Minimalism? Stevens, “the nothing that is”; Williams, “a machine made of words.” Economy of means, focus on surfaces, concreteness, eschewing figuration, making silence and absence present, self-effacement, and the spareness of Suprematism. In the American context, Robert Morris, “Maximum resistance to…perceptual separation” inviting the viewer's participation and co-production in the creation of meaning. Donald Judd's “Specific Objects” and their “indeterminancy of arrangement” making for unclassifiable art “between” painting and sculpture, challenging the poetry/not poetry distinction, non-Art references and the use of industrial materials akin to citation, cliché, common speech, public announcement, advertising slogan, proverb, etc. But also Zen, a nearly spiritual pursuit, and human voice as sound sculpture. Not a movement: “Minimalism is not really an idea; it ended before it started” (Sol LeWitt). In the Russian context of the ‘60s and ‘70s, a resumption of the ‘30s generation's Absurdism, the naïve populist lyric of the war generation with its creation of a sphere for private utterance, a truly subversive act, parody of ‘50s Socialist Realism through coding, implication by omission, and ironic critique of the Soviet status quo. The emergence of Russian Conceptualism and so called SotsArt (Russian Pop Art). Yes Irony, but also pathos and a kind of aesthetics of exhaustion, both of the personal and of the historical kind. Minimalism: that legal definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. Enough said.
Yuli Gugolev was born in Moscow in 1964. He is a translator and the author of two books of poetry: Polnoe: Sobranie sochineniy (Complete: Collected Works; Moscow: OGI, 2000), and Komandirovochnye predpisaniya (Official Instructions; Moscow: Novoe izdatelstvo, 2006), which won the Moscow Count prize for 2007. In 2008, Gugolev was one of three poets invited to give a series of bilingual readings around the United States sponsored by the NEA and the Poetry Foundation in conjunction with the release of Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology from Dalkey Archives. He works in the regional division of the International Commission of the Red Cross in the Russian Federation.
Poetry | Russian | United States
December, 2009Marina Temkina was born in Leningrad in 1948 and emigrated to New York City in 1978. She has published four books of poetry in Russian: Chasti chast' (A Part of A Part), V obratnom napravlenii (In Reverse), Kalancha (Watchtower), and Canto Immigranto. Temkina's first book in English, WHAT DO YOU WANT? (just out from Ugly Duckling Presse) consists of several texts made for installations or as part of handmade artist's books, and two poems translated from Russian (by Vladislav Davidzon and Alexander Stessin) accompanied by installation images and original drawings by the author. Many of her other poems have been translated by Alfred Corn. She is a past recipient of an NEA grant and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of New York at Columbia University.
Alexei Khvostenko (1940-2004) deserves a larger, "literary" audience, but his "outsider" status is unlikely to be reversed posthumously and outside the Russian context, requiring an appreciation of him as a multi-artist (poet, singer/bard, collagist/sculptor) and an awareness of his immense popularity as a persona non grata during the exhilarating cultural moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Soviet status quo was still in place but the liberating/decadent influences of the West had flooded in. Suspector (literally: "he who suspects") is the title poem of Khvostenko's first samizdat book (1965) at the height of the Khruschev "thaw” which was to be shortly followed by the suppression and stagnation of the Brezhnev years. These words were revolutionary, eliciting the disproportionate response from the authorities that made the Russian outsider bards Pop Icons. Khvost (his nickname means "Tail”) lived in Paris after his 1977 expulsion from the USSR.
Vyacheslav Vasilievich Semikin was born on May 23, 1937 in Leningrad, USSR. He attended Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) State University, majoring in Philosophy, but left in the third year without completing his degree. He worked as a stage assistant at the Lenin Komsomol Theater, now Baltic House, and toured with the company throughout what was then the Soviet Union. In 1978, Semikin was forcibly physically removed from his home, an ancient wooden wing of an old structure on the Canal Griboedov, near Bankovsky Most. The wing was demolished. This forcible eviction, coupled with his disillusionment with the University and general feeling that he could not express himself freely, solidified his disdain of the Soviet state and propelled him further into what was to become a solitary and isolated existence. All of these experiences heavily influenced his poetry. Semikin died in February of 1990, immediately upon his return to Leningrad from a trip to New York. Neither a member of the Writer’s Union, nor a part of the Leningrad Underground which would have afforded him the opportunity to publish in Samizdat form, Semikin was never published during his lifetime.
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).