Thrilled to have four translations of Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Blok, and Tarkovsky, and a poem of my own, "Anna Karenina #metoo" in this brilliant KGB Lit issue, "Writing across Eastern Europe." Thanks to editor Olena Jennings for the pub! FOUR TRANSLATIONS AND A POEM
Delighted that the Poetry School is using Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry, the anthology of ultra-contemporary Russian verse I edited, as the basis of their course, Transreading Russia. https://poetryschool.com/courses/transreading-russia/ Description:
‘We are Russian and we have extra genes for compassion and asking unanswerable questions,’ writes Larissa Shmailo, editor of Twenty-First Century Russian Poetry. This online anthology of 50 poets in English translation becomes our essential reading in the course that invites us to look at present-day Russia through its poetry, beyond the looming news of Putinism. We will write our own poems in response to the ‘accursed questions’ posed by contemporary Russian poets about ‘the meaning of life, love, suffering, God and the devil.’ As the anthology boasts a wide range of approaches, from experimental to lyric to language poetry, we can expand our own repertoire of engaging with similar questions: by offering tentative answers or formulating new questions. To celebrate creative writing as translation and translation as creative writing, we will be joined by our special guest, Sasha Dugdale, poet and translator from Russian, who will talk to us about her work, also as the editor of the Russian and Ukrainian focus of Modern Poetry in Translation. In cooperation with the journal, we will create new poems inspired by this themed issue – the texts will be published on the MPT website as a featured project.
The program for the Association of Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Conference is now available. My panel, Contemporary Russian Poetry in Search of a Global Poetics, will take place December 9, 8:00 - 9:45 am. Chair: Vladimir V. Feshchenko; Panel: Eugene Ostashevsky, Evgeny Pavlov, myself; Discussant: OIga Sokolova. I will be speaking on global prosodies informing syntax and semantics in the experimental poetry of Alexander Skidan.
Contemporary Russian Poetry in Search of a Global Poetics
Sun, December 9, 8:00 to 9:45 am, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 1, Columbus II Session Submission Type: Panel
Brief Description
The focus of the panel is on contemporary Russian poetry's conscious quest for a global poetics. Specific case studies of several key poets, both living and recently deceased, conducted in the panel contributions will raise a number of important questions, ranging from linguistic to philosophical to political ones. What does it mean to be a global Russian poet today? How do globalised poetic strategies of Russian poets compare to the Western ones? What are the antecedents of the today's poets' globalising attitudes? What are the theoretical challenges of conceptualising a global poetics in the Russian context?
by Joseph Brodsky Tr. L. Shmailo
In a cold time, in a place accustomed more To scorching heat, than cold, to the flatness of plain, than hills: A child was born in a cave to save the world. And it stormed, as only winter desert storms can.
Everything seemed huge to him: his mother’s breast, The yellow steam of the camels’ breath. And from afar, Their gifts carried here, the Magi, Balthazar, Melchior, Caspar. He was all of him just a dot. And that dot was a star.
Attentively and fixedly through the sparse clouds, Upon the recumbent child in the manger, through the night’s haze, From the depths of the universe, from its end and bound, A star watched over the cave. And that was the Father’s gaze.
Thanks, friends, for downloading my recording of my translation of Alexander Pushkin's "I loved you once . . . " Here is the track from my CD The No-Net World for your enjoyment.
I'm delighted my interview by Leonard Schwartz on PennSound's Cross-Cultural Poetics show is now up! We discuss my collection, #specialcharacters, Aleksei Kruchenych, and why Russians read poetry and Americans don't.
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (June 6, 1799 – February 10, 1837)
I loved you once, and this love still, it may be,
Is not extinguished fully in my soul;
But let’s no longer have this love dismay you:
To trouble you is not my wish at all.
I loved you once quite wordlessly, without hope,
Tortured shyness, jealous rage I bore.
I loved you once so gently and sincerely:
God grant another love you thus once more
Tr. L. Shmailo
Я вас любил: любовь еще, быть может,
В душе моей угасла не совсем;
Но пусть она вас больше не тревожит;
Я не хочу печалить вас ничем.
