Citizens! Who taught letters to compose themselves into words? And words into songs? And songs to penetrate into our soul and set it trembling with ineffable delight?
—Dmitri Aleksanych
A literary montage by artist Taisiya Kulygina. Left to right, top to bottom, are the poets Yesenin, Baratynsky, Tyutchev, Gippius, Khlebnikov, Pushkin, Krylov.
Ineffable delight goes deeper than language – deeper than one language, at least. The pleasure of a poem is, on the one hand, the letters and the words whose combination strikes the ears; on the other hand, it is the images and the sentiments those words evoke.
This new volume demonstrates an ineffable delight that can transcend the original sounds of a poem as it was written.
The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (PBRP) seeks the balance between sound and meaning, and in most cases its translations succeed in retaining the original’s poetic force as well as its message. Especially for English-readers, whose encounters with contemporary Russia these days consist of reports of the conflict in Ukraine, the falling ruble, or the latest newsflash about President Putin’s workout regimen, PBRP serves as a reminder of the wealth of cultural expression that scintillates throughout Russian history. And, despite the temptation to view cultural expression through the lens of politics, the pieces in this volume should be read for their own artistic merit – both as the originals were composed, and as works showing great linguistic dexterity in translated form.
A lucky find for Slavic scholars, English-speaking Russophiles, and poetry lovers of many stripes, PBRP will surprise readers with the wide range of expression and form evident in each era included. Edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski, the volume features 70 poets and a wide array of translators, whose versatility in method and style is as broad as that of the poets themselves.
The poems comprise seven sections: “The Eighteenth Century,” “Around Pushkin,” “Alexander Pushkin,” “After Pushkin,” “The Twentieth Century,” “Three More Recent Poets,” and “Four Poems by Non-Russians.” Is it puzzling to find Russian poetry categorized by century, or by relation to Pushkin? What about the metallic conventions of Golden and Silver Ages, and the sub-genres of Romanticism, Symbolism, Futurism, and so on?
Relax, the editors have it covered – the interpenetration of poetic movements justifies the temporal divisions, while detailed biographies introducing each poet will satisfy readers seeking to trace affiliations or development. As for clustering three sections around Pushkin, the proof is in the poetry: Stanley Mitchell and Antony Wood’s “The Bronze Horseman” captures Pushkin’s strength in blending storytelling with poetic precision, and the linguistic flexibility and range of the selection show just why he is Russia’s Shakespeare.
It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a poet whose portrait hangs beside religious icons on many a Russian wall; many of the poets included note their artistic debt to Pushkin. Despite the section headings, though, the editors should be commended for featuring many poets whose names will be unknown to most English-language readers.
And what will those readers find in this volume as a whole? A window into the Russian soul, or russkaya dusha? A vision of Russia’s political strife and how culture can serve as its antidote? Art as mode of viewing the past?
All of the above, and contradictions to each, as well. Through poems of unbelievable variety, what remains constant is the “magical belief in the power of the word,” as Chandler writes in the introduction. Throughout PBRP, the magic of poetic language emerges in its devious ability to sneak into the consciousness – individual or at a broader social level – and start the rhythm of change.
Russian poetry, as PBRP shows, is about much more than culture as the oppositional force to political oppression. Yet that stereotype is in place for a reason, so what better poem to start with than a pessimistic reflection on the Russian character? In the words of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a critic of the Soviet regime (though careful enough to avoid persecution) since the 1960s:
Russia has lost Russia in Russia. Russia searches for itself like a cut finger in snow, a needle in a haystack, like an old blind woman madly stretching her hand in fog, searching with hopeless incantation for her lost milk cow.
This excerpt from “Loss,” written in 1991 and translated by James Ragan and Yevtushenko himself, questions the paradoxes of the Russian national character, using imagery of the downtrodden peasantry to evoke the confusion of the USSR’s collapse. Pride and self-humiliation are mistaken for each other, and death (“Is it true that we no longer exist?”) plays with resurrection (“it’s so painful to be born again”).
It was Yevtushenko who famously said, “A poet in Russia is more than a poet.” Poetry isn’t just nice reading at bedtime; it can change thoughts and actions, galvanizing people and frightening politicians. As Chandler writes in the introduction, “In a world governed by official lies, poetry was seen as a truth to live by.”
