Languor Management

Enter their flesh and blood

Sovlit on Nikolai Lyashko's The Task of the Writer-Worker:

In 1920, the proletariat was looking for its own artists and writers, close to them not only in ideology, but also in their feeling for life. As these new worker-writers arose, they at first felt that it was sufficent to proclaim slogans and present the demands, beliefs, anguish, and hatreds of their class. Nikolai Lyashko, the unofficial leader of the non-Party members of the Smithy, however, cautioned
these writers that they had to move beyond general concepts and words and create a genuine artistic image. Only in this way, he believed, could they connect with the soul of labor and could they differentiate themselves from the hypocrites who were never associated with iron but now sing that they are "in iron and of iron." Lyashko also warned that the worker-writer must not be seduced by the lure of laurels from rootless contemporary poets with all their affectation, phrase-mongering, contentlessness, crudity, and eroticism. Moreover, Lyashko wrote, writer-workers must fight against a tendency to exaggerate in their descriptions of the proletarian future.

Herrings in fur coats

Mmmm, Soviet sushi...

Finally, a somewhat unusual recipe: the “Beer Roll”, which is meant to complement a glass of beer. Place slices of “Friendship” cheese (it really has to be that brand!) on dried whole fish. On the cheese, place two sukhariki (long, rock-hard croutons flavoured and packaged like potato chips, and traditionally eaten with beer) of your preferred flavour, and next to them place two dried squid rings. Sprinkle all over with tobacco from “Belomor” brand cigarettes. Dipping the roll into Baltika beer is optional, but drinking the beer is essential. This recipe is not for the faint of heart.

[Spaceeba, Michele!]

If you're reading this, please call your mother

Being the good son, I reached for the phone to call my mother and give her an update of my life to date. It is a particularly good time to do it, since I’m experiencing an unusual streak of luck: my lawyer, Winkles, managed to get T-Mobile to drop $1,700 in charges for calls to Yemen--YEMEN!--that it claimed I was responsible for even though my cell phone had been stolen; a journal has agreed to publish six of my latest translations, my fiancée finally moved in; I received a nice raise at work, and I was well-received at a reading of my latest translations last night.

The last call home had been filled with worries about a possible lay-off, a cold, and grave concerns about how I was going to pay off that $1,700 for calls to Yemen. My mother added that I would likely be put on a CIA terrorist list, since “they are terrorists over there.” She was also under the impression that I was asking for money to help pay the bill, which inspired her to lecture me on how I was too old to ask my mother for money--and how would I ever be able to afford to get married if I kept on like that? So this new call would put me back on the right track—at least in my mother’s eyes.

I dialed her number and an older woman’s voice, slightly out of breath, came on the line. “Hello?” She sounded surprised.

“Mom?” I answered, not immediately recognizing her voice.

“Yes?” The woman answered, hesitating. That certainly wasn’t my mother’s voice.

I hesitated.

“Yes, dear?” She tried again.

“I’m sorry, I’ve dialed the wrong mother.” I answered.

“That’s alright, dear,” she replied. “I’ll adopt you--”

Cute, but unnerving. I laughed and hung up the phone, but realized that she was still talking. Here is some little old lady receiving an unexpected phone call from an estranged or distant son, and I hung up on her. I felt like a cad! But what could be done?

So I redialed my mother and got her voice mail--the automated message: a deep-voiced robot intoning the number I had just dialed and then advising me to call again. I called again and received the same heartless message. After lunch, I was again admonished by the robot and told to try again later.

Meanwhile, a lonely mother waits—hardly daring to hope-- for her son to call, while my own continues to think that I’m a loser and refuses to pick up the phone.

A loopy Surrealist

I've never read anything from Yuri Druzhnikov, but I think I want to get this new translation: Madonna from Russia (translated by Thomas Moore and Peter Owen), as reviewed by Aaron Hamburger, whose terrific Faith for Beginners I did read:

Yuri Druzhnikov's "Madonna From Russia," a tale of ex-Soviet bigwigs who find themselves on the wrong side of history, fits squarely within the Bulgakov tradition. This novel's comic elements include a 96-year-old vixen whose sexual charms still prove irresistible to men, an island that magically appears in the Rio Grande during a hurricane and an embittered Russian immigrant to the United States who wants to turn the above-mentioned island into an independent country and is prepared to declare war on the United States to defend its territorial integrity.

The unmoored boat is not to be untied

I absolutely agree with Languaghat's post on translation into English from Russian:

Now, I yield to no one in my admiration of Brodsky as a poet, but as a theorist of translation he was as bad as Nabokov, and with worse results, since he controlled the (generally mediocre) English translations of his work so closely. (Daniel Weissbort's From Russian with love: Joseph Brodsky in English is devoted in large part to accounts of his unavailing attempts to convince Brodsky he didn't know what he was talking about when it came to English translations.) English is not constructed like Russian, its poetic traditions are different, and it makes no sense to try to reproduce Brodsky's rhyme and meter...

A history of their rescue

The Empire that was

Czarist-era photographs from The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record. [Via Gridskipper. Spaceeba, E!]

Aren't you curious?

“Wait! Hold up! I said, ‘hold up!’” a man was yelling desperately from outside of the public bus as it was pulling away from the curb. And, surprisingly, the driver complied with the forceful request and waited for the man as he raced across the commuter Park-n-Ride parking lot to catch the bus that slowly wound its way along Rhode Island’s southern coast from Newport to the Kingston train station, where I would board a train for New York.

“Didn’t you hear me?” said the man, out of breath and sounding a bit angry as he climbed aboard. He was wearing an army field jacket over his slim frame and his shaggy salt-and-pepper hair was held in check by a red bandana tied over his head. An unruly mustache rested above his lip and he wore a small gold earring in his left ear—by all appearances, a pirate on the high seas of the Rhode Island public transit system!

“I heard you,” replied the driver casually. “I stopped, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but only after I yelled and had to run all the way over here,” the man, who appeared to be in his late forties, said testily, as he pulled a yellow form from his military surplus coat. “I just got out of jail, and they said that I could get a free ride with this. Well, can I?”

You ought to be on a bed of sickness

Panurge’s Muse*

Hair like a fishtail;

No bust, more like a frying pan;

And growing from the chin–

It’s terrible, I know–a beard.

Choppy gestures, long feet,

Hands twisted backwards,

A voice thinner than a cobweb,

Canine teeth–some rotten.

Oh, darling, your laughter–

It opens gates....

Just stunning! An acid stench

Gushes from your mouth.

Eyes lost in craters in the skin,

Arched, balding eyebrows.

Dear God, after all this

We are to bear her naked?!

--Sasha Chernyi, 1910 (Translated by me)

*Panurge is one of the principal characters in thePantagruel of Rabelais, an exceedingly crafty knave, a libertine, and a coward.