Я вас любил безмолвно, безнадежно,
То робостью, то ревностью томим;
Я вас любил так искренно, так нежно,
Как дай вам бог любимой быть другим.
In a cold time, in a place accustomed more
To scorching heat, than cold, to the flatness of plain,
than to hills: A child was born in a cave to save the world.
And it stormed, as only the winter’s desert storms rain.
Everything seemed huge to him: his mother’s breast,
the yellow steam of the camels’ breath. And from afar,
Their gifts carried here, the Magi, Balthazar, Melchior, Caspar.
He was all of him just a dot. And that dot was a star.
Attentively and fixedly, through the sparse clouds
Upon the recumbent child in the manger, through the night’s haze
From the depths of the universe, from its end and bound,
A star watched over the cave. And that was the Father’s gaze.
It's frightening to die, and such a shame to leave
This captivating riffraff that enchants me,
The stuff so dear to poets, so very lovely,
I never celebrated; it somehow wasn't to be.
I loved to come back home at the break of dawn
And shift my things around in half an hour.
I loved the white windowsill, and also the flower,
The carved faceted glass, and also the water,
And the heavens, greenish-azure in their color—
And that I was a poet and a wicked man.
And when every June came with my birthday again
I'd idolize that holiday, bustling
With verses by friends and congratulations from women,
With crystal laughter, and gay glasses clinking
And the lock of that hair, unique, individual
And that kiss, so entirely inevitable.
But now at home it’s all set up differently;
It's June and I no longer have that homesickness.
In this way, life is teaching me patience,
And turbid, my blood now is stirring this birthday,
And a secret anxiety is tormenting me—
What have I done with my great destiny,
Oh my God, what have I done with me!
25 июня 1939 года
Арсений Тарковский
И страшно умереть, и жаль оставить
Всю шушеру пленительную эту,
Всю чепуху, столь милую поэту,
Которую не удалось прославить
Я так любил домой прийти к рассвету,
И в полчаса все вещи переставить,
Еще любил я белый подоконник,
Цветок и воду, и стакан граненый,
И небосвод голубизны зеленой,
И то, что я — поэт и беззаконник.
А если был июнь и день рожденья
Боготворил я праздник суетливый,
Стихи друзей и женщин поздравленья,
Хрустальный смех и звон стекла счастливый,
И завиток волос неповторимый,
И этот поцелуй неотвратимый .
Расставлено все в доме по-другому,
Июнь пришел, я не томлюсь по дому,
В котором жизнь меня терпенью учит
И кровь моя мутится в день рожденья,
И тайная меня тревога мучит,—
Что сделал я с высокою судьбою,
О боже мой, что сделал я с собою!
By Harriet Staff
From Russia: Beyond the Headlines, a great review of the new anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry, which is collected on the website Big Bridge and edited by Larissa Shmailo.
Contributors include Philip Nikolayev, Vladimir Gandelsman, Katia
Kapovich, Polina Barskova, Marina Boroditskaya, Dmitry Kuzmin, Maxim
Amelin, Elena Fanailova, Mikhail Aizenberg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya,
Alexander Ulanov, Ruslan Komadey, Vita Korneva, Alexander Stessin,
Andrei Sen-Senkov, Sergey Stratanovsky, Alexei Tsvetkov, Maria Rybakova,
Maria Stepanova, Alexandr Skidan, Bakhyt Kenjeev, Nariste Alieva, Felix
Chechik, Vadim Mesyats, and many more. Phoebe Taplin writes of the
anthology:
New York-based Shmailo first approached the webzine “Big
Bridge” in June 2012 “with the idea of an ultra-contemporary anthology
of Russian poetry.” The resulting collection is reaching international
audiences and there are plans to extend into a more comprehensive,
bilingual print edition.
The anthology celebrates the arts of translation as well as poetry.
Shmailo told RBTH: “the poem needed to be beautiful in English as well
as a good reflection of the original Russian.” She detects a new
excitement about Russian writing in the United States and believes “we
are all falling in love with literary Russia all over again.”
