In Memoriam N.G. & R.D.

 Portrait of Regina Derieva by Dennis Creffield / Image courtesy of The Regina Derieva Web Site

In the past month, we lost two important Russian poets, both of them expatriates: Natalya Gorbanevskaya in Paris on November 29, and Regina Derieva in Stockholm on December 11. To honor their memory, I am posting a favorite poem by each from anthologies on my shelf. Those keen to read more from these two women would do well to turn to Derieva’s Corinthian Copper, translated by Jim Kates, and Gorbanevskaya’s Selected Poems, translated by Daniel Weissbort—who died just twelve days before she did.

*     *     *

[…where rivers flow purer than silver]

by Natalya Gorbanevskaya

…where rivers flow purer than silver,

not polluted by heavy oil and grease,

where God has not abandoned us and bright

is the Admiralty spire, where on straw

lies the Infant and the bull makes utterances

wiser than the wise man, having eaten its fill of celandine,

where the Russian has long ago had enough of victories

and war, staying within his native bound,

where beneath the cover of a starry cloak

the state’s robbers do not creep up on us,

where, rinsing the syllables for a long time in their throat,

but not contemplating whether it’s to the point or not,

like a fairy tale, retelling something that really happened,

the real events of the past, past pain, past love,

you are transformed into dusty feathergrass,

and I show white in the wind, like a dandelion.

Translated by Gerald S. Smith

*     *     *

Beyond Siberia again Siberia

by Regina Derieva

Beyond Siberia again Siberia,

beyond impenetrable forest again forest.

And beyond it waste ground,

where a blizzard of snow breaks loose.

The blizzard has handcuffs, and the snow-

storm has a knife which kills at once…

I will die, pay a debt

for others who lives somewhere,

out of spite, out of fear and terror,

out of pain, out of a nameless grave…

Beyond the wall another wall,

on the wall stopped dead one sentinel.

Translated by Kevin Carey

A Nativity Poem by Timur Kibirov

Timur Kibirov (2011) / Image courtesy of Богослов.ru

NOTE: As I have done every Christmas Eve since starting this blog, I am posting a nativity poem to mark the holiday. This year’s selection, by the Moscow poet Timur Kibirov, appears in Greek and Roman Catholic Songs and Nursery Rhymes (Греко- и римско-кафолические песенки и потешки), a book that I am in the midst of translating. See the poems from previous years here. 

*     *     *

After Dorothy Sayers
by Timur Kibirov

In the night, the dumb ox lowed to the donkey:
“Can you hear, brother, the sounds from the valley,
            the neighs and the horseshoes' clang?
From magical lands, from the edge of the world,
wise magi hasten and kings gallop toward us
            to bow to the King of Kings!
But before all the rest of them, I—a silly,
            dawdling ox—bowed to Our Child!”

In the night, the lop-eared donkey cried out:

“Look at all the angels up there, brother ox,

who have lit up the midnight darkness!

For this one and only time, this joyful time,

the Heavenly Powers have come together

in the sky to sing His praises.

But before them all, I — a stubborn old ass —

have already praised Our Child!

“Glory to God in the highest! Ee-yaw, ee-yaw!

Glory, glory to the Child in the manger!”

Translated from the Russian by Jamie Olson

Who You Callin’ Ignoramus?

Illustration by G. O. Valk / Image courtesy of Либрусек

A Russian-speaking colleague of mine once told me that she had to toss aside an English translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita because the character Ivan Bezdomny was presented on the page as “Ivan Homeless,” which drove her crazy. Bezdomny is his name, after all, and translating it seemed ridiculous. I agreed with her.

And yet, at precisely the same time, I was translating a poem by Timur Kibirov that included character names for which I felt compelled to find English equivalents. Hypocrisy! So how did I justify my choice? Well, for one thing, there was not just one information-packed name, but many of them, and for another, they had all been imported from an intertext beloved by Russian readers: Nikolai Nosov’s Neznaika books.

