Poetry | Russia | Russian | United States
October, 2020“David and Orpheus” juxtaposes the archetypal musicians of Abrahamic and Graeco-Roman religion. David and Orpheus are paralleled throughout: via their instruments, harp and lyre; their certainty–David’s in his god, Orpheus’s in his art (their uncertainty is vice versa); their woodland location; and their situation just after a crossroads in their stories–David’s anointing as King of Israel, and Orpheus’s return from Hades. The paralleling also happens on a formal level: the pair occupy separate stanzas, but are united through rhyme, which operates across–not within–stanzas (I have replicated the rhyme scheme in my translation). But whereas David sees a future, embodied in the tradition-bearing “tree” of his people, Orpheus, having lost Eurydice, has a fatalistic disregard for life. This is reflected in the imagery of the second part: whereas David’s extends to the twentieth century through Christian imagery, Orpheus’s remains resolutely classical.
From a wasp trapped in a clock, “The Wasp in the Hour” spins an allegory of our implication in time. Kutik admits this is “a difficult poem”–its flow of images can be baffling. In part 1, the clock becomes a cuckoo, then a seed, while the wasp becomes a zero (a non-existent numeral on a clock); the Roman numerals on the clock face turn it into the shield which Horace famously dropped at Philippi, when the triumvirs defeated the Republican army; then the clock hands – which are also ancient arrows–turn into a sewing needle, moving time forward. In part 2, this needle is thread, which becomes Zeus’s golden rain, which impregnated Danaë; the clock becomes a spinning wheel, with the wasp a spindle inside it, and Zeus its thread; Zeus attempts to drown the clock, which is his father Cronus (Time), to avenge his siblings, eaten by Cronus; finally, the clock turns into a ball of yarn, and its hands are knitting needles. In part 3, this yarn is stripy socks worn by the wasp; the clock becomes a football, then semen, then a cup; the wasp is a zero again, and therefore “nil-time,” or our present, which is represented by open mouths (zeros); finally, the clock turns into a round table, then the firmament, then a person–and the wasp drowns in the cup/Time. Kutik’s ultimate message is that “living here means wasting Time,” and that “we must accept ourselves as numerals (‘golden tsars’) of a much bigger 'round table’ than a clock face, that is the sky itself.”
In “Cats’ July” Kutik looks into the dreams of cats and sees their great and terrible history before their decline into creatures of luxury. The domestication of the cat in Ancient Egypt is equated with first the seduction of Cleopatra and then the assassination of Julius Caesar. The final stanza is a feline Actium–the deciding battle of the Roman Civil Wars–with cats cast both as the fighting ships and as Mark Antony.
“In Memory of Anton and Allen” is Kutik’s obituary for his Persian blue cat Anton and his friend Allen Ginsberg.
- Georgina Barker
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
October, 2020Elena’s best stories evidence a peculiar knack of showing us characters who seem to shift in and out of conventional reality and yet at the same time make us knock into our own very real hopes, fears, insecurities, peculiarities. It’s a good idea when considering her material to put aside the either/or questions we instinctively ask: Is this taking place in some interior world or the tangible exterior world? Are we dealing with real actions taking place within normal time or with a timeless, symbolic piece happening in some place slightly shifted to one side? Are these two people two different characters or different aspects of just one? With Elena, there is no either/or, nor will she offer you her own answers to your questions. You are delightfully on your own, feeling your way by a kind of echolocation, meeting strange people who, even when they are superficially unlike you, your loved ones, or your circle of acquaintances, nonetheless trigger strong feelings of recognition. All this she does with a beguiling naturalness, an apparent effortlessness and artlessness, a complete lack of apology, self-doubt, or explanation.
The joy of translating Elena is that of going for a ride and just hanging on, wherever she takes you. And remaining faithful to prose that reflects in its lexis and syntax the combination of simplicity and unexpectedness that marks her characterisation.
- Richard Coombes
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
October, 2020I was first introduced to the Soviet cartoon Малыш и Карлсон [Junior and Karlsson] when I was studying Russian during the summer of 2013. The cartoon follows the adventures of a shy but imaginative boy who is pushed to daring-dos by Karlsson, a plump man who flies around with a jelly-powered propeller on his back. The cartoon was beloved in the USSR and continues to be a staple in Russian households. The story is whimsical, charming, and a little fear-inducing (so much playing atop—and in the air between—roofs!). And like many cherished Soviet cartoons—take Vinni Pukh, for example, the Soviet cartoon adaptation of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh—it is an adaptation of a translation, based on the Swedish story Karlsson på taket [Karlsson on the Roof] by Astrid Lindgren, who also wrote Pippi Longstocking.
