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.)

Laureate for the Little Ones

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"

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

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

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

Drawing by Nikolai Gumilyov / Image courtesy of Novaya Gazeta

Today marks 125 years since the birth of Nikolai Gumilev (or 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”), Gumilev 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 Gumilev—and two others who I think may be somewhat less familiar—Mikhail Kuzmin and Georgy Ivanov. As for Gumilev, 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?”

Translation in "Poetry"

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.”