The popular children’s series dates to the 1950s, and two Moscow-based publishers put out English translations of it back in the early 1980s by Margaret Wettlin, an American expatriate who lived for five decades in the Soviet Union. (Surely, those editions are relics of the Cold War’s cultural battlefront.) In Wettlin’s translations, the main character Neznaika, whose name derives from the negated verb “to know” (не знает / не знаю), quite reasonably becomes “Dunno,” although Wikipedia also offers “Know-Nothing” as an alternative. He and his diminutive comrades live peaceably in a town sheltered by daisies, dandelions, and honeysuckle; hence, the first of Nosov’s stories is called—in Wettlin’s translation—“The Mites of Flower Town” («Коротышки из цветочного города»), but in my own translation the “mites” become variously “shorties” and “midgets,” depending on what I needed for the sake of rhyme or alliteration.

Kibirov’s poem approaches Nosov’s flower town at a slant. It is called “Fairy Tale” («Сказка»), and it concerns the missionary travels of Sir Reepicheep, a stout-hearted mouse that the poet has expropriated from C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Reepicheep sets about to visit every land in his jumbled yet familiar (to us) fairytale realm—from Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland—in order to spread the good news of Narnia’s Christ-like leader, the lion Aslan:

A small ship soars atop the swells,

the Narnian rodent at the helm.

The mouse must visit each and every

magic land to tell of Aslan’s glory.

Rejoice, Moomins! Looking-Glass, gleam!

O Emerald City, sparkle and shine!

(По синему морю кораблик летит, / Нарнийский грызун у кормила стоит. // Он должен объехать волшебные страны, / Чтоб всем рассказать о победе Аслана! // Ликуй, Мумми-долл! Зазеркалье, сияй! / О Град Изумрудный, лучись и сверкай!)

“The last songs are gathering…”: Reflections on Maria Stepanova

Maria Stepanova (2012) / Image courtesy of Valerij Ledenev

One of the books that I am most excited to get my hands on this year is Relocations: Three Contemporary Women Poets, which comes out with Zephyr Press in August. The collection includes Russian poems by Polina Barskova, Anna Glazova, and Maria Stepanova, translated into English by three more women: Catherine Ciepiela, Anna Khasin, and Sibelan Forrester. That’s six writers for the price of one! According to Amazon’s description of Relocations, the three poets were all born in the 1970s and “came of age” during the frenzied years of Perestroika:

They are old enough to have visceral memories of Soviet life but young enough to move adeptly with the new influences, new media and new life choices introduced in the post-Soviet era. In distinct ways all three are engaged in the project of renovating Russia’s great modernist tradition for a radically different historical situation.

Even if I knew nothing about the poets, this description alone would be compelling enough to make me want to buy the book. These three women are my coevals, and I find it fascinating to consider how their generation in Russia has tracked alongside mine, though on a completely different path. Given their experience, it is only natural that they have been among those writers seeking a new poetic idiom for post-Soviet Russia – as poets always must do, but as is all the more necessary in their case.

More than the other two poets, Maria Stepanova has kept crossing my radar in recent years. The first poem that I remember reading by her was “O,” which came out in the journal Znamia in 2006. At the time, I was on the lookout for poets to translate, and even though I still have never tried my hand at translating Stepanova’s poems (except piecemeal in this post), the sound of her voice stuck with me.

The poem begins with Stepanova’s reflection on another Maria Stepanova – no doubt better known than her by the sports-loving general public – who played center for the Russian national basketball team until 2011. In a helpful footnote to “O,” we learn that the other Stepanova is 202 centimeters tall (or 6’7”) and was selected in 2005 as the best woman basketball player in Europe. (Apparently, she is also one of the few women who can dunk.) After an intentionally misquoted epigraph by Velimir Khlebnikov about a ball and sword, Stepanova proceeds to describe her namesake:

Her height is just right for this sort of thing—

to look the air in its half-opened mouth

and pop in a caramel (the color of its rubber):

a dazzling ball into a vulnerable basket,

grounding itself at the other end of the arc,

through the funnel where it was coaxed by

kisses of soles and soil, the minutes ticking by,

the rumble from the stands, the slap of each pass.

