A Bath for Alexander Sergeyevich

Statue of A. S. Pushkin on Arts Square in St. Petersburg / Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Today is banya day for Pushkin. His birthday is tomorrow, after all, so Russians want to be sure that their national poet is spick and span for the celebration. In Saint Petersburg, according to one Russian newspaper, experts from the Museum of City Sculpture, with a little help from local actors, will give the Pushkin statue on Arts Square a thorough scrubbing, but everyone is welcome to swing by with their own statuettes to take part in a truly public, open-air bathhouse. I hope the people themselves keep their pants on...

As for me, when I get to Petersburg on Friday, I'll pass through the square and make sure that the poet is looking his best. I hear that the sculpture-scrubbing specialists from the museum bathed the Bronze Horseman on the Neva embankment not too long ago, and maybe they'll get around to him again soon, but for a while at least, Alexander Sergeyevich will be the cleanest fellow in town.

In This House Lived a Poet

Plaque on the corner of Pestel Street and Liteyny Prospekt in St. Petersburg

Today is Brodsky’s birthday. If the Nobel laureate were still around, he would have been seventy-two. In his native Saint Petersburg—formerly Leningrad, or in the poet’s lexicon simply “Peter”—Russians are celebrating Brodsky Week, whose goal it is to raise money to open a long-awaited museum in the apartment where Brodsky lived with his parents. According to Russia’s official national paper, the program for the week is “pleasantly unofficious,” including walking tours, a play, and screenings of a documentary about the poet.

Many doubt that Brodsky’s famous “room and a half” will open to the public anytime in the near future. The delay is owing to negotiations with a neighbor who occupies an adjoining apartment. The New Yorker’s Book Bench reported last year that a sale was imminent, but they were obviously mistaken. In the ensuing months, the neighbor’s asking price for the space rose to seventeen million rubles (over $530,000), but she recently agreed to bring it down to twelve million (just shy of $380,000) – still more than the city is willing to pay.

Now, according to Fontanka.ru, project organizers hope that the United States government will pitch in the money needed to close the deal. After all, Brodsky lived in the U.S. for over two decades, and he was the American poet laureate back in the early 1990s. In my own view, a museum jointly funded by the U.S. and Russia would be a fitting tribute to a writer who straddled two cultures and two languages. As Brodsky put it himself, he was a “Russian poet, an English essayist, and of course, an American citizen.”

In the meantime, visitors to Saint Petersburg can drop by the Anna Akhmatova Museum to view Brodsky’s desk and other items from his study, not to mention his postcard collection. As it so happens, I’ll pass through the city in about two weeks on my way to Petrozavodsk, so I might just stop in!

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.

Wisdom from Pasternak

Portrait of Boris Pasternak (Yuri Annenkov, 1921) / Image courtesy of WikiPaintings

“I believe, as do many others, that closeness to the original is not ensured only by literal exactness or by similarity of form: the likeness, as in a portrait, cannot be achieved without a lively and natural method of expression. As much as the author, the translator must confine himself to a vocabulary which is natural to him and avoid the literary artifice involved in stylization. Like the original text, the translation must create an impression of life and not of verbiage.” 

– Boris Pasternak (“Translating Shakespeare,” 1956, trans. M. Harari)

What They Said in Kansas City

Statue of Winston Churchill near the conference hotel in Kansas City / Image courtesy of ChrisM70

Each fall, a group of translators gathers somewhere in North America for the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association. I’ve gone twice now to the ALTA conference, and I can’t imagine a more welcoming community for a beginning translator. In particular, those who translate from Russian and suchlike languages have gone out of their way to make me feel at home. And I truly appreciate their company. For someone like me who often has no real connection with other translators for months at a time, ALTA can be downright exhilarating.

My second ALTA conference took place in November of last year in Kansas City, and ever since then I’ve been meaning to write up a quick post giving a few highlights from the gathering. Well, somehow the busyness of everyday life has prevented me from even writing something “quick,” but a nasty cold that kept me home from work today has given me a little free time to organize my thoughts.

Timur Kibirov (b. 1955)

Timur Kibirov (Dmitry Rozhkov, 2011) / Image courtesy of Википедия

[NOTE: For my own purposes, I recently wrote a biographical statement for Timur Kibirov, a Russian poet whose work I have been translating and hope to publish as a book someday. Since no good bio exists for Kibirov in English anywhere online, I am posting what I came up with here.]

Timur Kibirov (born Timur Yur'evich Zapoev), who ranks among the most influential of contemporary Russian poets, was born in 1955 and began publishing his poems in the 1980s. In the late Soviet period, he was closely associated with underground poets like Lev Rubinstein, Dmitri Prigov, and Sergey Gandlevsky, and critics have often identified his work with postmodernism and conceptualism. Mikhail Ardov claims that “Kibirov has been and remains the best, most talented poet of our post-Soviet era,” and Andrei Nemzer and Mark Lipovetsky call him “the voice of an entire generation.” [1]

Not Just Pretty Words

Image courtesy of Gvideon

I have known for a while about Konstantin Gadaev’s film that shows Sergey Gandlevsky and Timur Kibirov discussing poetry as they drink tea on a Russian train, but only today did I finally get around to watching it. Midway through the half-hour film, Kibirov offers this definition of literature (and by implication, of poetry in particular), which I find compelling:

“В армии я понял, что - может, потому, что впервые на самом деле столкнулся по-настоящему с реальностью ... Я вдруг понял, что вот тот любимый мной ... ‘дискурс’, [то есть,] язык серебряного века, что он не может эту реальность описать. Я впервые понял, что такое ‘литература’, что это - не просто красивые слова, а нечто встреча реальности с индивидуальным языком.” - Тимур Кибиров

     

“In the army I understood – maybe because that was the first time I had really run into reality … I suddenly understood that … the very ‘discourse’ that I loved, [that is to say,] the language of the Silver Age – that it could not describe that reality. For the first time I understood what ‘literature’ was, that it wasn’t just pretty words, but some kind of meeting of reality with an individual’s language.” – Timur Kibirov

The film features Kibirov reading several of his poems, while Gandlevsky acts as interviewer, asking questions on art and politics that prompt Kibirov to reflect on decades of his poetic experience.