They Can't Get Us Here

Ivan Papanin (left) at the arctic drift station «Северный полюс-1» (1937) / Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Like just about everyone who translates Russian poetry into English, I keep my eye on the Compass Award, which is given each year for a translation of a single poem by a Russian writer. Early in the spring, we all wait to see which writer the Compass committee will choose for us—typically one who is underrepresented in English—and then we dash off to our computers and bookshelves to find a poem that suits us. (The committee selects the poet; the translator picks the poem.)

At least, that’s the way it should work. In truth, though, I’m lazy. I wish I could say I’ve sent in something to the contest each summer, but as I look back over the roster of previous poets—Nikolai Gumilev, Marina Tsvetaeva, Maria Petrovykh, and Arseny Tarkovsky—I realize I’ve only submitted a translation once before this year. Somehow, life has a knack for getting in the way of my good intentions.

This year, though, when Boris Slutsky (1919-1986) was identified as the Compass poet, I wasn’t about to let the summer pass without making time to choose, translate, and submit a poem for the contest. Not that I’m going to share my translation in this post! No, no, it’s a secret. I’m too superstitious to reveal it—at least until after the Slutsky winners have been announced. But I will talk about what I learned in the process of translating him.

Where the Black Sea Breaks Its Back

Column of White ships fleeing to Constantinople (1920) / Image courtesy of Сегодня.ua

Much has been made of the way that Vasily Aksyonov’s 1979 Sci-Fi novel “The Island of Crimea” predicted Russia’s takeover of Crimea last year (for instance, in this New Yorker piece), but a new essay in НГ Ex Libris claims that one can find similarly prophetic moments in poetry too. Mikhail Epstein, the author of the essay, focuses on two Crimea-themed poems—one by Osip Mandelstam and one by Andrei Voznesensky. Mandelstam’s untitled 1916 poem describes a visionary moment during a walk he took with Marina Tsvetaeva in the Alexandrov Kremlin, the fortress from which Ivan the Terrible ruled Russia and where he killed his own son:

Doubting the miracle of the resurrection,

we strolled in the cemetery.

– You know, the land all around us

reminds me of those hills.

………………………….

………………………….

Where Russia breaks away

above a black and silent sea.

(Не веря воскресенья чуду, / На кладбище гуляли мы. / – Ты знаешь, мне земля повсюду / Напоминает те холмы. / …………………………. / …………………………. / Где обрывается Россия / Над морем черным и глухим.)

The reference to Crimea in the last two lines is so clear that Mandelstam struck from his draft the two previous ones, whose outright naming of the peninsula he must have felt too obvious and unnecessary. Epstein even thinks that the long ellipses are better than the missing lines, since they “demonstrate more vividly than any words the blackness and silence into which the country breaks away.”

Epstein says that what unifies Crimea and the cemetery in the poem is “the presentiment of death.” After all, Russia was about to begin killing its own sons in a civil war, and the Crimean peninsula would play a key role: in 1920, just a few years after the poem was written, the last White forces left from Crimean ports, taking 100,000 refugees with them. Somehow, Mandelstam had foreseen his country’s violent end in that place. “There,” Epstein writes, “pre-Soviet history broke away. But where and when will post-Soviet history break away?”

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

Tsvetaeva, Poet of the Moment

Marina Tsvetaeva with her dog in Savoy, France (1930) / Image courtesy of the Poetry Foundation

Lately, it seems that Marina Tsvetaeva pops up everywhere I look. After last year’s inaugural prize for a translation of a poem by Nikolai Gumilev, the organizers of the Compass Award have announced that they’re now seeking translations of Tsvetaeva. Her work is famously difficult to translate, so whoever wins will certainly have earned the $300 in prize money. (That may not sound like much, but hey, we all know that literary translation isn’t the most lucrative field.) On their page, the Compass organizers speculate why Tsvetaeva’s poems rarely come across well in translation: “Their poetic tension is just too high, and their force fields are overwhelmingly complex.” Anyone who has read her in Russian knows exactly what the Compass folks mean: nobody writes such intricately formal poems as Tsvetaeva.

Just when I had the Compass Award on my mind, the annual translation issue of Poetry magazine arrived, replete with a portfolio of Tsvetaeva’s work. The eight poems in the portfolio, along with accompanying prose excerpts, were translated by Jean Valentine and Ilya Kaminsky, who says that Tsvetaeva offers a particular challenge to translators because of her “over-abundance of lyricism.” The solution that he and Valentine came up with was to avoid imitating the form of her poems altogether. Kaminsky explains that the two of them do not even claim to have “translated” Tsvetaeva’s poetry, but have rather composed a kind of commentary on it—mere “fragments, notes in the margin.” Still, some of their translations (or whatever they are) come off pretty well.

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.”

Bella: Woman of the 'Sixties

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 poet and Radio Svoboda correspondent 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.

A Russian Journal Goes English

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.