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AN ANTHOLOGY WINNOWED FROM 800 POETS D.M.Thomas’ appraisal of poems by Russian women and the translations |
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| VALENTINA POLUKHINA & DANIEL
WEISSBORT (Editors)
The times have mercifully gone when Akhmatova could write: ‘I who know only the one city…’ Many of these poets show a Western European familiarity with Paris, Rome, London, New York and Berkeley. Even if they have not travelled in their bodies, their imaginations can now travel freely. Josef Brodsky is a major inspiration. There is an extravagance in their writing as though they are testing the new freedom — somewhat uneasily. The critic Dmitry Polishchuk has referred to ‘a new kind of baroque, with novel structures, combining the far-fetched, the heterogeneous, the incompatible, in a poetics of contrast.’ One might compare this with the extravagance of Mayakovsky and others, in the ‘new dawn’ of Bolshevism. Only their vision looked grandiloquently outwards, to embrace (and kill) millions; whereas these women look inwards, into the self, the spirit. The decision to limit the anthology to women poets was arrived at fairly arbitrarily: there were simply too many worthwhile poets. Daniel Weissbort acknowledges in his introduction that the decision upset many in Russia, even among the poets selected. The country of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva surely did not need positive discrimination. Was there ‘women’s mathematics, women’s art’? One or two of the poets interviewed reveal a love of abstraction, of theory, even a slight pretentiousness, which we associate more with male writers. Probably it is time to put ‘women’s poetry’ to sleep; but the important thing is that there are riches here. Of course, we English speakers are seeing through a glass darkly. I have never agreed with Robert Frost’s view that ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’. It is not true to my experience; otherwise I would never have felt the greatness of Homer, Dante, Rilke, of whose languages I am ignorant. But I am sure it is easier to convey some essence of a poet if a substantial body of his or her work is being translated. It is much harder when, as in this anthology, only a brief selection can be offered. Verse translators have to struggle to reconcile two intractable elements, a poem’s literal sense and its form. Preserving both, as Olga Sedakova remarks, ‘is overambitious. Yet there are many in our country who have mastered the art of doing precisely that.’ Russian poets are fortunate; their language has many more potential rhymes than ours, partly thanks to their inflections which open up endless internal rhymes and end-rhymes. With our short, uninflected words, we struggle. One American Russian translator of Pushkin, trying to reproduce the metre of The Bronze Horseman, had to stick in a pointless word in ‘I love thee, Peter’s own creation’, then absurdly conjured up the Neva’s ‘perfluctation’ (Pushkin has ‘techenie’ — ‘flow’) for a rhyme. Instant death of the poem, and Pushkin! Re-creating a form is not only very difficult, it can also be dangerous, for the ‘same’ form in English may create a very different effect. On the other hand, if translators disregard metre and rhyme altogether — as a great many in this anthology do — they sacrifice much of the music of the poem, its ‘charm’, and what Akhmatova called ‘the blessedness of repetition’. Free verse has never quite caught on in Russia. In the effort to find — not the ‘same’ form but some equivalent form — in English, free verse can sometimes be suitable and effective; but the stylistic differences between poets inevitably become diminished: imagine, say, Frost and Yeats ‘translated’ into free verse. Svetlana Kekova, in an interview, refers to rhyme and other poetic devices as a reflection of the correspondence of phenomena, the fact that ‘everything which exists has one source, one Creator.’ The formal devices evoke diversity and exuberance, however, as well as unity. ‘Rhyme is a woman, trying on clothes’, begins a poem by Tatyana Voltskaya. Free verse can seem like someone just grabbing jeans and a T-shirt from a rack and rushing to check-out. I liked best those who had clearly made an effort to echo, though not slavishly, the metre and rhyme. Carol Rumens shows what a good poet she is in her and Yuri Drobyshev’s versions of Ella Krylova and Evgeniya Lavut. Maura Dooley and Terence Dooley likewise, translating Vera Pavlova’s ‘Sun’: How, when the sun first rose, They have, rightly, not tried to reproduce Pavlova’s pentameter and alternating rhyme, but their version is rhythmic, haunting, musical. For a short, striking lyric by Olga Ivanova, Jenefer Coates has moved from a flexible pentameter to short, irregular lines: I meet myself each and every day It’s a fine translation; I know it’s fine, even though I have never read the original. I sense an echo of an Akhmatova poem, equally short, from the period of the Terror, which begins ‘When a man dies, / his portraits change.’ Ivanova’s simplicity is reminiscent of how the Acmeists, after the Revolution and in the face of grandiloquence, emphasized clarity and sharpness. Russia is going through a time of immense change and turbulence, and there is a need for voices which are quiet, down-to-earth and laconic. Ina Kabysh has a similar quality. Her poem about a prodigal daughter is one of comparatively few which westerners might consider feminist. But she has a light, engaging touch as she describes how the prodigal daughter, unlike the prodigal son, ‘slinks’ in after dark, ‘encumbered with children’. Marya Kildibekova demonstrates a joyous madcap imagination in creating a voyage, on a ship like the Titanic, in which such celebrities as Stalin, Hitler, Mandelstam, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe and Freddie Mercury mingle together. This poem is well translated by Roy Fisher. Marina Boroditskaya’s verse is wry, fresh and charming: ‘Hullo, Lord! / A minor poet / is writing to You, / a voice from the choir, / a little pine tree from the forest, / a clarinet in the school orchestra…’ (‘Sound Letter’, translated by Ruth Fainlight). It’s not surprising that she also writes for children. A poem beginning ‘So much gentleness from unknown men’ is that most rare of creations, a poem by a woman praising men. Simple kindnesses, she says, from a Parisian waiter, a Cockney stall-holder, and an old black man guiding her to an airport gate in New York — these memories allow the pearl to stay peaceful in its oyster, the moon to stay calm in the heavens. I liked the imaginative intensity of Nina Kossman, longtime American resident who has translated her own poems. I also found myself responding to Inna Kulishova, Elena Shvarts, Elena Ushakova and — already mentioned — Vera Pavlova and Tatyana Voltskaya. Russian poetry is in a healthy state as it leaves the glaciers of Communism for the steamy jungle of western hedonism.
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Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
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