London Trip Report: Russian Poetry Week & A Bit More

Ah, travel! Ah, returns home! Ah, trip reports! My recent trip to Oxford, for the first-ever Translators’ Coven, and London, for Pushkin House Russian Poetry Week events and assorted meetings, was worthy of a slew of adjectives like fantastic, marvelous, wonderful, and, yes, productive… but trips are always difficult to describe, particularly because I’m not a very consistent note-taker, particularly when the topic is translation. I get so caught up in the programs that I forget to write. Nonetheless, here’s a very unmethodical, very noncompletionist summary of sorts, of What Went On In London. I do have more detail in my notes about certain things—including more poem titles—so add a comment if you have questions. I’ll write about Oxford soon.

Tarkovsky's grave, in Peredelkino.

Pushkin House Russian Poetry Week, organized and led by Robert Chandler, with lots of participation from Irina Mashinski and Boris Dralyuk, began on June 16 with Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize Evening, which featured winners of, appropriately, the Brodsky-Spender Translation Prize. The night was particularly fun because Sasha Dugdale, a writer, translator, and editor, interviewed two teams of translators—Boris and Irina (on Arseny Tarkovsky’s “Полевой госпиталь”/“Field Hospital”) and Glyn Maxwell and Alexandra Berlina (on Joseph Brodsky, memorably including “Ты не скажешь комару”/“You Can’t Tell a Gnat”)—about their work. My notes for this session are awful, though I did scribble down that Irina finds it particularly difficult to translate favorite poems; Maxwell said some words in Brodsky translations are “haunted by each other” rather than rhymed, as in the originals; and Sasha compared Brodsky with Toblerone chocolate. This is high praise, indeed!

Sweets came into the program again on the second night—with the spotlight on Osip Mandelshtam—when writer, teacher, and translator Victor Sonkin discussed Mandelshtam’s life and noted that Mandelshtam enjoyed tea with candies. My favorite portions of the discussion concerned one poem, “Вооруженный зреньем узких ос”: Robert read several translations of the poem, and I especially enjoyed Peter France’s version, which began with “Armed with the eyesight of thin-waisted wasps.” It was the “thin-waisted” that caught me—over “skinny” (Andrew Davis) and “slender” (John Riley)—somehow “thin-waisted” sounds and even looks better to me, both in my imagination and on the page, where a hyphen makes “thin-waisted” almost physically resemble a wasp. You can get a feel for Peter’s love for poetry and translation in these translator’s notes (and Mandelshtam translations!) in Cardinal Points.

Lucky for me, Phoebe Taplin wrote a piece about the third event—“The Soviet Union’s Other Poets”—for Russia Beyond the Headlines, mentioning specific poems. There were, once again, lots of highlights, including more mentions of a poetry anthology that Robert, Boris, and Irina are co-editing for Penguin… the book will include around 50 poets and cover the years from Pushkin to Brodsky, guided by birth years, though there seems to be some creative interpretation of dates. The book will be out within the next couple years and will include, by design, lots of poets who are relatively unknown in the West, such as Boris Slutsky, David Samoilov, Vladimir Kornilov, and Maria Petrovykh. They, along with Tarkovsky, were all part of the Wednesday program. Translators/speakers included Robert, Boris, and Irina, as well as Katherine Young and Stephen Capus.

By the time the final night rolled around—this after four muggy London days and three muggy London nights of talk about poetry, prose, and publishing—my note-taking ability sank from a polite “minimal” to nearly zero. I guess it’s appropriate that, for a program about Afanasii Fet and Fyodor Tiutchev, one of the titles I wrote down was “Silentium!” I also noted that Tiutchev was careless in his work, rarely checking proofs and allowing Ivan Turgenev to make changes. Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t remember anything else: I remember, for example, that Robert also discussed Tiutchev’s famous “Умом Россию не понять” and read a translation from fellow coven attendee Anatoly Liberman; I particularly like Anatoly’s final line, viewable here, if you scroll down.

