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

A Nativity Poem by Timur Kibirov

Cover of Греко- и римско-кафолические песенки и потешки, 1989-2009 (М.: Время, 2009) 

NOTE: I’ve gotten into the habit of posting a Russian nativity poem each Christmas, and while so far it’s all been Brodsky (see here and here), this year I’m introducing a new voice. Below are the final lines of Timur Kibirov’s poem “The Den,” where all eyes are turned toward the mother and child. The poem was published in Kibirov’s 2009 collection Greek and Roman Catholic Songs and Nursery Rhymes (Греко- и римско-кафолические песенки и потешки).

*     *     *

From “The Den”

And the magi came in with plumes of steam

as they carried in gifts for the newborn king,

while nearby the men gathered shyly together,

each gripping a hat made of fur like the others,

and his papa did not have the slightest notion

what to offer his guests or where he should put them,

while his mama could see not a single soul,

not a one, except for her very own son,

and the ox lackadaisically chewed its cud,

and the donkey’s long ears quaked and twitched on its head,

but the newborn just sucked at the boob.

Meanwhile, in Kerioth, another child

held in his lips a taut nipple and fed,

while far, far away, across the vast sea,

a third child gulped down his milk with greed—

the very same one who would fasten a sign

to the cross declaring Him king!

Translated from the Russian by Jamie Olson

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

Did You Wash Behind Your Ears?

Moidodyr postage stamp (Russia, 1993) / Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

All good Soviet children knew the importance of bathing properly. They knew it from their grandmothers, certainly, but they also knew it from Kornei Chukovsky, author of the classic children’s poem “Moidodyr” («Мойдодыр», 1921). In the poem, when a filthy young boy’s clothes and other belongings flee from him, a talking washstand named Moidodyr comes on the scene to sort things out.* Moidodyr, whose name means something like “scrub to the bone,” announces himself as “leader of washstands and commander of sponges” and orders his crew to get to work. “Kara-baras!” he shouts nonsensically, and they set off after the boy.

The soap and brushes do their duty, stinging the boy like wasps, but the “rabid sponge” has to chase him all over Saint Petersburg. Only after he is taken to task by a sponge-eating crocodile does the boy finally agree to get cleaned up. Now freshly scrubbed, he stands by as his pants willingly come back to him and a sandwich hops right into his mouth. The young speaker then delivers a classic bit of didacticism:

You must, you must wash up

every morning and every evening,

and as for unclean chimneysweeps,

they should be ashamed!

They should be ashamed!

(«Надо, надо умываться / По утрам и вечерам, / А нечистым / Трубочистам – / Стыд и срам! / Стыд и срам!»)

All of this is a way of talking not about Chukovsky, but about Timur Kibirov, the contemporary Russian poet whose work I have been translating lately. Kibirov appeared last month on Radio Svoboda’s program Over the Barriers, where he contributed a reading to their ongoing “radio-anthology” of contemporary poetry. The poem he read was “Kara-Baras! An Experiment in Interpreting a Classic Text” («Кара-Барас! Опыт интерпретации классического текста»), whose title derives from the nonsense word that Moidodyr shouts to rally his troops.

Now, Kibirov and I differ on what’s translatable and what’s not – with me being the more optimistic one – but this is one poem that I have no intention of ever tackling. It defies translation. The problem is that every line in Kibirov’s poem refers to an original line in Chukovsky’s, with plenty of puns along the way. Essentially, “Moidodyr” is the soundtrack that plays continuously beneath “Kara-Baras!” Readers who don’t know Chukovsky inside and out won’t make heads or tails of Kibirov. Well, okay, since I am such an optimist, maybe I could imagine a side-by-side, heavily annotated double translation for an academic audience, but such a thing would suck the pleasure right out of the text. Why bother?