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.
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| Tarkovsky's grave, in Peredelkino. |
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.