Those muggy London days also included… a visit to the Calvert 22 Foundation, where there was no exhibit but I met with Jamie Rann, who works as comment editor at the online Calvert Journal, which contains a nice variety of articles and beautiful photos… meeting with Sarah Wallis and Paul Mitchell, who wrote and directed Russia’s Open Book, a one-hour documentary about contemporary Russian literature. The trailer is online here. I’ll be writing more about Russia’s Open Book later this year. I found, thanks to I.I. Google, that an animated chunk of the film, by Andy Acourt, won an International Motion Arts Award… Russian book shopping at Waterstone’s Russian bookshop (orderly, great selection, even if it’s pricey) and Русский мир (chaos, not much of interest that I haven’t already read) accumulated a nice stack of books that includes Aleksandr Ilichevskii’s Орфики (I’ll call it The Orphics for now), which I already read and can’t quite let go of, Iurii Buida’s Вор, шпион и убийца (Thief, Spy, and Murderer), which I’m reading and enjoying now; Maxim Kantor’s rather large Красный свет, (Red Light); and a collection of stories and a play by Nina Berberova.

I should also add that the trip generated a number of contributions to the list of Notable New Translations for 2013. There are lots of great new entries but I was especially happy to hear about Sasha Dugdale’s collection of Moscow stories for Oxford University Press, where authors range from Nikolai Karamzin to Igor Sutyagin.

Disclosures: The usual.

Up Next: Coven trip report. And Ilichevskii’s Orphics, which really and truly creeped me out with its perspectives on Moscow in 1991 and, really (of course), what came before and what came after. Then Buida’s Thief, Spy, Murderer.

Image credit: A. Savin, Creative Commons, through Wikipedia.

Favorite Russian Writers A to Я: Bulgakov and Brodsky

The Russian letter Б – B in the Roman alphabet – is tremendously busy! A letter has to be pretty good if the list of not-favorite authors includes Isaak Babel, Andrei Belyi, and Ivan Bunin.

But then there is Mikhail Bulgakov, whose novella Собачье сердце (Heart of a Dog) has been a favorite for years, thanks to Bulgakov’s humor in depicting bureaucracy, the Soviet housing shortage, and what I will just call a medical transformation. I thoroughly enjoyed Bulgakov’s play Иван Васильевич (Ivan Vasilyevich) in late 2007, too. (Previous post)

Though I have a more complicated relationship with Мастер и Маргарита (Master and Margarita), I love the Soviet-era passages -- particularly Satan’s ball and certain other scenes involving unclean forces -- more than enough to put Bulgakov onto my favorites list. Next time I read M&M I will use Kevin Moss’s Master & Margarita Web site to compensate for my embarrassingly anemic knowledge of the Bible. Maybe then the many sections of the book set in Biblical times will mean more to me, and I’ll be able to connect the novel’s two tracks.

I also want to mention a poet: Joseph Brodsky. I first read Brodsky in grad school, rather incidentally, when a professor handed out Brodsky’s “Бабочка” (“The Butterfly”) as an example of a poem whose shape mirrors its content. A few years later, I was asked to translate a few Brodsky poems for a stage production. The poems were horrifically difficult for me, and when I asked a Russian co-worker for help, he also found them difficult and told me he thought of Brodsky’s poems as an uncomfortable house that he didn’t enjoy visiting. I’ve heard similar comments from other Russians.

I understood. But now that nearly 20 years have passed and I’ve increased my Russian vocabulary and cultural knowledge, I love visiting Brodsky’s poetic house. I read his work rather randomly so don’t know why I seem to have a preference for his poems from the ‘70s, though I know it’s the existential themes I like best. One of my favorites so far, “Я сижу у окна,” reads as an interpretation-translation in Howard Moss’s English-language New Yorker version, “I Sit by the Window.”

The B-List for Future Reading: There’s a lot to look forward to in the letter Б: I want to make amends to Ivan Bunin by reading beyond “Солнечный удар” (“Sunstroke”), the first story in a collection I never quite seem to get into… perhaps something longer, like Жизнь Арсеньева (The Life of Arsenyev) or Деревня (The Village), will hold my interest. Then there is Isaak Babel’, whose Конармия (Red Cavalry) scared me off with its brutality. I think it’s finally time to read all Babel’s Одесские рассказы (Odessa Stories). One of these years I will also get to Petr Boborykin’s Китай-город (transliterated: Kitai-gorod; the translation Chinatown is a false friend... see comments for more), which has been sitting on my shelf, untouched, for years, though it comes highly recommended by several friends.