Shmailo has included “émigré voices with still-strong Russian roots,”
among them influential figures like Bakhyt Kenjeev. One of his poems
uses the timeless imagery of the wanderer: “argonaut” or “nomad,”
sailing to shore, or taking to the road. Another of Kenjeev’s
bittersweet elegies looks back at the icons of a Soviet youth (“Sputnik,
Laika,/ then Gagarin…”) and forward to an alien future.
Moscow and New York are home to many of the anthology’s poets and
translators, but there is a rich geographical diversity too, including
writers from Israel, Kyrgyzstan or Colorado. The poems are recent,
written since the year 2000, but the range of writers’ ages is
remarkable.
Some poets’ lives span the eras, like Arkadii Dragomoschenko who died
last year, or 77-year-old Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a veteran Soviet
dissident, one of eight courageous protestors in the 1968 “Red Square
Demonstration.” Others represent a new generation, like Ruslan Komadey,
born in 1990 in Kamchatka, whose thoughtful poetry reflects the slow
“cycles of the earth.”
“I wanted to include both established and emerging voices in a wide
range of styles,” said Shmailo. There are formal experiments, free or
fragmented verse, and poetic prose. But the themes echo through the
centuries: Love, death, pain and religion, the inner world of dreams,
the external realities of new homes, or native lands, and the tensions
of living between the two.
[. . .]
Shmailo writes in her preface: “what Russians from Rurik to post-post
perestroika have always done … is wrestle with the prokliatye voprosy,
the “accursed questions”…” Big, abstract themes may underlie them, but
the subtlest poems focus on barely visible details.
In one of Mikhail Aizenberg’s poems, translated by James Kates, “… a
tiny moth has come awake,/ and flies like a negligible feather/
reminding me of something about you.” Alexei Tsetkov’s “ashes” has this
shining glimpse of human delusion: “so we keep walking in the tall grass
/ where cats are chasing butterflies / and leap catching with their
paws / only the empty bright air.”
A rich and diverse feast of contemporary verse is available in
English and slated to be released in a bilingual edition in print.
The anthology celebrates the arts of
translation as well as poetry. Pictured: Dmitry Vodennikov. Source: Olga
Salij / PhotoXpress.ru
Poetry is not well represented in the global view of Russian literature,
in part because linguistic nuances
make poems harder to translate than a story or a novel. New York-based Larissa
Shmailo, editor of a groundbreaking anthology, hopes to change all that. “Twenty-first
Century Russian Poetry” tantalizes English-speaking readers with selected poems
from fifty writers.
Russia’s literary
heritage continues to inspire today’s writers. There is an ongoing tradition of
poems about other poets. Where once Akhmatova dedicated her verses to Blok (and
vice versa), now Elena Fanailova writes about Gogol and Irina Mashinskimourns the suicide of Boris Ryzhy, a young
poet from Yekaterinburg.
In her verses “In
Nabokov’s Memory,” Katia Kapovich pays tribute to those, like Nabokov, who: “… never settled down to sink his roots/ in any
fathermotherland.” Maxim Amelin, winner of this year’s Solzhenitsyn award,
celebrates a range of cultures in his rich, allusive work: “If we wipe our memory clean / of its
lingering garbage,/ what then will ever remain?”
Fusions and borrowings are everywhere. Polina Barskova, whose latest translated collection (“The
Zoo in Winter”) had a series of poems with epigraphs from Hamlet, also favors
classical references: “filching Orpheus or fibbing Odysseus.” Catherine
Ciepiela’s translations of Barskova are a sneak preview of “Relocations,” an
anthology of poetry by women due out from Zephyr Press next month.
Ruth Fainlight’s pitch-perfect version of Maria Boroditskaya’s poem to
Cordelia, playfully subverts gender and genre. She tells the daughter of
Shakespeare’s King Lear to reject her tragic destiny: “Like a puppy,/ Pull him by the leg of his pants with
your teeth/ Into the game, into comedy!” Emigrés and wanderers
New York-based Shmailo first
approached the webzine “Big Bridge” in June 2012 “with the idea of an
ultra-contemporary anthology of Russian poetry.” The resulting collection is
reaching international audiences and there are plans to extend into a more
comprehensive, bilingual print edition.
