accounts for the exhibit’s subtitle: “Hygiene in Historical Context.” And the historical context that the curators have in mind runs from classical antiquity to the present day, with stops along the way at medieval Asian chamber pots, urine collection bags from the Mir space station, and brand new toilet bowls that can quickly analyze what you put into them and give you timely updates on your health. Russian readers can have a look at a full description of the exhibit here.

A writer for Novaya Gazeta who visited the exhibit, Evgeniya Pischikova, reminds us that that Russian word for “toilet bowl,” «унитаз» (“unitáz”), came into the language as a product name – like Kleenex in English, Pampers in Russian, or Xerox in both. (On a personal note, something about the word «памперс» [Pampers] irritates me; our daughter has always worn «подгузники» [diapers].) The English company that made those first “lavatory pans” for the Russian market called their product “Unitas,” which means “unity” in Latin. I’m sure I’ve heard someone else say this before, but perhaps the name stuck because Russians associated it in their minds with the word «таз» (“taz”), or “basin.” In any case, the Latin meaning of the word prompts Pischikova to muse on what it is that connects us:

After visiting [the exhibit] you really start to think about humanity’s development and the significance of sewage in a cultural context. And its role was enormous. Sewage is unity. Proof of that can be found in a famous interview that the French sociologist and theorist of culture Jacques Ellul gave regarding the Internet, which was just then emerging and gathering strength. “Isn’t it a miracle, monsieur,” the interviewer said rapturously, “that every person, every home, every solitary individual will be connected by a single, common network? Doesn’t it seem to you that this is something inconceivable?” “Pardon me, madam, but no, it doesn’t seem so to me,” the theorist drily answered. “We have long been connected by one common network – the network of sewers.”

[Translation mine]

A Russian Journal Goes English

2010-09-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

For the first time, the New York journal Cardinal Points (Стороны света) has published an issue in English. In fact, it's a double issue, and it's packed with great stuff. Compiled under the guest editorship of Robert Chandler, the new issue includes translations of works by Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Platonov, Varlam Shalamov, and Vasily Grossman, along with original poems by Chandler, Glyn Maxwell, and Ilya Kaminsky, among others. There is enough excellent writing here to keep you occupied for many days. Valentina Polukhina, for example, has an interview here with David Bethea about Joseph Brodsky, whom Bethea calls "the last poet in the Russian heroic tradition." And Chandler gives us his own essay on Platonov and Shalamov to accompany their stories.

But my favorite section of the new issue is the one called "The Art of Translation." This is a big section, with contributions by the likes of Daniel Weissbort, Sasha Dugdale, Elaine Feinstein, and Sibelan Forrester. As I see it, the must-read essay in this section is Stanley Mitchell's recollection of the work he did - and depression he suffered - while translating Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. There's no question but that any Onegin translation is a Sisyphean task, and Mitchell's took its toll on him. In the end, though, he turned out something to be proud of: "Repeating Pushkin’s self-congratulation on finishing a piece of work, I said of mine: ‘Well done, you son-of-a-bitch!’"

For a glance at the older issues, go to the journal's Russian-language page.

Good News for Those Who Read Russian

2010-09-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

The chaos of the new semester has kept me from doing much with this blog lately, but I thought it necessary to put up a quick message: OpenSpace.ru is up and running again! They were on hiatus for several months, but now they're back online doing their usual excellent work. For Russian readers who are interested in culture (music, literature, art, theater), this site is among the best resources out there.

Ryan on Translation

2010-08-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

Image courtesy of Jeff Birkenstein

As I was leafing through Kay Ryan's The Best of It again this morning, I rediscovered a little poem of hers that offers a metaphor on poetic translation which seems to me neither dismissive of the endeavor nor blind to its faults. In the poem, fittingly enough called "Poetry in Translation," Ryan describes an animal skin spread on the floor in such a way that it comes out shaped like the U.S.:

   One meditates
   upon a
   Florida-like flap—
   a forward leg
   which ran
   the Russian steppe
   perhaps?

