Languor Management

The Hyena

Here's a draft translation of nasty little children's poem by Sasha Chernyi that sends just the right message:

The Hyena

The hyena is a vile creature:
With its impudent muzzle
and hide sticking out of its nape.
Its back is all tangled
And it has rusty spots
On each side (What for is not clear).
Its stomach is dirty and bald.
It can be stitched into a lattice--a tail through a leg--
and its eyes are like that woman Baba-Yaga*.

And it is a pity to me...
Unless it doesn't have a problem with it?
Even a moth, even a crow
Can be nice and pretty.
Uncle Volodya's wife, Aunt Aglaia**,
Explained it to me:
“Why is it so nasty?
Because it is an ugly creature.”

1928

*Baba Yaga: in Slavic folklore, the wild old woman; the witch; and mistress of magic. She is also seen as a forest spirit, leading hosts of spirits.

**Aglaea: “shining, brilliant one.” one of the three Classical Greek Charities or Graces.

Merry Christmas!

Injun Joe Thompson's Reservation Cole Slaw

Maud was kind and generous enough to include my grandfather's recipe for his famous cole slaw in her Recipes from Writers series. I'm sure Injun Joe would be "pickled tink" to be included among the likes of James Hynes, Joshua Ferris, Justine Larbalestier, Laila Lalami, Tayari Jones, and others. Enjoy!

Wordplay and dystopias

I'm really enjoying Lisa Hayden Espenschade's Russian book blog Lizok's Bookshelf. Here's a bit from her review of Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel The Slynx:

The Slynx is a novel of posts: postmodern, post-Soviet, post-apocalyptic. It describes a Russian settlement, formerly Moscow, that was bombed back to, roughly, the Stone Age. The wheel was just reinvented, candles light huts, and people barter in mice, a valuable food source. The government is repressive, and its leader claims to have written all of what we know as Russian literature. Scribes copy those texts onto birch bark.

[***]

Despite loving dystopian novels and views of the future, I found that Tolstaya’s imaginative descriptions fail to become compelling: she creates a vivid setting but skimps on characters. Instead of creating real people, she tosses out figures to represent positions. Her primary focus is on language.

Study computer programming in America!

The latest Zoetrope is running a story by novelist Anya Ulinich, whose Petropolis was a big favorite around here.

Ever since the Soros Foundation stopped funding my father's salary at the Museum-Apartment of Repressed Poets, my father had been preoccupied with computers as the way of the future. And he'd always admired America, for its liberté, égalité, fraternité, the rule of law, and other incantatory, remote-sounding reasons. Had I been born a boy, I would have been named Dzhordzh, after Bush Sr., who had just been elected. It would have been exciting to be the only Dzhordzh in Upinsk. But I turned out to be a girl, and so my father called me Marina, in memory of his favorite repressed poet, Marina Tsvetaeva.

[Via Maud Newton]

It's Kharms week, here

From a new collection of stories by Dannil Kharms, entitled Today I Wrote Nothing, edited and translated from the original Russian by Matvai Yankelvich: 

"There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn't have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.

He couldn't talk because he had no mouth. He didn't have a nose either.

He didn't even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn't have any insides at all. There was nothing! So we don't even know who we're talking about.

So we'd better not talk about him any more."

From a review of Today I Wrote Nothing in the Guardian:

The difficulty of knowing a man who seemingly exists but in fact does not applies to Kharms' own biography. His birth name was Yuvachev: Kharms was derived from the English words "harms", "charms" and "Holmes", as in Sherlock, the fictional detective whose sartorial style he emulated. He had also consciously developed eccentricities, such as a strange hiccup-snorting seizure that disconcerted the NKVD agents who interrogated him. And finally Kharms himself was to vanish, and along with him all the notebooks containing his works. Only after 30 years did they reappear in samizdat, before finally being officially published in the 1980s.

About Katushka

Here's a draft translation of another children's poem by Sasha Cherny that was compiled in the collection Children's Island. Sure it's cute, but there's something sinister about it: the desolate setting, the howling wolf, the Peeping-Tom moon, the menagerie of toys...And why is poor Katya compelled to work so hard!

About Katushka

In the courtyard, there is frost,

And a wolf howls in the field.

Snow has fallen upon the porch,

And has bleached the fir trees…

In a warm room,

The furnace glows like a diamond,

And in the window, the moon

Looks like a big round eye.

Katya-Katenka-Katushka

Has put her toys to bed:

A hairless doll,

A noseless dog,

A legless horse,

And a hornless cow—

All stuffed in a lump

In her mother’s old stocking,

But with a hole in it

So they can all breath.

“All right, go to sleep,

And I will do the laundry!”

Ah, so many suds!

The walls are splashed,

The basin squeaks,

The water swirls,

Katushka pants,

The stool wobbles…

With red palms,

She rinses the clothes

And wrings them out hard

Over the soapy water.

A string is strung

From the window to the oven,

And like white lambs

Hanging in a row:

Teddy bear’s napkin,

Doggy’s socks,

Dolly’s shirts,

Diapers,

Cow’s bloomers,

And two velvet mice.

Finished with the laundry,

Katya sits down on the floor:

What’s left to do?

For the cat to climb under the bed,

To shut the oven door,

Or, perhaps, to give teddy bear a haircut?

1921

Incidences

The New York Times on a new English language edition of Danill Kharms "Russian Tales Incidences," translated by Neil Cromwell (in its entirety):

The bulk of the fiction of Daniil Kharms (the pen name of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov) was destined for his desk drawer. Though his work for children was widely published in the Soviet Union, his other efforts were unprintable, thanks to Stalin's iron rule. These tales have now been collected in "Incidences," an admirable work, edited and cleanly translated by Neil Cornwell, that highlights Kharms's eerie obsessions: a fear of old women and children, a love of falling bodies and a sensual pleasure in the scents and sounds of daily life. With remarkable precision and fluid language, the stories capture everyday tension in a land where an innocent knock on the door might mean entrapment in a bureaucratic maze or even death at the hands of the military. By yoking official policy with personal ire, Kharms reveals how deeply his contemporaries absorbed and understood their domination. And by casting his tales within the realm of the absurd he lifts anxiety into art. The pity is that his life was as brief as his stories: he was only in his late 30's when he died in 1942, probably in a Leningrad prison.

Moose and squirrel

Ouch. Caryn James reviews "The Past Is Still Ahead", a play about the life of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva presented in New York by Moscow's Mayakovsky Academic Art Theater,  for the New York Times:

“The Past Is Still Ahead,” an odd little play about her life presented by the Mayakovsky Academic Art Theater of Moscow, replaces this drama with two seemingly incompatible stereotypes: the tortured poet and Natasha from “Rocky and Bullwinkle.”

In life, Tsvetayeva was not a great beauty. But here she is glamour itself, portrayed by the throaty-voiced actress Yelena Romanova in a long, glossy wig, enormous false eyelashes and a black velvet dress, a performance of rolling eyes and oversize gestures.

Russian Reading Challenge

For many Americans Russian novels are a source of guilt. Somewhere in the back of our minds we keep telling ourselves that we finally have to read The Brothers Karamazov or that new translation of War and Peace--and since Gary Steyngart's Absurdistan, everyone talks about Oblomov as though they've actually read the work. Now comes the 2008 Russian Reading Challenge, a dare to read at least 4 Russian novels in 2008, as well as an opportunity to compound the guilt by setting yourself up for a fall and bailing out on a New Year's resolution...Still, I'm taking the opportunity to explore some more Sergei Dovlatov and maybe reading that new Tolstoy...