The anthology celebrates the arts of translation as well as poetry.
Shmailo told RBTH: “the poem needed to be beautiful in English as well
as
a good reflection of the original Russian.” She detects a new excitement
about Russian writing in the United States and believes “we are all
falling in
love with literary Russia all over again.”
Shmailo has included “émigré voices with still-strong Russian roots,”
among them influential figures like Bakhyt Kenjeev. One of his poems uses the
timeless imagery of the wanderer:
“argonaut” or “nomad,” sailing to shore, or taking to the road. Another
of Kenjeev’s bittersweet elegies looks back at the icons of a Soviet youth (“Sputnik, Laika,/ then Gagarin…”) and
forward to an alien future.
Moscow and New
York are home to many of the anthology’s poets and translators, but there is a
rich geographical diversity too, including writers from Israel, Kyrgyzstan or
Colorado. The
poems are recent, written since the year 2000, but the range of writers’ ages is
remarkable.
Some poets’ lives span the eras, like Arkadii Dragomoschenko who died
last year, or 77-year-old Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a veteran Soviet dissident,
one of eight courageous protestors in the 1968 “Red Square Demonstration.” Others represent a
new generation, like Ruslan Komadey, born in 1990 in Kamchatka, whose thoughtful poetry reflects the slow “cycles of the earth.”
“I wanted to include both established and emerging voices in a wide
range of styles,” said Shmailo. There are formal experiments, free or
fragmented verse, and poetic prose. But the themes echo through the
centuries: Love, death, pain and religion, the inner world of dreams,
the
external realities of new homes, or native lands, and the tensions of
living
between the two. Big themes; recurring dreams
Shmailo writes in her preface: “what Russians from Rurik to post-post
perestroika have always done … is wrestle with the prokliatye voprosy, the
"accursed questions"…” Big,
abstract themes may underlie them, but the subtlest poems focus on barely visible
details.
In one of Mikhail
Aizenberg’s poems, translated by James Kates, “… a tiny moth has come awake,/
and flies like a negligible feather/ reminding me of something about you.” Alexei
Tsetkov’s “ashes” has this shining glimpse of human delusion: “so we keep
walking in the tall grass / where cats are chasing butterflies / and leap catching with their paws /
only the empty bright air.”
Maria Rybakova’s
verse-novel “Gnedich” builds on the work of its namesake poet, one-eyed, dreamy
Nikolai Gnedich and his translation of the “The Iliad.” For Rybakova, like
Lermontov and others, dreams are a recurring motif, revealing an interior
world:
“… at night,/ when the
bed was rocking/ and calling itself/ in the false language of dreams,/ 'a
boat.'” Marina Boroditskaya, in Sasha Dugdale’s powerful translation, imagines
herself judged by the “heavenly medical board” and found wanting: “You will wake as a woman again/ With winter
upon you.”
The selected poems are brief, sweet tasters from a Russian feast; in its
current form the anthology is tantalizing and uneven. It might have been useful
to list the poets in alphabetical order and to provide a fuller introduction
that would lead new readers into the text. A slight sense of exclusivity is
reinforced by Eugene Ostashevsky’s
clever version of Igor Belov’s poem about translation, where knowledge of the
original (provided in Russian) is essential to get “the inside joke.”
But these are quibbles and
Ostashevsky’s heroic puns (“Hector/ hectors. Menelaus/lays many”) are worth it. Poetry has often
been poorly translated, Shmailo explained, because the translator lacked the
poet's ear. Gathering together “many superb poets fully bilingual in Russian
and English who are also experienced translators,” Shmailo and her team have
produced something unusual and fascinating: a contemporary Russian poetry
anthology translated by poets.
Please join us on Thursday, April 11, 6:00 pm, at New York City's Cornelia Street Cafe for a special sampling from the forthcoming Big Bridge Magazine anthology, "Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry," edited by Larissa Shmailo
Poets and Translators: Philip Nikolayev, Katia Kapovich, Irina Mashinski, Dana Golin, Alexander Cigale, Andrey Gritsman, Larissa Shmailo
