Languor Management

Parting Poetry of Pindostan's Political Pygmies

Viktor Pelevin's latest book, P5--a collection of short stories--was announced by the publisher as a novel, because short story collections don't sell. But it sounds like the publisher is going to need more tricks than that to sell this one. From the Moscow Times:

The critical consensus after the book's appearance was unfavorable to Pelevin. Some said he was moving toward Sergei Minayev (the author of several very badly written bestsellers). Some said Pelevin had become undistinguishable from his numerous imitators. Galina Yuzefovich wrote in Vedomosti that the creative spirit that had inspired the author throughout the 1990s has obviously left him.

People often tell me that I am a pessimist

Today, October 7, is the second anniversary of the murder in Moscow of Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006).

[Hat tip to A Step at a Time.]

Interesting fellows

The Russian version of Esquire magazine has published a conversation between Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the writer Grigory Chkhartishvili, better known as Boris Akunin. Khodorkovsky's lawyer, Robert Amsterdam, will be posting a portion of it everyday this week in his very necessary blog.

Correspondence: CONVERSATION OF WRITER GRIGORY CHKHARTISHVILI
(B.AKUNIN) WITH MIKHAIL KHODORKOVSKY

When the editorial board proposed to me to get an interview from any person who would be interesting to me, I said right away: “Most interesting of all for me would be to talk with Mikhail Khodorkovsky”. The fate of the former richest person of Russia gives me no peace. And not at all because he is the richest. Every time somebody tries to stand up for Khodorkovsky an his comrades, without fail you always hear the reproach: come on, we have many people in our country who are being held behind bars unfairly. They don’t write about them in the newspapers, they don’t have a team of high-class lawyers looking out for them. Why is it, gentlemen, that you’re making such a fuss over this specific oligarch?

I will explain why I’m making such a fuss. It was specifically on the YUKOS case that we lost the independence of the judiciary – an institution without which a democratic society can not exist. That means this is precisely the point to which we have to return. If we restore justice and legality in the case of Khodorkovsky, this will also help all the rest of the victims of our foundering Themis.

For understandable reasons, the dialogue took place in epistolary form. It is given here without any abridgements. -- Grigory Chkhartishvili...

Well said!

In this month's The Believer magazine, Adam Thirlwell expresses quite well something that I have yearned yet failed to express for some time, namely that Style can be translated across languages even if formal elements like meter and rhyme must be jettisoned in the transfer from one language to the next. The Believer doesn't provide the full text of Thirlwell's essay, so here's an excerpt (reproduced without permission) on Vladimir Nabokov's experience and troubles translating that famous novel-in-verse Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:

In Nabokov's forward to his translation he asked a simple question: "Can Pushkin's poem, or any other poem with a definite rhyme scheme, be really translated?" And then he rephrased it: "Can a rhymed poem like Eugene Onegin be truly translated with the retention of its rhymes?" The answer, of course, is no. To reproduce the rhymes and yet translate the poem entire is mathematically impossibe." And yet: "In losing its rhyme the poem loses its blooom, which neither marginal description nor the alchemy of a scholium can replace." The only solution, thought Nabokov, which was not really a solution, was to give up on the style and explicate the content. this, argued Nabokov, was a literal translation; and only this method was acceptable. It was hardly a translation at all: rather  than fulfilling the traditional function of replacing the original, it was now only useful as a crib, a prompt to the orginal, instead.

Every theory of translation is a theory of style. Each implies the other. Translation has to deal, minutely, with the relationships between form and content. The reason, I think, that Nabokov was having such trouble with Eugene Onegin was that it pointed to a central problem. His idea of style was problematic. He believed in the novel--the novel in prose--as a poetic entity. He thought it should value the form (the phonetics, the technical tricks) of a sentence as much as or more than it should value that sentence's content. He believed the European avant-garde idea--most famously expressed in Flaubert's letter to Louise Colet--that a novel had a value only insofar as its sentences were organized with as much care as possible. But Nabokov's idea of how sentences might be organized placed too much emphasis on the sentences' internal structure. And so he refused to admit that Eugene Onegin could be translated. He did not allow that a novel--even the most poetic novel of all, one written in poetry--has a style that goes beyond the sentences' internal structures: It  is there in the arrangement of paragraphs, of chapters, of voices and materials. It is there in the arrangements of the plot. Nabokov's model of style was too much based on the advertised constricted tricks of the lyric poem.

All theories of translation depend on a genre--on whether a text is poetry, or prose, or an instruction manual. Maybe I can make this even more limited. All theories of translation will only be entirely true for a particular work....

Yes!

Aeroflot posters

This just in from Maxx Klaxon, hot of his Authoritarian Idol tour:

The Chelsea Museum is featuring an exhibition of very cool historic Aeroflot posters--this week only 9/22 to 9/27.

