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I probably won't be posting for a few days because we're going home to Newport for the holiday weekend, which really isn't as patrician as it sounds, believe me. Though we'll be thinking about you over martinis at the yacht club...ok, behind the yacht club...or, rather, at a dive bar some distance from the yacht club.
I forgot to mention that yesterday was Joseph Brodsky's birthday...or would have been:
Letter to an Archaeologist
Citizen, enemy, mama's boy, sucker, utter
garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiling water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven.
Also: we didn't love our women, but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of pickax that hurts dead iron;
still, it's gentler than what we've been told or have said ourselves.
Stranger! move carefully through our carrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells.
Leave our names alone. Don't reconstruct those vowels,
consonants, and so forth: they won't resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces, feces, and barks, and barks.
Go here for some more Brodsky poems.
[But wood s lot didn't forget!]
Robert Pinsky reviews a new book of Eugenio Montale's poetry, Montale in English.
A wonderful book just published by Handsel Books is Montale in English, an anthology of translations by many hands. Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) has exerted a continuing, large influence on poetry in English. This book, edited by Harry Thomas, presents the range and depth of the great Italian modernist's attraction for those who write in English.
Poetry in translation has had an especially great appeal for American poets and readers in the decades since the deaths of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Williams and Frost. Among modernist poets from other countries, Montale's contemporary Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) has in some ways provided a hero of the explicit and the inclusive. In contrast, Montale during the same period has been for American poetry something like a hero of the implicit and the suggestive. In other words, Montale is a great poet of the ineffable, tracing spiritual longings and forces that have no ready label, feelings that are powerful yet glancing.
Oh, It's just too much! Within the space of a weekend, I went from "that funny nice guy" to "office cad." The girls from editorial are staring daggers at me when they walk by my cubicle. They walk by periodically with the expressed purpose of starring daggers as they walk past my cubicle!
But when I walk by theirs, I force a smile in a friendly, modest way -- sometimes I leave my own cubicle just to lob a friendly, modest smile in the direction of theirs as if to remind them that I am still "that friendly, funny guy" whose clever jokes they used to find so charming around the water cooler despite what has happened. But for my troubles I receive only daggers -- cold hard stares, held briefly, but meaningfully, then turned brusquely and just as meaningfully away, as if they've just decided that my blood isn't good enough to sully their blades.
But at home there is a cat I rush home to feed each evening. At lunch I'll meet an anxious friend in the park to talk her in from graduate school's ledge. Saturday, I'll walk alone in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden considering the merits of tendatious literature versus the merits of a more aesthetically motivated writing, yet not wholly unaware of the flowers and foiliage, I'll also make plans to plant a garden of my own within which I can already imagine the cat dozing...then a Russian poem will come to mind:
Two huge eyes showed
A sorrow words cannot describe,
The crystal poured away
as the flower vase overflowed.The whole room is pervaded
With languor -- sweet medicine!
Such a tiny kingdom
To swallow so much sleep.A little red wine,
A bit of May sunshine--
And the slenderest, white fingers
Breaking a thin biscuit.
Yet on Wednesday morning, I'm the office cad -- a rake! My reputation laid low by one evening's indescretion.
Victor Sonkin on Dmitry Bykov's latest novel, The Evacuator:
Dmitry Bykov's new novel, "The Evacuator" (Evakuator), published by Vagrius earlier this year, is set in present-day Moscow. Or is it? The setting seems realistic at first. It is the familiar world of glossy magazines, supermarkets and young people working in offices. The occasional act of terrorism seems realistic too. But gradually the setting changes. Terrorist attacks become more frequent. First, a shopping center in Sokolniki is blown up; next, a huge explosion pulverizes Komsomolskaya Ploshchad with its three railway stations. The government responds vigorously, forbidding citizens from walking their dogs after 8 p.m. Within days, the city is in flames, and people are flocking to their dachas and the homes of distant provincial relatives.
An anti-utopian fantasy? Not quite. The eponymous evacuator is Igor, a computer programmer. Igor is in love with Katya, a young woman who is happily – or at least tolerably – married, with a young child. In the course of their affair, Igor reveals to Katya that he is an extraterrestrial spy, "the evacuator," on a mission to take several worthy humans to his blissful planet after things get nasty on Earth. He gives Katya the choice of whom to save. Besides her daughter, she can select five people.
Sunday, May 29, 8pm
at the Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (bet Bleecker and Houston)
$6
Mario Susko will be reading to celebrate the release of his newest book of English-language poems, "Eternity on Hold" (Turtle Point Press). Born in Sarajevo during World War II and wounded during the recent blockade, Susko is the author of twenty-two books of poetry and the winner of Nuove Lettere Premio Internazionale di Poesia e Letteratura, the Council of Europe Award and three Fulbright scholarships. He is also the translator of James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Walt Whitman and many other Americans into the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian.
Vasyl Makhno, a Ukrainian poet living in New York, is the author of six poetry collections, and also a translator of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. His complex, elusive, metaphorically dense and extremely beautiful work, together with articles about him, may be found here.
I just came across a few of my earliest attempts at translating from Russian. They're from Mandelshtam's first book Stone:
Christmas trees burn
With tinsel in the woods.
In the bushes, toy wolves
Stare with frightening eyes.
Oh my prophetic sadness,
Oh my quiet freedom,
And the ever-laughing crystal
Of Heaven's dead dome!
**********
Suddenly, in a light shawl,
You slipped from the shadowed hall—
We disturbed no one.
We didn't wake the servants...
**********
To read only children's books,
To think only children's thoughts,
To throw away all adult things,
To rise from a deep sadness.
I am mortally weary of life.
I expect nothing from it.
But because I've seen no other
I love my poor earth.
In a far off garden I swung
On a simple wooden swing
And in a hazy fever I remember
Fir trees, dark and tall.
**********
Kinder than kind
Your face
Paler than pale
Your hand
You are far away
From the peaceful world
And everything about you
Is as it must be.
It must be this way
Your sadness
And touch
Never cooling
And the quiet sound
Of undying
Speech
But you are
Very far away.
**********
I've been given a body—what am I to do with it,
So singular and so much my own?
For the quiet joy of breathing and living,
Tell me, whom am I to thank?
I am the gardener and the flower as well.
In the world's dungeion, I am not alone.
On eternity's windowpane, already have settled
My breath, my warmth.
A pattern, no longer recognized,
Is printed on the glass.
Let the sands of the moment pour away
The precious pattern must not be wiped out.
Tomorrow is the 100th birthday of Mikhail Sholokhov, author of the classic epics "The Quiet Don" and "Virgin Soil Upturned". He was also the only Soviet writer to accept the Nobel Prize for literature.
To mark the occasion, SovLit.com is holding a celebration entitled, "100 Years of Sholokhov". Among other things, they've posted:
1. Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov.
2. The complete text of "Birthmark", Sholokhov's very first short story, published in 1924. It is a story about the clash between a young Red commander and the wizened old leader of an anti-Soviet band of marauding Cossack brigands. An unexpected connection between the two leads only to anguish, despair, and death.
3. A detailed summary of Sholokhov's tale "The Fate of a Man". During the Great Patriotic War, a Soviet soldier is captured by the Nazis, tortured, and confined to prison camps. He loses his entire family and his will to live. After the war he slips into drunkenness and depression until a young boy gives him a new reason for living.
4. Text of Sholokhov's speech to the de-Stalinizing 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1956). He blasts Soviet writers, calling most of them "dead souls". Also, while praising Aleksandr Fadeev as a good writer, he slams him as a lousy administrator.
(Fadeev was First Secretary of the Writers Union).
“Reading the World” NYC Event: Lost in Translation
Monday, May 23 at 7PM, at Housing Works Used Bookstore & Cafe
Why are fewer translated works published, and what can be done to reverse the trend?
In honor of May's designation as World in Translation Month, Housing Works presents two of the country's leading publishers of translated books in discussion with booksellers and literary critics about the difficult business of publishing, marketing, and selling works in translation. Leading the discussion will be Dennis Loy Johnson, editor of MobyLives and publisher of Melville House Books. His guests will include Chad Post and John O'Brien of the Dalkey Archive Press, perhaps America's leading publisher of translated books, Michael Orthofer of The Complete Review.com, and Margarrita Shalina, buyer for St. Mark's Bookstore in New York City.
Just before last night's thunderstorm, E— gave me the walking tour of the Brooklyn Riviera. The sky was a purplish blue and thunder and lightning were bursting and crackling over the Brooklyn Bridge and I couldn't help but think of Mayakovsky's poem:
Give, Coolidge, a shout of joy!...
I too will spare no words about good things.
Blush at my praise, go red as our flag,
however united states of america you may be.As a crazed believer enters a church,
retreats into a monastery cell, austere and plain;
so I, in graying evening haze,
humbly set foot on Brooklyn Bridge.As a conqueror presses into a city all shattered,
on cannon with muzzles craning high as a giraffe –
so, drunk with glory, eager to live,
I clamber, in pride, upon Brooklyn Bridge.As a foolish painter plunges his eye,
sharp and loving, into a museum madonna,
so I, from the near skies bestrewn with stars,
gaze at New York through the Brooklyn Bridge.New York, heavy and stifling till night,
has forgotten its hardships and height;
and only the household ghosts
ascend in the lucid glow of its windows.Here the elevateds drone softly.
And only their gentle droning
tell us: here trains are crawling and rattling
like dishes being cleared into a cupboard.While a shopkeeper fetched sugar
from a mill that seemed to project out of the water –
the masts passing under the bridge
looked no larger than pins.I am proud of just this mile of steel;
upon it, my visions come to life, erect –
here’s a fight for construction instead of style,
an austere disposition of bolts and steel.If the end of the world befall –
and chaos smash our planet to bits,
and what remains will be this
bridge, rearing above the dust of destruction;then, as huge ancient lizards are rebuilt
from bones finer than needles, to tower in museums
so, from this bridge, a geologist of the centuries
will succeed in recreating our contemporary world.He will say: -- Yonder paw of steel
once joined the seas and the prairies;
from this spot, Europe rushed to the West,
scattering to the wind Indian feathers.This rib reminds us of a machine –
just imagine, would there be hands enough,
after planting a steel foot in Manhattan,
to yank Brooklyn to oneself by the lip?By the cables of electric strands,
I recognize the era succeeding the steam age –
here men had ranted on radio.
Here men had ascended in planes.For some, life here had no worries;
for others, it was a prolonged and hungry howl.
From this spot, jobless men
leapt headlong into the Hudson.Now my canvas is unobstructed
as it stretches on cables of string to the feet of the stars.
I see: here stood Mayakovsky,
stood, composing verse, syllable by syllable.I stare as an Eskimo gapes at a train,
I seize on it as a tick fastens to an ear.
Brooklyn Bridge –
yes…
That’s quite a thing!
Then we got stuck in the downpour until E— summoned her driver to take us to a bar.
And then there's Hart Crane's poem of the same name and subject:
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited; Only in darkness is thy shadow clear. The City's fiery parcels all undone, Already snow submerges an iron year . . .O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
(excerpted from "Brooklyn Bridge")
