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
Kazakhstan | Poetry | Russian
July, 2020Oral Arukenova is one of a dozen talented Kazakhstani writers whose work I’ve had the pleasure to get to know over the last few years. I became acquainted with Arukenova and her writing when a colleague included her work in our proposal for an anthology of contemporary Kazakhstani women’s prose, recently the fortunate winner of a RusTrans grant for Russian-language fiction in translation. It was surprisingly easy to find enough good short fiction to fill the anthology–and once we had enough, I kept discovering more, all of it wonderful and diverse. I knew Oral as a Kazakh-language fiction writer who crafts stories that take an ironic approach to Kazakh cultural traditions and mores. Thanks to these two poems, I now also know her as a Russian-language poet. Her quarantine poems struck me for their raw, honest examination of the emotional states stemming from the ongoing virus-related quarantine in Kazakhstan’s cities. There, police have zealously enforced restrictions governing who can leave their house, making every visit to the park or run on the riverbank a stealthy act of sometimes desperate self-expression. The first, shorter poem strikes a quiet tone, full of a simple longing for air, beauty, and room, where the narrator wishes to speak and breathe freely, на родном–a phrase I’ve translated for the rhythm as “in my way,” but which usually means “in my native language,” hinting at the tension of multilingualism. The second poem is more of a sweeping survey of emotional types in the city, where people jostle each other in line at the store, plug away at their remote work in isolation, and trade tips for how to navigate an online portal to get their 42,500-tenge government assistance deposit (about $100). Here, paranoia, financial desperation, and even the boredom of a lonely translator (!) can be hidden away in quarantine as easily as a bruise under a face mask, and a snappy refrain can almost help us hold it all together.
- Shelley Fairweather-Vega
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
Canada/Belize | Russian | Short Fiction
June, 2019Lida Yusupova is the author of three books of poetry, Irasaliml (1995), Ritual C-4 (2013), and Dead Dad (2016), and co-author with Margarita Meklina of the prose collection Love Has Four Hands (U liubvi chetyre ruki, 2008). Dead Dad was awarded the Difference (Razlichie) poetry prize in 2017, honoring her “books in which poetry becomes an investigation. ... The jury took special note of the innovative and uncompromising language in her discussions of violence.” In 2016, she received an invitation to attend the AATSEEL (the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) conference, an honor offered annually to a single poet. Her work has been published in the journals Air (Vozdukh), Mitya’s Magazine (Mitin Zhurnal), St. Petersburg Review, Atlanta Review, and others. Her verse has been translated into English, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Czech, and Polish. She has lived in Petrozavodsk, St. Petersburg, and Jerusalem, and now resides in Toronto and on an island off the coast of Belize. Kirill Kobrin has said of Yusupova’s poems, “Their angle of observation and description is nearly impossible for Russian poetry.”
Friedrich Chernyshev (b. 1989) studied at the Donetsk Medical University in Ukraine and currently lives in Kiev. He is an LGBTQI activist and coordinates the transgender program for Insight, a Ukrainian LGBT community organization. His translations from German and Ukrainian have been appearing since 2013 in TextOnly, Air (Vozdukh), and elsewhere. His own poems were first published in the gender issue of ’Nother Man – ’Nother Woman (Yshsho Odin — Yshsho Odna) of Almaty, Kazakhstan. You can find his work on textonly.ru, litkarta.ru, and polutona.ru, and you can read (in Russian) about his coming out on upogau.org.
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.
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