While Yevtushenko’s poem links the pain and guilt of a nationwide attempt to come to terms with history to Russian cultural identity as a whole, a poet 140 years his senior, Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky (a close friend of Pushkin’s, it’s worth mentioning), takes a different tack. Instead of indicting the Russian people, he ironically portrays “The Russian God” (1828). Two of the poem’s nine quatrains are reproduced here:
God of snowstorms, god of potholes, every wretched road you’ve trod, coach-inns, cockroach haunts and rat holes, that’s him, that’s your Russian god. […] God of all that gets shipped in here, unbecoming, senseless, odd, god of mustard on your dinner, that’s him, that’s your Russian god.
Бог метелей, бог ухабов, Бог мучительных дорог, Станций — тараканьих штабов, Вот он, вот он русский бог […] Бог всего, что из границы, Не к лицу, не под итог, Бог по ужине горчицы, Вот он, вот он русский бог.
Translated with great facility by Alan Myers, the poem uses embittered humor rather than mournful meditations to condemn its subject, while its barbs are sharpened by the abab rhyme scheme and trochaic tetrameter (meaning the rhythm is stressed-unstressed and each line is eight syllables, in case you needed a refresher). Tighter if more simple in form, its caustic view on Russia (with the possible exception of the mustard) may seem to some to still apply today.
These are but two among many poems taking the Russian soul as muse for reflecting on problems of upheaval, hunger, political oppression, violence, weather, and other Russian dramas. Different though they are, they contribute to the view of Russia as dark and downtrodden, a place where poets and poets alone resist the authoritarianism of nature and government alike.
But is Russia really as dismal as all that?
The anthology’s excellent selection of humorous poems may surprise a reader unfamiliar with Russia’s more jocular side. Tones of levity and irony can be found even in poems not aiming for a punchline, from Nikolay Oleinikov’s anthropomorphized hero in “The Beetle” to Dmitri Prigov’s absurd retelling of a fourteenth-century battle with the Mongols.
Ivan Krylov’s fables in verse, little known among English audiences,* are a prime example. As noted in Krylov’s biographical note, Gordon Pirie’s translations are relatively free with additions and alterations, yet the effect better maintains the humor, rhythm, and rhyme of the original than would a direct translation. For example, “The Donkey and the Nightingale” ends with the donkey’s assessment of the bird’s song:
The donkey, who had stood there looking down and listening with a frown of concentration, brow all creased, now gave his verdict on her voice: ‘Yes, that was quite a pleasant ditty – but it’s a pity that you’ve not met our cock. He makes a really splendid noise when he stands on the dunghill, crowing loud and clear to all his flock!
Осёл, уставясь в землю лбом: «Изрядно, — говорит, — сказать неложно, Тебя без скуки слушать можно; А жаль, что незнаком Ты с нашим петухом; Еще б ты боле навострился, Когда бы у него немножко поучился».
The donkey’s intense concentration is Pirie’s addition, as is the cock’s precise location on the dunghill; he also adds the moral: “A donkey’s ears are large and long, / but he’s no connoisseur of song.”
The meaning is not present in the original, but Krylov’s humor, intensified by quick rhythm and a simple rhyme scheme, lends itself to elaboration. It is satisfying that Krylov used the same liberated style in his own adaptations of Aesop and La Fontaine.
Krylov (and Pirie) give a lesson not only in Russian humor, but also in the variety to be found in translation methods and philosophies. As Chandler writes in the introduction, “There is no single correct approach to translation; translation is an art, and there is more than one way to go about it.”
The wealth and complexity of Russian language cannot be reproduced in another language, but the types of tricks that it plays can be conveyed.
This is neatly illustrated in the neologisms of Velimir Khlebnikov, whose call to see humor in unexpected places is a good cure for the temptation to see Russia for its darker sides. Take his “Laugh Chant” (1908, translated by Christopher Reid), accomplished by adding prefixes and suffixes to the word “smekh” (laughter):
Laugh away, laughing boys! Laugh along, laughmen! So they laugh their large laughter, they laugh aloud laughishly. Laugh and be laughed at! O the laughs of the overlaughed, the laughfest of laughingstocks! Laugh out uplaughingly the laugh of laughed laughterers! Laughily laughterize laughteroids, laughtereens, laughpots and laughlings . . . Laugh away, laughing boys! Laugh along, laughmen!
О, рассмейтесь, смехачи! О, засмейтесь, смехачи! Что смеются смехами, что смеянствуют смеяльно, О, засмейтесь усмеяльно! О, рассмешищ надсмеяльных — смех усмейных смехачей! О, иссмейся рассмеяльно, смех надсмейных смеячей! Смейево, смейево, Усмей, осмей, смешики, смешики, Смеюнчики, смеюнчики. О, рассмейтесь, смехачи! О, засмейтесь, смехачи!
In either language, the poem is nonsense. We hear a cacophony of meaningless noises: smekhachi, smeyeva, smeyunchiki, smeyanstvuyut are as strange to the Russian ear as to a non-speaker. Yet whether the gibberish itself elicits a chuckle, or whether it is the word “laugh” turned into a toy – manipulated, bounced, broken, and rebuilt like a linguistic Mr. Potato Head – the poem does it job, turning readers into laughers.
“Laugh Chant,” though playing with the idea and the sound of laughter, is most notable for its manipulation of language. In Russia, words carry weight. Khlebnikov treats them like objects; Yevtushenko saw their power to change. And in times of strife, sometimes they are all a person has left.
Conversations about Russia often center on political strife and oppression, painting culture as the force of truth. Heroes like Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn, and martyrs like Mandelstam, become noble embodiments of the Russian soul, contrasting with its corrupt, soulless leaders. Sure, there are variations on the binary theme, but this view of Russian society and of the past often plays a key role in popular notions of Russia.
Under Stalin, a poem could mean life or death. PBRP reminds us not only of the dangers faced by Soviet-era poets, but also of the strength imparted through poetry. For poets who faced the camps memory and orality were vital: prisoners fought for survival alongside their cellmates by reciting poetry to each other. For those who had memorized the works of Pushkin, Blok, Akhmatova, Tyutchev, Mayakovsky, or others, those poets’ words helped them maintain the will to live.
Poets, in the meantime, committed their own poems to memory. After all, paper could be dangerous – if they could even obtain it. Lev Ozerov captures that threat in his portrait of Shmuel Halkin (1990), a Soviet Yiddish poet who spent several years in labor camps.
There was no paper, but Halkin was writing. Poems piled up. A terrible burden. More dangerous, perhaps, than gunpowder. He wrote them down on the paper of memory and day by day his memory grew heavier. Poems with sharp elbows were elbowing one another out of the way.
Бумаги не было, Но Галкин сочинял, Стихи накапливались, Это страшный груз. Опасней пороха, пожалуй, Он на бумаге памяти Писал их, И память тяжелела День за днем. Стихи выталкивали Острыми локтями друг друга.
The poems seem to come to life inside of Halkin’s mind, tangling with each other like prisoners in an overcrowded barrack. Ozerov makes the poems seem weightier than the labor Halkin had to perform in the camp, excluding any mention of daily life or work. Halkin becomes an anti-Ivan Denisovich: his experience is about his art, not his strategies for preserving bread rations. And, unlike many, Halkin lived to experience freedom.
When Halkin returned home, worn out by the camps, he wrote down his poems and his memory emptied and new poems came flooding in.
Когда, измученный тюрьмою, Домой вернулся Галкин, Он записал стихи И память опустела, И хлынули в нее Стихотворенья, как воспоминанья О будущем.
The sense of being relieved of a burden is captured in the lightness of free verse, the easy flow from one short line to the next. Yet Robert Chandler’s otherwise excellent translation misses a beat: the final three lines of the Russian include a further message: “Poems poured in, like memories of the future.” Even without this image, the poem captures the pleasing weight of poems and the power of words to keep one’s mind alive when the body is imprisoned. Yet with those words, Ozerov transforms memory itself. From something used for the storage of heavy, elbowing poems, memory becomes a resuscitating force: a way to transcend past struggles and open the space of the future to new creation.
These lines pose a powerful challenge to contemporary Russian culture. They suggest that it becomes possible to forge ahead by fostering beauty and creativity, allowing the pains of the past to empty out and make way for the possibility of viewing a future untinged by trauma.
Ozerov captures the common trope of the poet in the Gulag, yet in an unexpected way that carries broader import than a condemnation of the camps. In that, he epitomizes the value of this anthology: Ozerov is not well known among English readers, but his work is outstanding. Like many underrepresented poets, he merits greater attention among English readers.
PBRP should be praised for its democratizing principle, highlighting the skills of lesser-known twentieth-century poets while still striking a balance with acknowledged “greats” such as the “Big Four”: Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva. Though they are well represented (with the exception of some of Akhmatova’s more political poems), unfamiliar readers may be just as impressed with Yesenin and Tarkovsky; in addition, Voloshin, Gumilyov, Ivanov, and Kornilov are standouts among the poets of the century just passed.
It seems strange that the selections shrink from Slutsky onward; though attentively chronicled elsewhere, the inclusion of only a poem or two from Okudzhava, Voznesensky, Yevtushenko, and Vysotsky leaves the reader wanting more. This is particularly true of Bella Akmadulina, whose homage to Marina Tsvetaeva (1963) interplays a buoyant liveliness with strict attention to language:
Doh for a-do-lescence! Doh, Marina, for declamation, destiny, all those new dawning days!
Akhmadulina – rendered here by Peter Oram – gives the reader a sense of intoxicated movement and excitement, inspired by nothing more than words.
The inclusion of only one Akhmadulina poem demonstrates the one regrettable feature of PBRP: not simply the inclusion of few female poets, but the relatively small selections representing those women, and the fact that most of their poems chosen are about love – as if this is the only thing a woman can write about. This is not to say that they are not good poems, or poorly translated, but it is unfortunate that the tendency to underwrite Russian women writers, and to share only one type of their output, continues. Zinaida Gippius’ “Devillet” and Teffi’s “Before a Map of Russia” are welcome exceptions, but are these the only female-authored poems in Russia not addressed to a man?
Perhaps the oversight is not deliberate – especially as Chandler has produced an excellent translation of Teffi’s stories – yet it demonstrates the limited view of female authorship in the Russian tradition and beyond.
An excellent exception to this caveat is Marina Boroditskaya’s 2003 poem (translated by Ruth Fainlight) addressed to King Lear’s daughter Cordelia – a true bridge between cultures.
Cordelia, you are a fool! Would it have been that hard to yield to the old man? To say to him, ‘I, too, O darling Daddy, love you more than my life.’ Piece of cake! […] And now he’s dead, you too, everyone’s dead. […] OK, OK, don’t cry. Of course, the author is quite a character, but next time make sure to be more stubborn, and resist: Viola, Rosalinda, Catherine, they managed – why wouldn’t you? Like a puppy, pull him by the leg of his pants with your teeth into the game, into comedy! The laws of the genre will lead us out to light…Here, wipe your nose and give me back the hanky. […] Sorry I told you off. Best regards to your father. Remember: like a puppy!
Boroditskaya reminds her readers of the links between worlds (Shakespeare’s West and Pushkin’s – make that Boroditskaya’s – Russia), despite disparate values and perspectives. Humorous and caustic, her speaker admonishes the dead heroine for honesty and loyalty: these are the traits that lead to tragedy. By inciting a character of a centuries-old drama to resist her author, she recollects the notion that art, seemingly with a will of its own, can do something in society.
Perhaps this is a call to action, meant to restore a “magical belief in the power of the word,” or the power of art to stir action. A poet in Russia is more than a poet, after all. Perhaps, instead, this is Russia speaking to the West, ridiculing values that will not translate to a happy ending. Perhaps it is simply a humorous text-to-text tête-à-tête. The beauty of some poems lies in the many possibilities not only for translation, but for interpretation, too.
The value of the poems in PBRP is in their connection to wider culture, and the ability to appreciate their beauty in separation from stereotypes and preconceptions about what Russia is.
Excepting Winston Churchill’s evaluation of Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” perhaps the most famous description of Russia was penned by Fyodor Tyutchev in 1866:
You will not grasp her with your mind or cover with a common label, for Russia is one of a kind – believe in her, if you are able… Умом Россию не понять, Аршином общим не измерить: У ней особенная стать — В Россию можно только верить.
This is Anatoly Liberman’s translation; a second by Avril Pyman is also included in the anthology. Neither quite captures the incapturability of Russia – a trait that Tyutchev was not the first to note, and there will not be a last.
Perhaps Churchill lacked Tyutchev’s near-religious conviction, yet the fixation on Russia’s incomprehensibility is noteworthy. This anthology, perhaps, will help readers begin to crack through that enigma, and come to understand that even if Russia cannot fully be understood, its poetry, at least, is something to be believed in. RL
* Of course excepting those who purchased Russian Life Books’ The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar, featuring 62 Krylovian masterpieces translated by Lydia Razran Stone and illustrated by Katya Korobkina.
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
