Languor Management

About this, and about that I chatted

"Of course,
sit down, comrade luminary!"

A soviet poster a day

I love this blog. Spaceeba Monsieur Klaxon!

Anti-Ahkmatova

Tamara Katayeva has written a 600-page assault on the literary legacy Anna Akhmatova, but Victor Sonkin, who sees it as little more of a critique of the much-beloved Russian poet 's characater, says "so what?"

Some critics have already expressed their outrage at Katayeva's book, and not one failed to mention that it is derivative and verbose. But certain other reviewers welcomed the book as a sign that Russian poetry of the 20th century, instead of turning into classical marble, is alive and still provokes outbursts of emotion.

Certainly, there are several hundred lines of Akhmatova's poetry that make the question of whether she was a model human being utterly irrelevant.

This reminds me of Emma Gerstein's Moscow Memoirs, which was supposed to have debunked Nadehzda and Osip Mandelshtam's literary legacy, and really just portrayed them as particularly difficult people going through particularly hard times.

My sentiments exactly

An hour or so of Soviet poster fun. Why don't we ever get tired of them? [Spaceeba, Dana!]

Three times around the fire

As someone who is currently involved with planning a wedding, I can appreciate this:

Tajik President Imomali Rakhmon has proposed fines to limit extravagant weddings and funerals in his country–the poorest of the countries of the former Soviet Union:If his proposal is accepted, guest lists for weddings would be limited to no more than 200 people and weddings could last no longer than a day. Wedding processions could include four cars maximum. As for funerals, only 100 guests would be allowed and they would be permitted to eat only one meal after the ceremony.

[Via TOL]

A surrealist with a purpose

I am infinitely pleased that Charles Simic has been named the new U.S. Poet Laureate. The first poetry reading that I went to in New York City featured Joseph Brodsky and Simic. I went, of course, to see Brodsky and, through electricity, to be that much closer to Anna Ahkmatova. I remember how excited I was when I realized that, as I made my way through Soho to the gallery where the reading was taking place, I was walking behind Brodsky. But Simic really blew me away at the reading.

Mr. Simic said his chief poetic preoccupation has been history. “I’m sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents,” he said. “If they weren’t around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity.”

Yet he balks at questions about the role of poetry in culture. “That reminds me so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, ‘What is the role of the writer?’ ” he said.

Mr. Zbig

A new translation makes available in English the collected works of one of the principal figures in postwar Polish poetry..finally. James Orr says:

Of course, for most of us, discovering “the Poland that is real” means reading works translated from Polish. The most significant such translation this year — possibly in many years — is Zbigniew Herbert’s “Collected Poems, 1956-1998” (Ecco/HarperCollins, $34.95), translated by Alissa Valles, which was published in February to (almost) universal acclaim. The book is significant for two reasons. First, Herbert himself is significant — like Frost and Auden, he’s a poet whose failure to win the Nobel Prize says more about the prize committee than about the writer. Second, his poetry is relatively difficult to find. Although most of Herbert’s collections have been translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, many of those books are now out of print. For the casual reader, then, this “Collected Poems” is the likeliest path to this poet’s achievement.

That achievement is well worth the journey. Along with Tadeusz Rozewicz, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, Herbert is one of the principal figures in postwar Polish poetry — and by extension, in European letters generally. Born in 1924, he was active in the Polish resistance during the German occupation, then became an admirably uncooperative citizen of the subsequent Soviet puppet state. (According to a recent article in Süddeutsche Zeitung, whenever Herbert was asked by the secret police to write up reports on foreign trips, he would fill them “with interpretations of the poems of the Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz ... as well as long-winded cultural-philosophical observations.”)