Chelsea Art Museum - 556 West 22nd Street - New York, NY 10011 USA

Incredibly stupid, silly, and meaningless

From Roman Jakobson's memoir My Futurist Years:

In 1918 or 1919 Mayakovsky and I were walking along the street in Moscow, when suddenly he asked me: "Listen, canI ask you something that may strike you as strange?" I said: "Ask away."--"You're  walking along the street alone and suddenly you notice that you're thinking of something incredibly stupid, silly, and meaninglyess, and that you're thinking about it in a concentrated way. Does that ever happen to you.?"--Oh yes, it happens all the time."--"Thank God, I thought it happened only to me." This is very characteristic for Mayakovsky's psyche.

In Memoriam

This entire evening I will,
While suffocating on cigarette smoke,
Be tortured by thoughts of certain people,
Who perished very young,
Who either at sunrise or in the night,
Suddenly and inappropriately,
Died. Leaving unsteady verses unfinished,
Love unfulfilled,
         Stories untold,
                 Endeavors undone…

1939

-Boris Smolensky (Translated by Andrew Glikin-Gusinsky)

Parallels

My interview with What Happened to Anna K author Irina Reyn is live on Maud Newton today:

KK: Clearly, your purpose wasn’t exactly to bring Tolstoy’s novel up to date, but there are several scenes that reference Anna Karenina in a direct way. Some that come to mind are when David and Anna meet at the subway station, when David trips and falls during the New York Marathon, just as Vronsky’s horse goes down in a steeplechase (I love that one, by the way), and, of course, the ending. What made you invoke the scenes you did, if your intention was not Anna Karenina redux?

IR: You’re right — I did not begin my novel with the idea of updating Anna Karenina. The connections only became obvious to me after I had written some stories and began to sew them together into a novel. Perhaps because I had read the Tolstoy book so closely and so recently, it began to inhabit my novel-in-progress. Once I made up my mind to make the allusions explicit, I purposely did not reread the book, but allowed the scenes that had spoken to me push their images onto the page. I did not transpose them literally — in my novel, for example, the ice skating scene between Lev and Katia has a very different aim from Tolstoy’s ice skating scene. The parallels between my book and the classic are less conscious than they may seem, which made the process of writing my novel an unusual one. It is this process, I think, that allows my novel to stand firmly on its own two legs.

Read the whole thing here.

The allowance of an exiled prisoner

I found this letter (one of two) in the latest issue of Harper's Magazine. It's from Pushkin bowing out of an assignment to investigate the extermination of locust's somewhere when he was in the Russian Foreign Service. Count Woronzof, the deputy authority of the province of Bessarabia, was Pushkin's boss. The last graf reminds me one of my staffers when she calls in *sick* and feels the need to lay it on thick. Would that I received this letter from her!

Esteemed Aleksandr Ivanovich,

Bureaucratic procedure is entirely foreign to me. I don’t even know if I have the right to respond to His Highness’s orders. Whatever may happen, I trust in your indulgence and must dare to give an honest explanation of my situation.

For seven years I was remiss in my duties: I did not author a single paper, I did not communicate with any superior. These seven years, as you well know, were totally wasted. Complaints would be inappropriate on my part. I set obstacles in my own path and chose a different goal. For God’s sake, don’t think that I looked upon poetic creation with the childish vanity of a rhymester or as a sensitive man’s respite: it is simply my craft, an honest type of industry, which earns me my livelihood and independence. I think Count Woronzof won’t wish to deprive me of either the former or the latter.

I’ll be told that because I receive 700 rubles a year I am obliged to serve. You know that it is possible to be part of the book trade only in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, as the journalists, censors, and booksellers are there; I constantly have to decline the most advantageous offers for the sole reason that I am located far away from the capital. It suits the government to compensate me for my losses in some way, and thus I receive those 700 rubles not as a functionary’s salary but as the allowance of an exiled prisoner. I am prepared to refuse them if I cannot be in control of my own time and occupation. I’m going into these details because I value the opinion of Count Woronzof, as I do yours, as I do the opinion of any honest person.

I know this letter is enough to destroy me, as they say.

(If the Count orders me to send in my resignation, I am ready; but I feel that I am losing a lot and am not expecting to gain anything.)

One last word: you perhaps are not aware that I have an aneurysm. For eight years already I have been carrying death with me. I can show evidence from any doctor. Is it really not possible to leave me in peace for the remainder of my life, which surely won’t be prolonged?

Please accept my deepest respect and heartfelt devotion.

--Staff Secretary

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

(Translated from the Russian and French by Simona Schneider for Pushkin: Documents Toward a Biography 1799-1829, published last year in Russia by Iskusstvo.)