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

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.

Porvin's Debut

Image courtesy of Независимая литературная премия «Дебют»

Among the Russian literary prizes that I like to keep my eye on is the million-ruble “Debut” («Дебют»), which is awarded each December to younger writers in six different genres: novel/novella, short fiction, poetry, drama, essay, and fantasy. The winner in the poetry category this year was Alexey Porvin, whose name was new to me but probably shouldn’t have been. Why should I know who he is? Well, Jim Kates, one of my colleagues from the American Literary Translators Association, happens to have already published a small collection of Porvin’s poems in English with New Zealand’s Cold Hub Press. Chances are I’ve even thumbed through it at the ALTA book display.

Jim, who also writes his own original poetry and helps run Zephyr Press, has done a few books of translations for Cold Hub. One of them, Genrikh Sapgir’s Psalms, 1965-1966, is sitting on my desk waiting to be read, and Porvin’s Live by Fire is another. The publisher’s page for Porvin’s book features Jim’s translation of this surprisingly unrhymed poem (still a relative rarity in Russian verse):

On the smooth surface of the night

gleaming like a turnstile,

the sudden slot of a sunrise

requires some payment from you.

You want to pass, and you drop

an uneasy token into the interior

of the mechanism that holds up

any movement through here.

The machinery lets passers by through

to open space, which can take

loving possession of those minds

who have paid their own way

nor will you even recall the restless

little circle from your pocket, soul,

because there is far less profit

in constricted passageways.

Translated from the Russian by J. Kates

Bits and Pieces of ALTA

Illustration from the page of the Carmina Burana that includes "O Fortuna" / Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Each fall, a town somewhere in North America gets overrun with literary translators, writers, editors, and (small) publishers. That’s when our little mob of littérateurs gets together for the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association, and this year the place was Rochester, New York — home to Open Letter Books, the online literary resource Three Percent, and the University of Rochester’s program in Literary Translation Studies. (Next up: Bloomington, Indiana!) Any ALTA conference is a rich, varied, and intense experience, making it difficult to sum up neatly and comprehensively, but that’s why the gods of typography invented bullet points. With bullets, I don’t actually have to connect my thoughts. How nice! So here are a few of the moments (excluding bar scenes) that stood out to me from our gathering in Rochester earlier this month:

·      The plenary lecture on humor by David Bellos, whose hilarious example on shit and samogon from Vladimir Voinovich’s Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin has got me determined to read that novel at the soonest possible moment. (I’m a sucker for the scatological.) Bellos also showed us how our ears could fool us into thinking that the beautiful lyrics of “O Fortuna” had morphed into a “piece of lovely cake.”

·      The roundtable on reviewing translations, which happens to have become a pet topic of mine lately. My interest owes partly to my own recent forays into reviewing and partly to the book reviews I now ask my students to write. The panelists generally gave lots of advice for new reviewers, and they also formulated what a proper review ought to look like. (“Ably translated by X” just doesn’t cut it anymore.) Katherine Silver talked a lot about a certain “good” review that panned her recent translation of Daniel Sada’s Almost Never: sure, the reviewer didn’t like the translation, but at least she didn’t make Silver invisible. On the contrary, it was exactly Silver’s use of language that she objected to (e.g., “the translation fails spectacularly to deliver anything like Sada’s wonderfully wacky prose”). But not all “good” reviews are bad reviews. Silver also mentioned one in The New York Times, for instance, that exulted in her language. And where else can readers find decent reviews of translations? The panelists suggested Bookforum, The Nation, Full Stop, The Quarterly Conversation, and The Coffin Factory, not to mention two individual critics: Tim Parks and Ruth Franklin.