(У неё подходящий для этого дела рост— / Чтоб заглядывать воздуху в полуоткрытый рот / И совать карамельку (в цветную его резину): / Ослепительный мяч в подставленную корзину, / Приземлив себя на другой конец вертикали, / В ту воронку, куда баюкали-утекали / Поцелуи подошв и грунта, минуты часа, / Урчанье трибун, шлепок каждого паса.) 

Now That They’ve Hatched

Cover of Vsevolod Emelin’s “Bolotnaya Songs” / Image courtesy of Falanster

Last September, on the eve of the literary award season, Colta.ru ran a piece by Stanislav Lvovsky called “Chicken Count” («Подсчёт цыплят») identifying some of the major Russian poetry works of 2012. Since then, countless other critics, websites, and journals have put out their own lists (like these), but Colta’s was the first one to get me thinking about what the year’s landmark books might turn out to be. I found it humbling that some of the names on their list – even the older poets – were new to me, and I think it’s regrettable, but not really suprising, that many of them are not much available in English translation.

A new book of poems by the late Jan Satunovsky, for instance, has made quite a splash among Russian poetry critics, but I had only been dimly aware of his work before this winter. That’s a shame. I wish I had encountered him earlier; even a cursory glance at his stuff on Vavilon reveals a major poet with fine eye for the absurd. The new book is big – about eight hundred pages – and it is called Poems and Prose on Poems (Стихи и проза к стихам). In the Colta piece, Lvovsky writes, “This volume, when you consider the scale and personality of the author, as well as his influence (though often indirect) on contemporary Russian poetry, should have come out long ago. It’s nice that it finally happened.” But even though Satunovsky was an important modern Russian poet, he is little known here in America. Among the only translations I have been able to turn up are five by Alex Cigale from his “Anthology of Minimalist and Miniature Poems,” including this superb one:

In perfect pitch the outdoor brass orchestra,

the horns in pace with the concert master,

the sound quality ascending to the stars,

violins on key – like on his web the spider;

and swooning couples stride along the street

(as it was written, two of every monster.)

                                                Yalta, Apr. 30, 1974

[Всё в порядке в духовом оркестре, / дудки, капельмейстер — все на месте, / звук отличный, стереофоничный, / паучок на нитке — ключ скрипичный; / и, кружась, шагают пары на бульваре / (всякой твари, сказано, по паре).]

Brodsky's Jig and Bop

Joseph Brodsky, by David Levine (1980) / Image courtesy of NYRB

Last week, The New Yorker surprised me by running a new translation of a 1967 poem by Joseph Brodsky, “In Villages God Does Not Live in Corners” («В деревне Бог живет не по углам»). Just when I start to think that Brodsky has been completely muzzled in English, his estate lets out a little squeak to remind me that they still have more in store for English readers. Sure, they’ve got a new collected edition in the works, but we’ve been hearing that line for almost ten years now. That’s a long silence for one of the great poets of the twentieth century – and a largely untranslated one at that. Let’s hope we see plenty more of his poems in English soon.

Naturally, the magazine has restricted access of the poem only to its subscribers, but if you squint just right you can make out at least its general shape. So you’ll have to take my word for it when I say that the translation, by Glyn Maxwell and Catherine Ciepiela, is masterful. And by that I don’t mean that they have stuck mechanically to Brodsky’s Russian lines, but that their translation came alive for me as a new work in English. In terms of prosody, the form of the poem remains more or less intact in their translation, especially in the slant rhymes, though they loosened up Brodsky’s iambic pentameter to the point where it’s no longer audible. Also, they unaccountably chopped up some of Brodsky’s sentences into fragments. I suppose the fragments are not too terribly distracting, but I’m still not sure what effect they were seeking to achieve with them.

Most importantly, the tone of Maxwell and Ciepiela’s translation hits right on the mark. Brodsky’s whimsical countryside theology comes through loud and clear, and if anything, the translators have even cranked up the whimsy. My favorite passage comes near the middle of the sixteen-line poem, when God has migrated from the icon corner to the kitchen:

He’s plentiful. In the iron pot there.

Cooking the lentils on Saturday.

He sleepily jigs and bops in the fire,

he winks at me, his witness…

(В деревне Он - в избытке. В чугуне / Он варит по субботам чечевицу, / приплясывает сонно на огне, / подмигивает мне, как очевидцу.)

