Languor Management

Paging Ostap Bender

Lisa Hayden Espenschade on Victor Sorokin's Ice, which was  published in English translation (Jamey Gambrell) in January 2007 by the New York Review of Books:

Summary: Not particularly recommended except as an insight into what some Russians are reading these days. Ice, a combination of melodramatic kitsch, science fiction, and pop philosophy, is a book that gets under your skin and reads quickly if you get hooked in. Not for the faint of heart (sorry) or those impatient with postmodernist manipulation of genre or readers. The translation looked quite decent in spot checks, though the first section seemed overly colloquial.

 

The Bonfire

Hey, children,
Throw prickly brush
Into a pile
And throw chips and twigs
On top,
Add leaves and chips...
Then strike matches!
The fire creeps like snakes
From branch to branch,
forms a cage,
Runs and plays,
cracks and flashes...
Hisses and Crashes!

Now join hands--
We'll dance around the fire.
There's no better thing
Than to light a fire in broad daylight.
The fire burns
And smoke gnaws at our eyes,
The fire crackles,
But doesn't tire...
Be more careful, children!
Back further, further from the flames--
Or you might catch fire.
An excellent game.
Hey, firemen, it's time--
The fire is swirling toward you!
Douse it with water,
dirt and sand,
But not with your foot
Or your shoe will catch fire.
Hissing chips and twigs...
Pour, children, pour!
Again, again, and again...
Put out our fire.

1911

--Sasha Chernyi, from Children's Island (Translated by me)

What a dark children's poem, made all the more so knowing that Chernyi would die while helping to put out a fire in in Lamandou in the South of France on in 1932...

Echo of Russia

Victor Sonkin on painter-novelist Maxim Kantor's new collection of plays, An Evening with Baboons:

The book of plays is somewhat less ambitious than the novel, but many of the themes are the same. In "A Case in Practice," several intellectuals -- a gallery owner, a collector and a psychiatrist -- join forces to subdue a party guest who deliberately smashes a precious "installation" consisting of jars of human excrement. The trio try to force the man (played by Kantor himself in the film) to admit that his reluctance to acknowledge shit as great art is backward, naive, uninformed and even fascist.

Frankly, I side with Kantor and his stubborn hero; I find the argument especially compelling as it comes not from a kitsch official painter like Alexander Shilov but from an artist who's anything but "un-modern." On the other hand, the link made in the play between the grievous state of contemporary art and a general ideological and political decline seems less self-evident.

A dog, a scientist, and a trip to the cosmos

Yes! Just in time for the holiday gift-giving season, SovLit.com Books has published a new collection of short stories by Vasily Grossman: The War and Other Stories. Spanning almost 30 years of Grossman's career, the stories in this collection demonstrate that Grossman was not merely a "war" writer, but a universalist in the great Russian tradition.

Stories in this selection include: "A Tale About Happiness" (Can happiness be found on a slip of paper? 1934) "A Small Life" (A young couple takes in an orphan girl for the holiday. 1936) "In The War" (A loner finds true comradeship in a tank smashing Nazis. 1942) "In The Country" (Terror grips a man who hears a knock on the door at his snow-bound dacha. 1953) "The Resident" (An old woman is rehabilitated as part of de-Stalinization, but no one seems to remember or care. 1960) "Dog" (Story of a dog, a scientist, and a trip to the cosmos. 1961) "From the Window of a Bus" (Science meets natural beauty on a vacation tour. 1961) "An Autumn Storm" (The power and majesty of the sea made apparent. 1961) The collection concludes with an afterword by translator Andrew Glikin-Gusinsky, winner of Columbia University's Pushkin Translation Prize.

Order my copy today!

Welcome, Jeff Bridges!

Dreamka has seemed listless and lonesome of late, so E-- and I adopted this eight-week old kitten over the holiday weekend. He was found clinging to the edge of the Queensborough Bridge. The story was posted all over the Internet and lots of people expressed interest in adopting him--including his namesake, actor Jeff Bridges, who expressed interest the very day we interviewed for the adoption. But the House of Languor carried the day! Shawn, who heroically rescued the young Jeff and arranged for his adoption, even threw in the paint bucket that carried him to safety...Still, I can't help but wonder what our chances would have been if Shawn had named the wee koshka Todd...

See Jeff's slide show, if you're so inclined.

Me, whom everybody loves so?

James Woods on translating Tolstoy in a review of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of War and Peace in the New Yorker:

Translation gives us new access to the spirit and order of the book. Literary translators tend to divide into what one could call originalists and activists. The former honor the original text’s quiddities, and strive to reproduce them as accurately as possible in the translated language; the latter are less concerned with literal accuracy than with the transposed musical appeal of the new work. Any decent translator must be a bit of both. Though Tolstoy has been well served in English, his translators, like Constance Garnett, Rosemary Edmonds, and Aylmer and Louise Maude, have tended to be somewhat activist, sidestepping difficult words, smoothing the rhythm of the Russian, and eliminating one of Tolstoy’s most distinctive elements, repetition. Pevear and Volokhonsky, who are justly celebrated for their translations of Dostoyevsky, are closer to the originalist camp than to the activist. Without being Nabokovians (Nabokov used such clanking words as “mollitude” in his outlandishly literal translation of “Eugene Onegin,” and insisted on calling Stiva Oblonsky, in “Anna Karenina,” “Steve”), they want the English to sound as close to the Russian as possible, and they are fervent about the importance of “roughening up” their versions when the Russian demands it. Translation is not a transfer of meaning from one language to another, Pevear writes, but a dialogue between two languages.

