Endarkenment

by Dragomoshchenko, Arkadii; Ostashevsky, Eugene; Hejinian, Lyn

  Na beregakh iskliuchennoi reki [On the Shores of the Expelled River]. Moscow: OGI, 2005.

  Chinese Sun. Novel. Tr. Evgeny Pavlov. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005.

  Bezrazlichiia [Indifferences]. Shorter prose. Saint Petersburg: Borey Art, 2007.

  Dust. Shorter prose. Tr. Evgeny Pavlov et al. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2008.

  Tavtologiia [Tautology]. Poetry. Moscow: NLO, 2011.

  Shoaling Things / Naar de ondiepte. Poetry. With Jan Lauwereyns. Ghent: DRUKsel, 2011.

  Tavtologiia / Tong yi fan fu. Poetry. Tr. Wenfei Liu. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2011.

  Paper Dreams / Zhi Meng. Poetry. Tr. Gilbert Chee Fun Fong et al. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2012.

  DRAGOMOSHCHENKO’S RUSSIAN

  Arkadii Dragomoshchenko passed away only a fortnight after receiving the diagnosis of advanced lung cancer. As his friends sought consolation in his writings in the days of his death, the words suddenly seemed to bear new and heavier meanings. It was, for example, “discovered” that the poet had been contemplating the prospect of his own death all along, and that the prospect formed much of the negative space of his utterance. His poetry struck some of us then as even more classical, Roman. Perhaps this is a perspectival illusion due to death. In any case, the manuscript for Endarkenment was completed before the author’s illness manifested itself. In the light of his passing, the following essay appears outdated, and its ironies may grate on the nerves. I have nonetheless been encouraged to publish it without revising even the tenses, as a picture taken of the author while he was living.

  Arkadii Dragomoshchenko is a controversial figure in Russian poetry today. His work does not have broad appeal. Although he has been picked up by the country’s largest and most important humanities press, NLO—whose name, an acronym for “New Literary Review,” is also how one says “unidentified flying object” in Russian—the intelligentsia of his generation, the baby boomers, generally prefer poetry released by the far more prim and proper Pushkin Fund, located in Saint-Petersburg, rather than the younger, more “theory”-inflected, often undigested, and sometimes undigestible work of poets of NLO, headquartered in Moscow. The fact that Dragomoshchenko was born in 1946, lives in Petersburg, and came out of that city’s poetry scene does not substantially alter his image.

  A few years ago, I interpreted at a reading by a Russian poet whose poems are not difficult to decipher for a native speaker schooled in the Soviet system. The reading took place in Petersburg, under the auspices of Summer Literary Seminars, an international creative writing program. Some stranger in the back greeted the ending of each poem with the kind of “that’s so deep” hums and “you go girl” uh-huhs that you never, ever hear at Russian poetry events, although he was obviously a native. At the end of the set, he stood up and proclaimed with evident satisfaction: “This ain’t no Dragomoshchenko for you!” (Eto vam ne Dragomoshchenko!), presumably intending to underscore the reader’s adherence to the dictates of prosody, realism, and construction of self that make sense to a broad section of Russian intelligentsia. Dragomoshchenko was not present to hear his name become the byword for amphigory.

  He has fared better with American friends and readers, who sweetly stress the penultimate syllable of his last name rather than the middle one. The present book is his fifth English-language title, with the first two, Description and Xenia, translated by Lyn Hejinian for Sun & Moon in the early 1990s. He appears as a protagonist in Leningrad, a collaborative essay by Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Michael Davidson, and Barrett Watten about visiting Leningrad to take part in a poetry seminar in the heady days of 1989. In fact, far more attention has been paid abroad to Dragomoshchenko than to many Russian poets who have gained broader readerships at home. The situation is less unnatural than it seems. His American friends largely came from the movement associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, This, and other ’70s and ’80s journals known for their radical poetics. Especially in their salad days—back when “salad” meant iceberg lettuce—Language School poets were almost as likely to be denounced for deviating from mainstream poetic norms in the United States as Dragomoshchenko, a little later, was in Russia. It is the communities they built for themselves in the States, painstakingly and over decades, that provide the main American readership for their Russian colleague. He thus appeals not so much to foreign rather than domestic poetry readers, but to experimental rather than mainstream readers, in both systems. After all, someone in Russia must be buying his books, with their incisive prefaces by philosophically inclined critics. Conversely, I have no fear of these translations appearing in the New Yorker.