Maxwell and Ciepiela may perhaps have taken an ever-so-slight liberty by jazzing up their God and having him “jig” and “bop” in the fire (in Russian, he basically just dances in place), but who can argue with the sound of that phrase? I love it.

So Long Kept Out of Circulation

Yuri Kublanovsky / Image courtesy of Российская газета

I was struck last month by the opening paragraphs of a book review by Victor Leonidov in Ex Libris, the literary supplement to one of Russia’s leading newspapers, Nezavisimaya gazeta. The book under review was the latest collection by Yuri Kublanovsky, called Reading in Bad Weather (Чтение в непогоду), and Leonidov’s piece began with these two quotations:

“This is a poet who is able to speak of the history of the State with lyricism and of his own personal turmoil with the tone of a citizen. His technical equipment is amazing. Kublanovsky has perhaps the richest lexicon since Pasternak.”

“Kublanovsky’s poetry is characterized by an elasticity of line, a boldness of metaphor, a vivid sense of the Russian language, an intimate kinship with history, and an ever-present sense of God above us.”

Only then did we learn who had spoken:

The first quotation belongs to Joseph Brodsky, the second to Solzhenitsyn. Today Yuri Kublanovsky is probably the only contemporary poet who has received such enthusiastic praise from two Nobel laureates, two geniuses of Russian literature in the twentieth century.

Wow. So who is Kublanovsky? If these two Nobelists thought so highly of him, then why don’t his books accompany theirs on the shelves of American bookstores? (I mean, the three percent problem aside.) My first question is rhetorical, but my second isn’t: I really can’t comprehend why someone like Kublanovsky is not better known among English readers. Perhaps our market can’t bear much more poetry—I don’t know—but surely we can try to make room among the hordes of mediocre MFAs for some of the best international poets. And Kublanovsky certainly fills the bill.

Translator's Challenge: Maria Petrovykh

Georgy Chulkov, Maria Petrovykh, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam (1930s) / Image courtesy of Wikipedia

It was recently announced that this year's Compass Award, organized by the editors of Cardinal Points, will be given for a translation of a poem by Maria Petrovykh (1908-1979), whose name is new to me. I don't think I'm the only ignoramus, either: Stephen Dodson mentioned in a recent Languagehat post that the Wikipedia page for Petrovykh didn't exist until he wrote it. Quite a change from Tsvetaeva, who was this year's poet! But if the award draws attention to a good writer whom we might not otherwise read, then I'm all for it. Here's what the judges have to say about her:

Petrovykh was a poet of exquisite precision and subtlety – a friend of Osip Mandelstam, serving as an inspiration for his famed “Masteritsa vinovatykh vzorov,” and of Anna Akhmatova, who called her “Naznach’ mne svidan’e na etom svete” a “lyric masterpiece.” Yet, unlike her fellow masters, she hasn’t attained universal recognition. In part, this is due to her own humility; she published only one collection in her lifetime, and devoted most of her professional life to editing and translating the work of others. We feel it is high time for Petrovykh's own verse to benefit from the attention of translators as gifted and inspired as she herself was.

I was glad to see that the submission guidelines this year ask for a 400-word commentary from the translator. It's frustrating when you work hard on something only to have others overlook the subtleties of its craftsmanship, but a commentary offers a simple solution to the problem.

Oh, and as always, first prize is a compass. How cool is that?

Marina Tsvetaeva, "Magdalene"

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy (1606) / Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Magdalene

by Marina Tsvetaeva

I will not say a thing about your wayward

path, for now you are fine, my dear.

I was barefoot, but you shod me

with cascades of hair —

and tears.

Nor will I ever ask you at what cost

you bought these fragrances and oils.

I was naked, but you engulfed

me like a wave — you formed

my roof and walls.

I will caress your naked body now —

softer than water and lower than grass.

I was upright, but you forced me down

and warped me with your tenderness.

Set aside this flax and make my swaddling

by tearing out a patch of hair.

Anointer! What use to me is ointment?

Your very body washed me

like a wave.

Translated from the Russian by Jamie Olson