Looking at that skin lying inert on the floor, we seek to imagine that way that it (the poem, the animal) moved when it was alive, and we might even manage to picture something of the context in which it existed. Still, the question that Ryan poses in her last line always lingers: can one ever truly know whether the images brought to mind are accurate? Does the animal move anything like the way that it moved on the steppe?

Those of course are questions that readers must ask themselves. And what about translators? Well, maybe we translators are merely taxidermists, but at least we can grant readers a precious glimpse of the unusual creatures that live outside of English. We make them come to life as best we can. Sure, Google Translate can give readers some sense of the contours of a poem's skin (sometimes, sort of), but can it make that skin stalk and pounce? Making the animal move is the tricky part.

Speaking of Ryan, the July/August issue of Poetry includes a send-up by Jason Guriel of her clever, compact poems and their popularity. The piece takes the form of a review written in 2035—a time when Ryan has come to dominate the poetry scene—of a future collected poems no longer called The Best of It, but now All of It.

Translation and the Laureateship

2010-08-03T15:18:00.000-07:00

W. S. Merwin / Image courtesy of inkywretch

As I learned last week (perhaps belatedly) from the Poetry Foundation’s podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, W.S. Merwin has been named as the next U.S. Poet Laureate. He’ll take up the post this fall. At one point in the interview portion of the podcast, Merwin says that poetry is something we should naturally enjoy reading and hearing:

I really believe … that everybody really loves poetry. And if they don’t think they do, it’s because something has happened to deprive them of it. I think that just as children love to draw and to dance and to sing and do all those things, they also love poetry.

I hope he’s right. In fact, that hope is what keeps me teaching and translating poetry. And students who take my poetry courses often tell me they are pleasantly surprised that studying poetry isn’t as painful as they expected it would be. So there’s reason to be hopeful.

American readers of Russian poetry also know Merwin through the translations of Osip Mandelstam that he produced in the early 1970s with Clarence Brown. Like most Russian poets, even those writing nowadays, Mandelstam wrote formal poetry, but Brown and Merwin translated his poems into free verse. As a translator myself, I probably wouldn’t have made the same choice, but I don’t see it as an error. On the contrary, their versions of Mandelstam are marvelous. Brown and Merwin’s free verse (and I suspect we can credit Merwin alone with the sound of the poems) comes alive in English in a completely singular way. As an example, consider the last few lines of Mandelstam’s 1915 poem “Insomnia. Homer. Taut sails…” («Бессонница...»), whose literal meaning would be something like this:

… And behold, Homer is silent,

and the Black Sea, orating, groans

and with a terrible din approaches the headboard.

(… И вот, Гомер молчит, / И море черное, витийствуя, шумит / И с тяжким грохотом подxодит к изголовью.)

Literal translations of Mandelstam like mine come out clunky and unidiomatic. But listen to what Brown and Merwin did with the same lines:

… No sound now from Homer,

and the Black Sea roars like a speech

and thunders up the bed.

Sure, there are no rhymes here, and the meter has been chopped to bits, but the force of Brown and Merwin’s compact, direct American idiom convinces me that their way may be the best way. The inspired simplicity of the last line, especially, knocks me off my feet.

When I heard Merwin read in Seattle this past February, he mentioned his Mandelstam translations. Joseph Brodsky, whom Merwin knew, famously railed against any attempt to translate Mandelstam into free verse, so the success of Brown and Merwin’s edition was beyond his comprehension. In Seattle, Merwin told the audience that he and Brodsky “argued about those translations as long as he lived,” but that he took solace in something Brown said when he heard about Brodsky’s critique: “Don’t worry about that one. No translation ever spoiled the original anyway.” Empowering advice for translators seeking their voice!

In any case, I think that the Library of Congress has chosen a good laureate. Now let’s just hope that Merwin, who knows firsthand the impact of a good literary translation, uses his new soapbox to get more Americans reading poetry from elsewhere.

Note: For more on Mandelstam, Brodsky, and translation, have a look at Languagehat’s 2007 blog post on the topic.

Brodskiana: A Tractor Driver Named Bulov (Not Burov)

2010-07-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

Brodsky in Norenskaya / Image courtesy of Музей Иосифа Бродского в Интернете

Just as I was about to skip town and put this blog on hold for a month and a half, a curious little article appeared in Ex Libris, the literary supplement to the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. The idea behind the article, called “Brodsky’s Grandmother” («Бабушка Бродского»), was simple: the writer of the piece, an film actor who calls himself Yandané, would visit the village where Joseph Brodsky was exiled in the 1960s and talk to the locals about him. The results that Yandané’s experiment yielded were rather interesting. But more about that in a minute.

This episode of Brodsky’s life has become a key component of the personal mythology that influences how readers approach his poetry: after being put on trial in 1964 for tuneyadstvo, or “social parasitism”—basically, freeloading—Brodsky was exiled to the tiny village of Norenskaya in Arkhangelsk province, where he stayed for a year and a half. (The original sentence was five years.) This was the first of Brodsky’s two exiles—the second one was more permanent—and the alienation that an outcast suffers is central to Brodsky’s poetics. But even before he was sent to Norenskaya, the “exile” theme appeared in his work. Take, for example, this poem (in my translation), written in 1961:

You’re finally coming home again. So what?

Just take a look around and see who needs you.

Yes, take a look: who now might be your friend?

(Воротишься на родину. Ну что ж. / Гляди вокруг, кому еще ты нужен, / кому теперь в друзья ты попадешь?)

Brodsky writes as if he were returning from exile, but in fact experiencing estrangement is simply his modus operandi. He only seems to anticipate being banished. And yet he reprimands himself within the poem for choosing to maintain an aesthetic distance from the world; he implies that some real human connections must be made. The irony grows thicker as the poem proceeds:

How nice that you have no one left to blame;

how nice that you are free of all attachments;

how nice that right until your very death

no one will ever bother you with love.

(Как хорошо, что некого винить, / как хорошо, что ты никем не связан, / как хорошо, что до смерти любить / тебя никто на свете не обязан.)

But after all, a poem is a fiction. Everything I’ve ever read about Brodsky’s time in Norenskaya affirms that he sought to keep in close contact with all of his friends and family back in Leningrad while he was gone, as well as that numerous visitors came to see him. Staying aloof when writing a poem is one thing, but friendships are quite another.

Yandané, the Ex Libris writer, was on his way back to Moscow from Arkhangelsk this spring when he decided to stop in Norenskaya “to investigate the details of Brodsky’s sojourn there.” He was surprised by how small the village is: there are only about fifteen houses—no store, no post office, no school—and half of the people who live there are named Pesterev. Almost everyone speaks fondly of the poet.

Yandané had no trouble finding Brodsky’s house, since it stands right on the street and bears a memorial plaque. The owner of the house, Aleksandr Pesterev, explained that the plaque used to be accompanied by a wall-mounted flower box, but he had to take it down because “melting snow seeped from it onto the house, which is already 200 years old.” Even though he was just an adolescent, Pesterev remembers when Brodsky stayed with them and described the poet’s habits: he lived “separately, hung a lock on his door, and set himself up with a kerosene lamp, since there was no electricity in the village then. He wrote and read by the light of the lamp, and they brought him the fuel from Peter [i.e., Leningrad].”

According to another villager, Maria Zhdanova, that house actually wasn’t the one that Brodsky lived in during most of his time in Norenskaya; rather, he lived with another family of Pesterevs, Konstantin Borisovich and Afanasiya Nikolaevna, who “didn’t have any children” and “treated him like a son.” But Zhdanova said that “the plaque wasn’t hung there, because the other house is more visible and stands right next to the road.” (Zhdanova, by the way, is the one whom the villagers call Brodsky’s “grandma,” since she often spoke with him during her work at the local telephone switchboard and cashier’s office.)

For much of the time that Yandané was wandering around Norenskaya and nearby Konosha, he was searching for someone called “A. Burov” with whom Brodsky supposedly worked back in the 1960s. Brodsky mentions him in one of his poems, and Yandané carried that poem with him, showing it to passersby and asking if they happened to know this “Burov.” Here is my rough-and-ready translation of the opening lines of the poem, which I made without any attempt to reproduce the form of the original:

A. Burov, tractor driver, and I,

agricultural worker Brodsky,

were sowing winter crops—six hectares.

I contemplated the wooded country

and the sky with a jet’s trail,

and my boot rested on a lever.

(А. Буров - тракторист - и я, / сельскохозяйственный рабочий Бродский, / мы сеяли озимые - шесть га. / Я созерцал лесистые края / и небо с реактивною полоской, / и мой сапог касался рычага.)

(Incidentally, if you’re curious how Brodsky could have sat on a Soviet tractor with his boot on one of its levers, have a look at this.)

Whenever Yandané would ask anyone about “Burov,” they would always say something like, “Maybe you mean Bulov?” Yandané eventually did find the guy, and indeed his name is Bulov, not Burov. He’s now 65 years old. And he doesn’t remember Brodsky quite as fondly as some of the others:

“And just who is Brodsky? A parasite, a freeloader! I worked for ten years as a KGB driver, I’m a communist. …and they set him up with me for reeducation as a farmhand. I trained him, but he was as lazy as they come. He’d go off into the raspberry bushes and forget about work – you couldn’t call him back! I did his work for him, but still we got along fine. …he would come over to my place and I’d give him something to eat and drink. But when girls in jeans would come from Leningrad to visit him (my wife was pregnant then), I would ask him, ‘Introduce me!’ but he just wouldn’t share… He never invited me to his house and wouldn’t let me in, didn’t drink, lived cut off from the world and cooked for himself – like a spy. How could they have given him the Lenin Prize, that lazy good-for-nothing?! … He was a smart bastard. But Russia is a fool! Gave him a prize… America, America! He’s a leech, and they put up a fucking plaque for him!”

Yikes! Clearly, Bulov isn’t Brodsky’s biggest fan. But Yandané asks his readers to do one thing for the angry tractor driver from Norenskaya anyway: “I advise all of Brodsky’s fans,” he writes, “to change the name in that poem from ‘Burov’ to ‘Bulov’.”

Fair enough, I’d say.

Blogus Interruptus

2010-06-06T11:24:00.000-07:00

Sidewalk in Petrozavodsk / Image courtesy of Christian

Here I've just begun this blog, and now I'm off to spend five weeks in provincial Russia. Expect a new post in late July!

On the Death of Andrei Voznesensky

2010-06-03T20:21:00.000-07:00

Two articles from The New York Times on Voznesensky's passing:

Raymond H. Anderson, "Andrei Voznesensky, Russian Poet, Dies at 77"

Dwight Garner, "When Poets Rocked Russia's Stadiums"

The Way of the Dodo?

2010-05-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

Logo of the National Library of Russia / Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Today is National Library Day in Russia, and like everywhere else, the fate of libraries in Russia remains uncertain. The editors of Literaturnaya Gazeta offer their take on the situation in this week’s issue:

The library is a treasure.

Its death will be a tragedy. Because knowledge, memory, and the bond between eras will die with it. The universe itself will be destroyed, leaving humans defenseless before the fury of those who have lost their human form and the madness of the elements. Don’t be stingy with libraries! We understand: they aren’t nanotechnologies. But the future of the nation will depend on libraries nonetheless.

The library is a sanctuary. It is a salvation from the bustle of the world and the malice of others. Remember yourself in childhood. If, of course, your childhood was normal, and not filled with gunfire against computerized monsters. With whom could you seek consolation when your mama unjustly scolded you, when they teased you in school and nobody, nobody understood? Right, with them, with the heroes of books, amid the rustling pages. And books consoled you, taught you how to live, little by little showing by clear example how you should make peace with friends and with that very same mama, how to be brave and honest. And the trip to the local library was almost the first act that allowed you to feel like a grownup.

In any case, wherever you are today, do the simple thing: check out a book from the local library and read it.

Memorial to the Mandelstams

2010-05-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

A sculpture dedicated to Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, entitled “Monument to Love,” was unveiled yesterday in Saint Petersburg during the city’s Mandelstam Days celebration. The Dutch sculptor who designed the new piece, Hanneke de Munck, has posted video footage of it on his website, along with the Russian text of Mandelstam’s poem “Oh how I wish…” (“О как же я хочу...”). He told Radio Svoboda that the sculpture is “far more life-affirming than they expected in Saint Petersburg,” since they had in mind something that “would have expressed all the tragedy of Osip and Nadezhda’s life.”

RIA Novosti, quoting the press service of Saint Petersburg State University, describes the new sculpture, which stands in the courtyard of the university's Twelve Colleges Building, as a “tribute of respect to the great poet and his wife Nadezhda for their devotion to independent creativity and to each other. Many poems by Osip Mandelstam reached us only thanks to his spouse.” As is widely known, Nadezhda Mandelstam memorized countless poems by her husband in order that his work would survive when the manuscripts were stolen or destroyed by the Soviet authorities.

Maria Golubkova writes in Rossiyskaya Gazeta that, in the new sculpture, “Nadezhda and Osip seem as though they are flying past; they have angel’s wings on their shoulders, and the poet holds manuscript sheets in his hands.” Golubkova wrote in an earlier article that Hanneke de Munck plans to place a second, similar sculpture at a Dutch university “in order to emphasize the strong cultural ties between Russia and Holland. Only then will the project be complete.”

In other Mandelstamian news, The New York Review of Books published an article this week by José Manuel Prieto about the Russian poet’s “Stalin Epigram.” (Non-subscribers like me can read the beginning of the piece here.) Prieto, who translated the epigram into Spanish in 1996, explains its significance: “The poem had cost Mandelstam his life; writing it was an act of incredible recklessness, bravery, or artistic integrity.” Perhaps because of the poem’s status in Mandelstam’s oeuvre, Prieto was never happy with the translation he produced, claiming that it “felt like a pallid copy of the original Russian, which is as beautiful and powerful as if it had been carved in stone.” He describes (accurately) Mandelstam’s poetry as “amazingly concentrated and not particularly discursive,” making it “virtually impossible to translate its sonorities, or the richness of many images that don’t come through or resonate in the target language.” Indeed, the task of the translator is often impossible, but making the attempt is nonetheless worthwhile.

A Stream without a Main Current? On Russian Poetry after Brodsky

2010-05-26T00:19:00.000-07:00

Joseph Brodsky / Image courtesy of magictoken

Had Joseph Brodsky not died in 1996, he would have been 70 years old this past Monday. The Russian-speaking Internet is abuzz with opinions about the Nobel laureate’s birthday and what it means for his body of work. Many commentators focus on the tragedy of his untimely death—a death particularly painful to Russian readers because Brodsky is almost universally recognized as a genius who breathed a new kind of life into the Russian language. How ironic, then, that he ultimately became U.S. Poet Laureate! (Brodsky was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, after which he taught at American universities for over twenty years, beginning with my alma mater, the University of Michigan.)

Brodsky’s friend and fellow poet Anatoly Naiman, writing in Kommersant, argues that “observing—much less celebrating—the 70th birthday of a person who died at 55 is, generally speaking, absurd. That several of his peers who were close to him in his youth are alive confirms without a doubt that he certainly could have been alive now. And that he left us means that it was not written in the book of fate, or written at his birth, or wherever such things are written, that he would reach seventy. For such figures after death another kind of counting takes over in the calendar: the next date is set at 100, then 150, 200.” If there is a bright side to any of this, Naiman continues, it is that Brodsky the person—as opposed to Brodsky the poet—hasn’t yet been forgotten: “Today’s date is simply an occasion to reminisce about him while there are still those who can remember.”

Another Leningrad poet and contemporary of Brodsky’s, Yevgeny Rein, writes in Literaturnaya Gazeta that Brodsky left a gaping hole in literature that has yet to be filled: “And now, fourteen years after his death, in Russian poetry there invariably continues to be felt a certain emptiness. Poetry seems to have persisted, but it has come to look like a stream on whose bed rush a few dozen rivulets. This stream no longer has a main current, so swimming out into deep waters is impossible.”

Alexander Genis, on the other hand, addresses not so much Brodsky’s death as he does the experience of living for decades with Brodsky’s work. In his Novaya Gazeta essay on the long poem “Lullaby of Cape Cod,” he says of Brodsky, “for thirty years I haven’t gone on one journey without his books.” Genis believes that the poetry lends itself to travel, since Brodsky’s art is “an art of the local” and his poems often begin with a landscape: “Considering complex metaphysics to be bad science, he started from the earth on his trip toward heaven.” But as a traveling companion, Brodsky is always a step ahead of Genis: “More often than not I came after Brodsky—he had been everywhere and he was there earlier.”

(Radio Svoboda also posted a slideshow this week of photographs of Brodsky accompanied by spoken excerpts—in English—of Genis’s essay “Brodsky in New York.”)

Finally, the website OpenSpace.ru recently posted excerpts on Brodsky from Lev Losev’s posthumous memoir Meander (Меандр)—in particular, they give three sections of the long essay entitled “About Iosif” (“Про Иосифа”). In this first of those sections, Losev thinks back to the time when he first became acquainted with Brodsky in the early 1960s in Leningrad. He doesn’t recall the precise moment when they met: “Iosif in my memory comes into focus out of a blurry crowd of half-acquaintances. I remember that I first began to hear about him from the then-inseparable Vinogradov, Uflyand, and Eremin [three other Leningrad poets]. They mockingly but without malice mentioned ‘The Great Russian (Poet)’. … Not that [Brodsky] actually shouted in his guttural voice, “I am a great Russian poet,” but apparently his histrionic manner of reading and behaving, the cosmic pretensions of his still rather uneven youthful poems seemed a little comic to the older poets.” If they only knew then what he would become! In any case, with so much deadly serious stuff being published for Brodsky’s birthday, it’s nice to see something that reminds us of a time when he was just a little silly.

I think it fitting that one of my first entries on this blog happens to be about Brodsky, since it was his poetry that first got me to take myself seriously as a translator. While I was writing the Brodsky chapter of my dissertation as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, I translated many of his poems for my own scholarly purposes—a good number of them in a seminar with a fine mentor, Vadim Besprozvany. But when I happened to show some of the translations to the editor of a quarterly review, he expressed interest in publishing them. Luck, however, only seemed to be on my side. The trouble was (and still is) that the Brodsky estate has a new edition of his poetry in the works, so all uncommissioned translations have been put on hold. That was the end of that. And now I’ve got dozens of translations of Brodsky poems that I can’t publish.

Still, I learned in the process how translation ought to be done if publication is a desired end: a translator should get permission to publish from the author or the author’s estate before getting too deeply into a project. It’s a simple as that. The tricky part is getting in touch with well-known poets to ask them for permission. After all, some of them don’t necessarily want to be found…

But enough griping. In honor of Brodsky’s birthday, I think a poem is in order. Due to the copyright restrictions I just explained, however, I can’t put up the complete text of any of my translations of Brodsky’s poems. But I can give a brief excerpt of one of my favorites, “New England” (“Новая Англия”), which Brodsky wrote near the end of his life.

Brodsky begins the poem by describing a landscape where “everything seems senseless, [but] the trees continue to grow,” and then goes on to urge his reader (who is really the poet himself) to “be wary of the local trees—the alders, the elms, and the oaks.” He closes the poem with the exile’s fantasy of chopping down all the trees, chopping down the living objects that estrange him from the place:

Someday all of this will be kindling for the stove;
they will make of it a pencil or, God willing, a bed.
But the earth—in which you will also be obliged to sleep,
utterly alone, no less—you will never have to kiss.

(Когда-нибудь всем, что видишь, растопят печь, / сделают карандаш или, Бог даст, кровать. / Но землю, в которую тоже придется лечь, / тем более одному—можно не целовать.)

How appropriate, then, that after death Brodsky’s body was buried not in America, but in his beloved Venice—the shimmering Italian mirror that reflects his native “Peter.”

Chronicler of the Blockade: Olga Bergholz (1910-1975)

2010-05-21T23:25:00.000-07:00

This month marks the centenary of Olga Bergholz (Ольга Фёдоровна Берггольц, sometimes transliterated as ‘Berggolts’), a Soviet writer best known for the poems she composed, not to mention the radio broadcasts she delivered, from besieged Leningrad during the Second World War—what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Her most familiar poems from those blockade years are “February Diary” and “A Leningrad Poem,” both of which depict the harsh realities of survival in a city completely cut off from the world, where one might have had to trade a loaf of bread to get a coffin for a dead child.

Indeed, bread is a central image in “A Leningrad Poem,” since those without it were doomed to starve, yet “people listened to poems / as never before—with profound faith / in dark apartments, like caves / beside mute loudspeakers.” (“И люди слушали стихи, / как никогда,— с глубокой верой, / в квартирах черных, как пещеры, / у репродукторов глухих.”) As Americans did in the weeks and months following the attacks on 9/11, the people of Leningrad, Bergholz implies, found solace in poems despite their misery. Of course, most New Yorkers could still put food on the table in late 2001; tragically, one couldn’t say the same for Leningraders during the 900-day siege.

On the Calque site, you can read Andrew Glikin-Gusinsky’s translation of another WWII-themed poem, “My Home,” which Bergholz wrote when peace had been restored to Leningrad, but when bleak wartime memories were still fresh: “Glancing at the three windows that used to be mine, / I remember: the war happened here. / Oh how we darkened, without a ray of hope… / And everything darkened, everything darkened in this world.” Now, though, the poet wishes “dearly for someone to be happy.” (Calque gives the original Russian text of the poem as well.)

Bergholz was born on May 3 according the old calendar, so her birthday now lands on May 16. Either way, the centenary of her birth is this month, though dates don’t always transfer so handily from the old style to the new. In honor of her centenary, a St. Petersburg publisher has just put out a volume entitled Olga: The Forbidden Notebook (Ольга. Запретный дневник), which contains newly available materials from the archives of the FSB (successor to the KGB), including journal entries from three periods: her incarceration as a political prisoner in the late 1930s, her ordeal during the blockade years in Leningrad, and her 1949 stay on a kolkhoz in Stalin’s Gulag. Alongside the journals, the editors give a selection of Bergholz’s poems and letters. Her FSB file has only been accessible since last year, so the editorial team must have worked swiftly to put together what most reviewers have deemed a fine collection.

Dmitrii Volchek at Radio Svoboda claims that this new volume will help to present a more even-handed view of Bergholz’s career, since “for many years censors did not allow a significant portion of what she wrote into print,” and her name therefore became “associated with gung-ho patriotism” (that is, “ура-патриотизм”). But Volchek says that the new book redeems her as an artist, giving “the sensation of an improbably explosive force.”

Bergholz’s reputation as a Soviet flag-waver didn’t come out of nowhere. She did write patriotic poems, and the most public of them is displayed at the Piskarev Memorial Cemetery in St. Petersburg, where 470,000 Soviet citizens who died during the blockade are buried. This is my translation of those poignant lines:

Here lie Leningraders.
Here lie citizens—men, women, children.
Next to them are Red Army soldiers.
With their very lives
they defended you, Leningrad,
cradle of the revolution.
We cannot recount their noble names here—
so many rest under the eternal protection of this granite.
But you who fix your attention on these stones, know this:
nobody, nothing has been forgotten.

(Здесь лежат ленинградцы. / Здесь горожане - мужчины, женщины, дети. / Рядом с ними солдаты-красноармейцы. / Всею жизнью своею / Они защищали тебя, Ленинград, / Колыбель революции. / Их имен благородных мы здесь перечислить не сможем, / Так их много под вечной охраной гранита. / Но знай, внимающий этим камням: / Никто не забыт и ничто не забыто.)

But it appears that the newly published Forbidden Notebook complicates any purely nationalistic view of Bergholz’s work. In fact, reviewers at both Radio Svoboda and НГ Ex Libris note that her reputation as a poet-patriot came about because her urge to speak the truth coincided with a moment in Soviet history when truth-telling was permitted. Svoboda’s Boris Paramonov calls her a poet of “confrontation” and explains that “the war had suddenly and unexpectedly made the truth legal, made it utterable,” while the unnamed Ex Libris reviewer identifies the blockade as a “unique case, when one could write the truth, the bitter and evil truth, and write it without fear of punishment.” It was an instance, the reviewer says, of “fully permissible suffering.” Like countless other Soviet citizens, Bergholz suffered in peacetime too (as when her unborn child was “kicked out of her belly” by NKVD interrogators), but her depictions of those sufferings rarely appeared in print. Now, Russian readers can get a fuller sense of that other side of her story.

No Russian Doppelgänger for Ryan?

2010-05-20T13:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Washington City Paper ran an "Exit Interview" with outgoing U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, whose book of new and selected poems, The Best of It, has been steadily blowing my mind. Ryan is a master technician of language and imagery. Her interview got me thinking: why doesn't Russia have its own poet laureate? (At the peak of his popularity, Yevtushenko may have been the closest thing.) Does Russia lack a laureateship because the role of the poet there has traditionally been defined in opposition to the state? Not that American poets are lining up to write another "Praise Song for the Day." Not even Ryan.

When the Washington City Paper interviewer asked Ryan what plans she had for the near future, she replied, "I plan to do a lot more bicycle riding. I got a beautiful new bike and am looking forward to riding it more. I also want to do more woolgathering—idle rumination, daydreaming—which is absolutely essential for poetry, and which I can do on the bicycle."

Origins (with a nod to Lizok and Mandelstam)

2010-05-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

Osip Mandelstam / Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

This blog owes its existence to another blog on Russian literature: Lisa Hayden Espenschade’s Lizok’s Bookshelf. The difference between this one and that one is quite simple: while Lisa focuses on fiction, I intend to focus on poetry. I have been reading Lizok’s Bookshelf for many months now, and I count myself grateful for the insight that Lisa gives me into contemporary Russian novels and stories. Unfortunately, no English-language blogger seems to be providing the same readerly view into contemporary Russian poetry. In an e-mail exchange a few months ago, Lisa suggested that, since I’m the one who noticed the gap, I might as well be the one to fill it. So I’ve decided to take her up on that challenge.

If I’m going to use Lizok’s Bookshelf as a model, I’ve got my work cut out for me. Lisa seems to read just about every piece of fiction being published in Russia, and I’m afraid I may not be able to present such a comprehensive view of poetry. Translating Russian poems into English is something that I do almost every day, but I don’t typically read widely in contemporary Russian poetry, as Lisa does in Russian fiction. The sort of reading that I do as a translator is much narrower—scanning new poems to get a quick sense of their nature and keeping always on the lookout for writers whose poems somehow resonate with me. Then I go deeply into the work of those kindred poets. But I will need to broaden my reading habits if I want to give English readers a taste of what’s out there in the world of Russian poetry. I’ll do my best.

Still, I want this blog to be as much a record of my translation efforts as it is a record of my reading encounters. At the moment, I’m translating three poets who write in Russian: Irina Yevsa, Timur Kibirov, and Vyacheslav Kiktenko. I plan to post excerpts from some of their poems here soon, accompanied by my own musings on their work. (So far, only my translations of a few poems by Kiktenko have been published.) I’ll post links to other translators’ English versions of Russian poems as they become relevant, and I’ll try to report on news items from Russia that have to do with poetry. I also hope to make some connections between Russian and American poetry, since the American literary context is the one that I’m translating into.

By the way, the title of this blog, The Flaxen Wave, derives loosely from the final stanza of a late poem by Osip Mandelstam, where the great modern poet describes the role that poetry plays (or ought to play) in our lives. Here is my translation of the whole poem:

I’m now in a spider-web of light—
a raven-haired or light-blonde web.
The people need light and sky-blue air,
they need bread and the snow on Elbrus.

But I have no one to get advice from—
I don’t expect to find anyone, either:
Transparent, weeping stones like these
do not exist in Crimea or the Urals.

People need poetry kept close, kept secret,
so that they can wake up to it forever,
and in its sound, as in a flaxen-haired,
chestnut wave, bathe themselves.

January 19, 1937

Translation by Jamie L. Olson