My reread list includes Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog and Andrei Belyi’s Петербург (Petersburg), which I remember as a difficult but very rewarding symbolist novel. I also want to put in a better effort at reading Bulgakov’s Белая гвардия (The White Guard); maybe the third attempt will be a charm. 

Bulgakov on Amazon

Bunin on Amazon
Belyi on Amazon
Brodsky on Amazon
Babel on Amazon

Russian Reading Challenge 2: Platonov's “Foundation Pit”

Andrei Platonov’s Котлован (The Foundation Pit) was a perfect Russian Reading Challenge selection: I read the first 30 pages several years ago but got stuck. I’m glad I stuck with it this time because, though I still found it quite difficult, this short novel is very rewarding.

The Foundation Pit, written in 1929-1930, is an allegory of the era of collectivization: workers digging a pit for a foundation also find themselves digging, in effect, a collective grave. They take part in the collectivization campaign, too, banishing kulaks by sending them away by raft.

Form and content are inseparable in The Foundation Pit, and Platonov draws on language and themes found in divergent genres, mixing elements of folk tales, carnival, existentialism, and socialist realism to create a dystopia so painful and surreal that I feel almost as if I’ve lived there.

Despite the inherent tragedy of The Foundation Pit, some passages were laugh-out-loud absurd – the behavior of collectivized horses stands out – but I thought others plodded, perhaps because they were so familiar and reminiscent of “real” socialist realism. Other chunks of text jarred to good effect: an orphaned girl taken in by the workers speaks in violent, revolutionary terms, demanding death of kulaks.

What sets The Foundation Pit apart from other dystopian novels – and most other fiction – is Platonov’s creativity with the Russian language. Language is the foundation upon which the book is built, with Platonov’s diversity of linguistic registers reflecting changes in society. The Foundation Pit depicts on every level – from words to characters’ actions – untenable visions of a socialist future in a place where truth and rationality are losing their meaning.

Joseph Brodsky says in this (Russian) piece, which evidently appears as an afterward to an English-language edition of The Foundation Pit, that the book is untranslatable. (I find a lot of irony there!) He cites as one reason Platonov’s depiction of a nation that effectively becomes a victim of its own language. Obviously not all of Platonov’s words in The Foundation Pit have equivalents in a language like English – the content of “энтузиаст,” for example, differs tremendously on a cultural level from our “enthusiast.”

But I think Brodsky may underestimate the talents of translators, readers, and Platonov himself. Many of Platonov’s unique phrases translate elegantly enough into English to read well. Robert Chandler and Geoffrey Smith’s translation beautifully captures the mood and meanings of the novella’s unique first paragraph. Much later in the book, as I translate it, a bear “sang a song with his jaw.” Even culturally laden phrases that don’t translate this easily into English can still display Platonov’s ability to use repetition or word combinations that force the reader to (re)consider meaning.

Even if I don’t quite agree with Brodsky about translating Platonov – particularly after reading Robert Chandler’s crackling versions of Platonov in The New Yorker and the paragraph cited above – I think his definition of surrealism sums up The Foundation Pit very neatly. He calls Platonov the first surrealist, arguing that surrealism is not an aesthetic category but rather (as I translate it) “a form of philosophical rage, a product of the psychology of dead end.”

In the end (whether it’s dead or not) what I find most interesting about The Foundation Pit is that, to be blunt, I didn’t often enjoy reading it… but I can’t stop thinking about it. I even have thoughts of rereading it. I’ve enjoyed Platonov’s short stories much more because they feel peculiar and, perhaps even alienated, without conveying utter desolation. But I love a literary puzzle, and that’s what The Foundation Pit feels like. I may be back in a few years.

Summary: The Foundation Pit is one of the most difficult books I’ve read in recent years, but it’s worth the effort if you enjoy dystopia or writing that depends on both form and content to convey its messages. Platonov layers the book with far more themes than I’ve mentioned here: I felt like I barely touched on their significance in this, my first reading. I should add that my first attempt at reading The Foundation Pit was my introduction to Platonov. Reading several short stories between then and now helped me feel more comfortable with his style.

Cross-posted at Russian Reading Challenge