Gandelsman, Pasternak, Poesy

 

Portrait of Boris Pasternak by his father, Leonid Pasternak (1910) / Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The latest issue of the New York literary magazine Новый журнал (The New Review) includes a small selection of poems by Vladimir Gandelsman, a Russian-American poet I have written about on this blog before. What particularly caught my eye in this recent batch was Gandelsman’s first poem, “Pasternak” («Пастернак»), where he muses on the great modern poet, novelist, and Nobel laureate – whose birthday, it just so happens, was yesterday. When one poet writes about another, of course, we readers get a chance to eavesdrop on a conversation about poetics, one that often reveals more about the writer than about his ostensible subject. In this case, the poet’s observations concern Pasternak’s codependence with an anthropomorphized poetry, or as I like to think of her, Poesy. (In Russian, поэзия is grammatically feminine and thus necessarily more human than a mere “it.”) 

Here is my rough-and-ready, free-verse translation of the poem:

Pasternak

by Vladimir Gandelsman

With her, he is lonelier

than when alone, yet with her

the path to the pleasures

of art is half as long.

Stranger than a stranger,

she stands nevertheless

equal to him, familiar

as words suffered through. 

Only with her can he see

that certain slant of light

where his life outweighs

love. Which hardly exists.

Love remains on the verge

of breakdown, since it allows  

no rest for the mind at all

from its mindless madness.

But his wide open spaces

contain memory, stillness,    

words that hurt, and depths

we all should seek to plumb.

So, language of his suffering,

with your line ever sturdy, 

describe for us the stranger’s

familiar distant shores.

Translated from the Russian by Jamie Olson

More from Gandelsman

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

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.)