  In the excitement of perestroika-era encounters, American poets tended to portray Dragomoshchenko as one of them. I particularly enjoy accounts of one 1989 Leningrad reading where all the other Russians declaimed from memory, intoned, squinted, waved their arms, rocked to and fro, and performed other non-rational actions naturally selected out of print-dominated American letters, whereas Dragomoshchenko, when his turn came, pulled up a chair and started reading quietly from piece of paper. The Americans were so excited by this display of liberal values that their representations of the scene cite the poet’s words in seamless English, as if a large dictionary did not block them from the original. Then, in keeping with the rituals of Dragomoshchenko’s salad days—back when “salad” meant boiled potatoes—some village explainer from Siberia got up and tried to convince the poet that his poetry wasn’t poetry.1

  Rather than thinking about Dragomoshchenko as an American poet in Russian clothing, I want to think about him as no less legitimate a continuation of the Russian poetic tradition than somebody composing abab iambic tetrameter quatrains about pollen. This does not mean that I wish to discount his perusal of, say, Derrida and Deleuze or, say, Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein. I am sure lots of frisson may be had by mapping what Dragomoshchenko says and how he says it onto, if not the analytic procedures of deconstruction, then at least to its aesthetics, mythologies, symbols and emblems—that is, its version of the feeling you get when you look to the West and your spirit is crying for leaving. But this is not the job for somebody who went to American college in the 1980s and consequently finds combinations of words like “always already” and “the deferral of the signified” to be something so old-hat that even saying it’s old-hat is old-hat (and weirdly embarrassing). Nonetheless, I fail to see why engagement with relatively contemporary Western literature and philosophy should disqualify somebody from being a Russian poet—that would really be a break with tradition!

  A good starting point for thinking about Dragomoshchenko’s place in Russian poetry is his relationship to Mandelstam. Dostoyevsky once said that all of Russian realist fiction came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat”; this is no more false than claiming that much of Dragomoshchenko develops the line, in Mandelstam’s “Tristia,” that the only thing truly sweet—gloss: valuable, meaningful, meaning-making—in our lives is the instance of recognition (“i sladok nam lish uznavaniia mig”). Dragomoshchenko extends Mandelstam’s “recognition” to a whole series of scenarios: now it is eros; now it is self-reflection; now it is childhood memory; now it is matching a word to an object, understanding a pattern, finding oneself in the world; now it is anamnesis; now it is reading. However, what matters to him is only the instance of recognition—the mental experience of it—rather than what the recognition is a recognition of. This is why he strives to empty his poems of particular content. Imagine someone you know in the street: now take your recognition at the precise moment it occurs, and empty it of the street and the person, to contemplate recognition itself. This is what it’s like to read a Dragomoshchenko poem.

  Dragomoshchenko’s emptying out of Mandelstam owes some of its drive to Alexander Vvedensky, the Petersburg avant-garde poet and member of OBERIU who left, upon his death in 1941, what is only now becoming recognized as one of the most remarkable bodies of poetry in twentieth-century literature. Dragomoshchenko’s poems from the late 1
980s quote him repeatedly. For Vvedensky, human cognitive mechanisms are inadequate for understanding the world that always exceeds them; therefore, the epistemologically preferable attitude toward the world is that of active not-understanding. His language performs and evokes active not-understanding of the world by combining words in such a way as to preclude the world from being read rationally through them. Although Vvedensky’s poetics are rather unlike those of Dragomoshchenko, both poets cultivate indeterminacy and paradox in order to express doubt in (as Vvedensky does) or to bracket (as Dragomoshchenko does) the competence of language when it names, categorizes, describes, or even refers to anything outside itself.