The Witness

Seconds after the 6 Train pulled into the Bleecker Street Station, a young Chinese man, with his coat on the seat beside him and a filthy soccer ball resting on the floor between his feet, almost missed his stop. He was reading what appeared to be the Bible and failed to notice that we had arrived.

Scrambling to get his things together, the young Believer shrewdly thought to buy some valuable time by kicking the ball through the doors rather than bending down and picking it up. And it worked; he made it through the closing doors and onto the platform just in the nick of time. Unfortunately, his soccer ball bounced off of the wall and ricocheted back into the car even as he was racing out of it. So the ball remained on the train as we pulled out of the station en route to points south.

A rather rumpled man in a gray suit stood up from his seat and quietly retrieved the ball and returned with it to his seat. He appeared neither sorry for the young man's loss nor happy for his own gain. He put it down on the seat beside him and resumed reading the New York Post until we arrived at Canal Street Station, where we both exited the train and mounted the stairs that would take us to the street.

I lost sight of the rumpled man with the soccer ball held under his arm as we both merged with the heavy pedestrian traffic at Canal and Lafayette.

Like so many other misunderstood cults

Joshua Cohen on Viktor Sklovsky and the Dalkey Archive Press's efforts to publish all of the great Formalist's work:

Of all the writers of the European 1920s, the greatest modern decade for literature, and unparalleled for writers in Russian — with the light-limbed prose of Andrei Bely, the dark-limned poetry of Osip Mandelstam, and the vanguards of so many excellent others — Viktor Shklovsky was the most underrated, and is still the most under-read. He was born Viktor Borisovich in Saint Petersburg in 1893, and died in Moscow in 1984. Communism, whose revolution Shklovsky fought in, outlived him by half a decade. His writing — an oeuvre comprising literary criticism, memoir, correspondence and fiction that was itself revolutionary, and still soldiering on — deserves immortality. Dalkey Archive Press, a small but venerable publishing house based in Illinois, has dedicated itself to publishing Shklovsky’s writings for the first time in English. To date, it has published Shklovsky’s singular novel, “Zoo, or Letters Not About Love”; two disparate volumes of memoirs, “A Sentimental Journey” and “Third Factory,” and a vital selection of literary criticism, including “Knight’s Move” and “Theory of Prose.” This fall marks the publication of Shklovsky’s immense “Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot,” and numerous titles are scheduled as forthcoming, including “Hamburg Account,” “Bowstring” and “Literature and Cinematography.”

The Chimney Sweep

Here's my initial translation of a children's poem from Sasha Chernyi from his book Children's Island. I love that a poem like this was written by the same year as the Russian Revolution by a poet so embittered by the disappointments of the 1905 revolution...

The Chimney Sweep

Who’s that? —The chimney sweep.
What does he want? —To clean the chimney.
Black-faced, white-toothed,
And in his hand—a huge broom.

At his side is a spoon, like for soup…
Who says that he’s a villain,
That he stuffs children into his bag?

Perhaps boys—what about cheese?
Perhaps girls—how about a potato?
You see, darling, even a cat
Mews at his feet.

He is absolutely, utterly not terrible.
Soot pours from his pail
But yesterday he took a bagel out of it—
That’s all.

Early in the morning, at dawn,
He rises and drinks his coffee,
Cleans spots from his waistcoat,
Smokes his pipe and sings.

He has a son and a daughter—
Both white, yes.
In the morning, they always sleep
Near the furnace, like two lumps of coal.

Soon the chimney sweep leaves
For the city rooftops and chimneys,
Where the wind teases his forelock
And leaves crash and swirl…

He cleans, cleans the whole day
But after him comes a pack of tomcats,
Rushing greedily in a crowd,
As emaciated as shadows.

But why do you think
He brought liver for breakfast?
He treated one kitty
And, well, she had a slip of the tongue…

You see, here he’s taken off his cap.
He even smiled…You saw it, right?
Most likely, he put it right in its paw.
Soot washes off—Not so terrible.

1917

Out of our minds with the easy life

I saw my translation of Osip Mandelshtam's Tristia at St. Mark's Bookshop this afternoon. So I suppose that it is finally available...just in time for Xmas!

      “Out of our minds with the easy life. . .”         

Out of our minds with the easy life:
Wine in the morning, hung over by evening.
How can I quell this mounting gaiety,
Your glow, oh drunken plague?

From the agonizing ritual of a handshake
And nocturnal kisses on the street
When speech flows heavily
And lamps burn like torches.

We wait for death like a fairy-tale wolf,
But I'm afraid the first to die
Will be the one with the anxious, red mouth
And bangs falling over his eyes.