Years later, it is an honor to tackle a collection of stories with a titular reference to this beloved character, who in adaptation became as Soviet as he was originally Swedish. The story presented here has the same title as the collection by prolific author and playwright Natalia Rubanova: Karlsson, Dancing the Flamenco. The character here is a woman, whose pudgy form as a girl earned her the nickname after the cartoon character. The nameless narrator seeks her out, this girl with whom he experienced his first sexual awakening as a boy, the plump girl who danced around his head and continues to push him out the door to adventures, not with a jelly-powered propeller, but with the flamenco. Perhaps she is not so unlike the cartoon Karlsson, after all.
Rubanova’s prose is challenging. This collection of stories, which largely depict queer narratives but, as she has said to me, are “just about love,” is forbidden to be published in Russia since it is illegal to publish works that depict what is termed by the state as “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” Fashioned as a symphony, each piece named for a style of music, the reader is taken through a collection that defies genre, thus challenging while at once delighting the reader. Rubanova’s writing is informed by so many different factors, but musicality and its breakage is a great one of them, as Rubanova is a classically-trained pianist. (I myself played the French horn for six years, which is a long time to be bad at a heavy instrument.) How to navigate the musical intervals of her work, how to render the dissonance?
One of my favorite lessons I’ve learned from Soviet cartoons that there is a letting-go crucial to wonder. As in the translation of these texts, there is an openness to learn: listen to the dissonance, let the strange note ring out, play with it. Crack open the jelly. Power up the propeller. Let the flamenco fly.
- Rachael Daum
Poetry (excerpts) | Russia | Russian
July, 2020In early 1937, during his third year of exile in the southern Russian city of Voronezh in the "black earth" region, Osip Mandelstam’s desperation grows as he becomes increasingly uncertain that he can save himself and his wife, Nadezhda. He has by this time learned about the purges and has heard on the radio news that Kirov's murderers had been "found"—the show trials were in full swing. The Great Terror is beginning as he completes the second of the three Voronezh notebooks.
- John High and Matvei Yankelevich
In the late summer of 1830, Alexander Pushkin traveled to Boldino, a town four hundred miles east of Moscow, to settle the business of coming into legal ownership of the family estate which would complete the dowry he needed to marry his betrothed, Natalia Goncharova. Due to an outbreak of cholera, Pushkin was unable to return to the capital as soon as he had hoped: the roads were blocked by quarantine checkpoints or altogether closed by a cordon sanitaire. During three months of what turned out to be the legendarily productive “Boldino autumn,” Pushkin wrote the final chapters of Eugene Onegin as well as a number of other works, including The Tales of Belkin (considered the birth-site of all Russian fiction), and four short verse plays known collectively as “The Little Tragedies,” one of which is Feast During the Plague.
This short play draws on Scottish writer John Wilson’s lengthy drama The City of the Plague, from an 1816 collection of the same title. Wilson, who served for many years as chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, was a poet in his youth and was friendly with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Thomas de Quincey, and Sir Walter Scott. He also wrote voluminous criticism, stories, and novels, primarily for Blackwood’s, a well-known conservative miscellany that often published the British Romantics. So, the original of Feast During the Plague is itself a translation of sorts, from English into Russian; a not uncommon example of a translation, or a very free imitation (and a severe abridgment) that became an acknowledged classic in its new context, outliving its source.
I translated Pushkin’s play in the spring of 1999 to serve as a libretto for an operetta by the émigré Russian composer Sergei Dreznin. I edited and even composed parts of the translation at his piano as he played and sang the melodies I was to accommodate. I saw the operetta performed only once in New York City, staged by Garik Chernyakhovsky (1944-2015), a legendary and much-beloved Moscow theater director who had recently emigrated to New York. I believe it was later performed in Vienna and perhaps elsewhere in Europe.
The peculiar musical circumstances necessitated that I keep close to Pushkin’s iambic blank verse in the speeches as well as the meter and rhyme of the two songs. Two decades later, finding some charm in this earnest early effort and resisting the retrospective urge to move away from the formal approach, I have made only small corrections and, partly thanks to poet Steven Zultanski’s suggestions, a few minor improvements.
- Matvei Yankelevich
The entire translator's note can be found at the beginning of the post, before the play.
This selection presents verses by Osip Mandelstam written in 1937, just one year before his second arrest and subsequent disappearance in a labor camp. The premonition of imminent death left its imprint on them. But these lines are not a cry of despair; rather they express recognition of the tragedy of being, concern for the preservation of Russia's cultural and moral heritage, and faith in the poet's mission.
- Boris Kokotov
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Ilya Danishevsky is a Russian author and publisher for the opposition. He graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute and studied the history of religions at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He is editor-in-chief of the Anhedonia book project (published by AST), dedicated to studying the institution of violence in contemporary Russia. Danishevsky is interested in those who describe reality in spite of official discourse. In 2014, he published his novel Tenderness for the Dead (Nezhnost’ k mertvym), and his book Mannelig in Chains (Mannelig v tsepyakh) came out in 2018.
Poet and artist Nastya Denisova (b. 1984, Leningrad) lives in Saint Petersburg. Her poetry books include There’s Nothing (Nichego net, 2006), Incl (Vkl, 2010), and They Touched and Loved Each Other (Trogali lyubili drug druga, 2019). She co-edited the poetry anthology Le Lyu Li: A Book of Lesbian Love Lyrics (Le lyu li – kniga lesbiyskoy lyubovnoy liriki, 2008). In 2012, she participated in Riga’s Ambassadors of Poetry: North-South program. Her work has been anthologized in 12 Poets from Russia (12 poetov iz Rossii, Latvia, 2017), Windows on the World: Fifty Writers, Fifty Views (USA, 2014), and Tutta la pienezza nel mio petto: Poesia giovane a San Pietroburgo (All the Fullness in my Chest: Young Poetry of Saint Petersburg, Italy, 2015). Her writing has been published in many print and online journals, including Air (Vozdukh), New Literary Review (Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye), The Way Home (Put’ domoy), TextOnly, Colon (Dvoetochie), and elsewhere. As an artist she works in video, text, and image, and samples of her work can be viewed here: vimeo.com/nastyadenisova.
Gila Loran (Galina Zelenina) is a native Muscovite. She has published a prose collection, Freakipedia, or the Adventures of a Shard (Frikipedia, ili Pokhozhdenia oskolka, 2010), and three poetry collections: W (Zh, 2000), Voilà: A Genre Anthology (Voilà: Antologia zhanra, 2004), and A Cow Ate [the First Word] ([Pervoe slovo] syela korova, 2008). Zelenina is a historian and the author of From Judas’s Scepter to Fool’s Staff: Jews in the Medieval Spanish Court (Ot skipetra Iudy k zhezly shuta: prodvornye yevrei v srednevekovoy Ispanii, 2007), Judaism Two: Faces of the Renaissance (Iudaika dva: renessans v litsakh, 2015), and The Fiery Foe of the Marranos: Life and Death Under the Surveillance of the Inquisition (Ognennyy vrag marranov: zhizn i smert pod nadzorom inkvizitsii, 2018). She was editor and translator at the Gesharim/Cultural Bridges (Mosty kultury/Gesharim) publishing house and editor-in-chief of the website Booknik. She has also taught at Moscow State University, the Higher School of Economics, and the Russian State University of the Humanities (RSUH). Currently, Zelenina is Associate Professor in RSUH’s Center for Biblical and Jewish Studies and a Research Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation.
After Marina Tsvetaeva emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1922, she suffered from a sense of homelessness that left her desiring fulfilling relationships. As a romantic, Tsvetaeva felt the rift between reality and fantasy, body and spirit, thought and feeling. She felt an aversion to the physicality of the world, as this physicality was a barrier that prevented a direct connection to the essence of nature and those around her. Her feelings on love reflected this focus on spirit rather than body, as well as the desire for all-consuming love from one person to another rather than mutual love.
Living as a poet in exile, disconnected from her spiritual motherland and audience, Tsvetaeva often despaired in the 1930s that she had lost her creative abilities and was doomed to lose her lofty position as a poet. She relied on correspondences to establish a separate space for her to express intimacy and to escape the spiritual isolation she felt in her self-imposed exile from home. Her greatest inspiration throughout her life came from the intense, one-sided adoration she exhibits in her letters.
In 1936, Baron Anatoly von Steiger, a young Russian émigré, sent her a book of his poems from a sanatorium for tubercular patients in Switzerland. They had met briefly at one of her poetry readings but Tsvetaeva could not fully recall their meeting. However, as a young poet of noble descent, ill and lonely, Tsvetaeva immediately developed a maternal love for Steiger as she fabricated an ideal romantic image of him. In her first letter to him, excerpted below, Tsvetaeva assumes the maternal role and makes clear her desire for this “enclosing and embracing” love, this filial relationship with her young, ill poet. It is over the course of the following two months, after receiving Steiger’s initial correspondence, that she writes the cycle, Poems to an Orphan. Tsvetaeva recreates her former creative power by immersing herself in this constructed romance. She fills the space around the heroine with images of an imaginary lover, while dissolving herself into nature, embedding her own emotions into the natural world around her.
After this cycle, Tsvetaeva wrote only a few more poems before her return to the Soviet Union and subsequent death. Given the significant role that correspondences, particularly with Boris Pasternak, played in inspiring Tsvetaeva’s poetry throughout her life in exile, this last relationship with Steiger was her final attempt to connect with what she felt was her former self.
- Tara M. Wheelwright
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).