  English-language readers might benefit from the following brief sketch of Dragomoshchenko’s Russian, especially of those aspects that have defied our translation efforts. I will draw most of my examples from my favorite poem in this volume, “To a Statesman,” beautifully rendered by the American poet Genya Turovskaya. Its first line,

  presents problems both syntactic and semantic. Razgovàrivat’, “to talk,” “to converse,” is an intransitive verb, but here a direct object is thrust upon it: dreams. The result, something like “you are conversing dreams,” is not a phrase that might pop into the mind of a native speaker. As a syntactic impossibility, it generates no clear meaning and cannot, therefore, represent anything in the world if the world is rational. It does, however, suggest several near hits. First and foremost, the native speaker will notice its proximity to the phrase razgovàrivat’ vo snè, “to talk in one’s sleep.” Perhaps the statesman divulges his secrets or suffers from nightmares? A more recondite—and very obsolete—usage of razgovàrivat’, one where the verb may indeed take a noun in the accusative, means “to talk out of.” Perhaps the statesman defuses his nightmares by talking? Yet, in Russian as in English, only a person can be talked out of something, a dream cannot. Perhaps the statesman “talks” his dreams in the sense that they are a kind of speech-act, and structured according to the same rules as language? But to interpret the phrase thus still violates syntactical norms, and if that were the native speaker’s meaning, she would have expressed herself otherwise.

  To make matters worse, po tetràdi—“along” or “from” or “by the notebook”—cannot not join with razgovàrivat’ either. One can chitàt’ po tetràdi—“to read from (or by) the notebook,” not quite the same as chitàt’ v tetràdi, “to read in the notebook.” Po tetradi often has spatial connotations (“the pen was moving in, or along, the notebook”) or sometimes causal (po tetràdi uznaiùt, “they will know from” or “by the notebook”). When the preposition po follows razgovàrivat’, however, the result is almost inevitably po telefònu: “to talk on the phone.” So what is the statesman doing with his dreams? Is he talking them “into” his notebook, as if it were a telephone receiver? Or is the notebook instructing him how to interpret his dreams, or even how to dream them? Or is he talking his dreams “across” the notebook by writing them left to right? None of these possibilities fully fits. Rather, the central meaning of the phrase sny razgovàrivaesh po tetràdi is missing, forced out like the face of the snuffbox general in Gogol’s Overcoat: “which general I can’t exactly say, for a finger had been thrust through the spot where his face should have been, and the hole had been pasted over with a square piece of paper.”2

  Complementing the elision of central meaning (and therefore the possibility of reference) is the poet’s prolific abuse of deixis, that is, those features of language that refer to the time, place, actors, and other extratextual contexts of an utterance. He avoids pronouns (I, you, he, etc.), adverbs of place or time (here, there, now, tomorrow), or demonstrative adjectives (this, that), making explicit who is doing what to whom, when, or in what manner. I don’t just mean such questions as who the addressor and the addressee of “To a Statesman” are, and what their relationship is, and what country the statesman lives in, and so forth—these issues might be left unspecified in far more normative poems, although perhaps not all of them at once, nor to such an extent. What I am referring to is rather more extreme. In “To a Statesman,” “the voices” that “didn’t reach you” actually belong to some human “them” we are told nothing about except that the voices are theirs. The same poem suddenly switches the addressee from male to female, and the tone from social to erotic, only to nonchalantly backtrack a sentence later. (Differences between languages prompted Genya Turovskaya to put the gendered pronoun into the third person; they also prevented her from attaching a pronoun to “voices.”) An analogous deictic shift occurs in “Paper Dreams,” a poem that, although dedicated to Jerome Rothenberg, suddenly starts slobbering over the tattooed clavicle of some informal “you” that probably does not belong to a professor emeritus of a large American university. In general, deictic deficiency is such a programmatic feature of Dragomoshchenko’s work that he sneeringly has his critics in “… there they go, writing poems” assume the deictic, pointing pose of Lenin on the monument outside Finland Station:

  “But what exactly are you doing?”

  Yes, ask me, but ask intelligibly,

  ask me so that I may grasp what you’re saying.

  Be articulate, do not avoid the sense of responsibility.

  Take two steps back, do not hurry,

  and if there is a stone nearby,

  stand on it, raise your arm as befits someone

  whom you can’t lead by the nose,

  and then extend it, open-palmed,

  asking: “What exactly are you doing?”3

  Just as Dragomoshchenko’s word combinations do not exhibit well-formedness, neither do his combinations of larger units. His sentences, whose logic is that of dreams, often employ the rhetoric of ratiocination without delivering on the ratiocination. Conjunctions, especially causal (although, because, in order to), and connectives (in addition, however, besides) unite phrases whose logical connections remain loose, intangible, or nonexistent. Self-corrections and retractions obfuscate rather than clarify (“the voices didn’t reach you. That is, / they did reach you”). The sentences break halfway or veer off into nothingness or verbose incoherence. (A strikingly formless smear of a sentence in “An Evening” programmatically associates such incoherence with the experience of being alive, as opposed to the other lines of the poem, so chiseled that even the dead can understand them.) On the higher level of narrative structures, there is obviously no beginning, middle, and end—no one has that anymore—the narrative signals rarely give any kind of consistent message, and, in general, the parts are often joined so haphazardly that they might as well belong to other poems.

  Russia struggles to remain a poetically traditional society, where children memorize classic poems in school, and adults can get caught reading poetry for pleasure. Hence it is customary among Russian readers to look for literary allusions while interpreting poems, since they are expected to have much of the diminutive Russian canon in their subconscious memories. Perestroika-era postmodernism marched under Mandelstam’s slogan tsitàta eto tsikàda (“the quotation is a cicada”), which some wag defaced, with universal approval, to read tsitàta eto tsikùta (“the quotation is hemlock”). Is intertextuality how Dragomoshchenko produces meaning? No cigar! The same as in his syntax, we are offered what looks like a quotation or an allusion, but we cannot make sense of it. Consider the second and part of the third line of “To a Statesman”:

  The indigenous reader compensates for semantic deficiencies by turning toward the history of Russian poetry: “Why, the slate pencil certainly refers to the last and unfinished ode of Gavrila Derzhavin … And then there is the ‘Slate Pencil Ode’ of Osip Mandelstam, one of his most difficult compositions, commemorating Derzhavin … And the notebook comes from Vvedensky—from the tiòmnik and the tetràd’ of his final pieces—and together they stand for death, etc.” But why is the slate blue? Is this a nod towards Paul Celan—“Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland / Sein Auge ist blau”? But—so what? How do any these unascertainable associati
ons help us understand what is happening in the poem? If the second line tells us only that the statesman is afraid of death, we could have figured that out without footnotes.

  Intertextual banners are also raised by such Hellenophile constructions as “Aegean linens,” “Stymphalian nightingales,” “Phrygian, pentatonic trifles” (culling only from “To a Statesman”), recalling the Petersburg tradition. But they are not legible either. Rumor went around Petersburg in 1920 that Mandelstam, after writing the lines “I am so afraid of the weeping of the Aonides” and “The train station trembles with the song of the Aonides,” started asking acquaintances who the Aonides were (the Muses, by another name). The story provides us with a suggestive vantage point on “Stymphalian nightingales,” asserting the primacy of sound and stylistic aura over philological (and logical) accuracy. Why “Stymphalian”? Nobody is alluding to the labors of Hercules; it’s just that “Stymphalian” has the right sound shape—with its evocation of Hellas and Barbary—for an ear that grew up with the Crimean myths of Russian modernism.

  As in his handling of literary allusions, Dragomoshchenko’s sound shapes both continue and empty out the legacy of Mandelstam. For the latter, sound shapes serve to establish similarity between things: for example, i Giòte svìshchuschii na vyùshchiisia tropè (“and Goethe whistling on a winding path”), implies isomorphism between the path and the whistled tune. Sound shapes in Dragomoshchenko, on the other hand, emphasize the uncanny and the illegible. One typical move is to pair words whose near-identity of appearance coexists with divergence in meaning, making the written seem indistinct, glimmering, spectral. Consider the following line from “The Weakening of an Indication”:

  It is similarity of sound and look that motivates the juxtaposition of the adjective “elaborate” (podrobno) with the adjective or adverb “similar”/“similarly” (podobno). After much doubt, we rendered the line in English as: “the indifference of stones recurs, recalls gravel.” Another kind of wordplay appears in the strange-seeming pun in “To a Statesman”: