by Dragomoshchenko, Arkadii; Ostashevsky, Eugene; Hejinian, Lyn
The nonsensical “daughterly board” results from association by sound and look with “on the blackboard” (na doskè chiòrnoy), black being the most pervasive color in Dragomoshchenko’s poetry. The image of chalk shattering upon such a board, with its Freudian whispers of incest and impotence, might also gesture toward the Stalin period, when so-called black boards of shame pilloried unproductive workers and saboteurs. Yet does the complex pun clarify anything about the statesman, the speaker, or even empires? Does it help us locate them as concrete historical entities? Ultimately, it does not. Rather than history, the poem wants to talk about phenomenology: not memory of this or that event, but of the texture of remembered experience “as such.” (Incidentally, this is why we entitled it with a nod toward Plato’s dialogue of the same name—«Политик» in Russian, “The Statesman” in English—instead of opting for the more obvious “To a Politician.”)
Some concluding remarks. It might be tempting to regard Dragomoshchenko as one who rejects the domestic tradition in favor of a globalized poetic deriving from American and Western European models. Several aspects of his poetry lend credence to the view: its philosophical dependence on poststructuralism, its internationalized vocabulary, its dearth of local detail, and—most importantly—its adherence to free verse, still the main ideological marker in the Russian context. Presumably the animosity the poet encounters in his native country comes not so much from his complexity as from his alleged break with the Russian tradition. Cultural conservatives would see him as creating the kind of “world poetry” that, as Sinologist Stephen Owen argues, shears away the specificities of history, language, and culture to make itself more palatable to international—read: Western—audiences. Composing with the translator in mind makes such “world poetry,” argues Owen, about as savory as wet paper.4
Stephanie Sandler, an American scholar of Russian literature, while discussing the three-decade-long dialogue between Dragomoshchenko and Lyn Hejinian, does indeed suggest the poet’s process of composition to be affected by the text’s future in English: “Dragomoshchenko has said that there are moments when he considers how a line will sound in Hejinian’s translation, which affects his choices as a poet. He is, in effect, writing for a multilingual audience. Or we might say, following the lead of Walter Benjamin, he uses poetic language as if it were always already translated.”5 I respectfully submit that we should take Dragomoshchenko’s admission with a grain of salt—or even a small beach of it. It is certainly true that he is “writing for a multilingual audience” in the sense that many of his poet friends and readers do not speak Russian. However, for him to make any choice based on translatability he would need to forego the syntactical discontinuities and the puns that lie at the heart of his poetic method, as I have demonstrated. His tendency to maximize connotation at the expense of denotation by appealing to specifically Russian idioms further compensates for the easy translatability of his free verse. I therefore attribute the poet’s “admission” to graciousness, or to the fact that Hejinian for him was not just a translator but a partner in a literary dialogue that lasted almost thirty years. He does not use poetic language as if it were always already translated.
It bears adding that Dragomoshchenko’s ideal translation is more imaginative than most people’s. Translation for him is not about rendering his Russian as precisely as English allows. His translators have all had the experience of inquiring about the exact meaning of some line only to be told, in effect, to just “go and do something interesting,” with target-language improvisation considered a legitimate extension of the poem’s semantic field. This view of translation as an unfolding of the original poem’s potential was also held by our mutual friend the late Alexei Parshchikov, a Russian metametaphorist poet with the same circle of American contacts. Even more nonstandard is Dragomoshchenko’s way of handing his work to translators and then rewriting it some more, without informing anyone of the changes. I stumbled across these revisions only when, starting to compare English versions with Russian originals, I found many variant readings that could not possibly have come about as simple errors.
It is my opinion that the job of an editor of a bilingual volume that does not explicitly foreground variativity is to tamp down on it and—disregarding the author’s love of the free play of signifiers—bring the English text into as literal a version of the Russian as possible. Although I did retain such translator successes as Lyn Hejinian’s lineation, I sought to avoid the impression that we were mistaken or improvising when it was the author himself who changed the original after giving it away. Those variants that surely remain are mainly due to my oversight.
I would like to thank the translators for being so patient. An especial thanks goes out to Lyn Hejinian for reworking the versions of the poems published two decades ago in Description, and to her and Douglas Messerli for letting us cull from that book. We are also grateful to Deborah Meadows for suggesting this volume, and to Serguei Artiouchkov for generously helping solve challenges both logistic and philological.
EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
NOTES
FOREWORD
1 From unpublished letter to LH, October 14, 1983.
2 From unpublished letter to LH, May 12, 1985.
ARKADII TROFIMOVICH DRAGOMOSHCHENKO
1 For their poetic friendship, see Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 44–94.
DRAGOMOSHCHENKO’S RUSSIAN
1 Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten, Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991), 40–41.
2 The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. Constance Garnett and Leonard J. Kent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 2:313.
3 Obfuscation of deixis is one of the more international features of Dragomoshchenko’s poetry. Jonathan Culler describes Ashbery’s “play with personal pronouns and obscure deictic references which prevent the reader from constructing a coherent enunciative act” as “one of the principal ways of questioning the ordered world which the ordinary communicative circuit assumes” (in his Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975], 168–69).
4 Stephen Owen, “What Is World Poetry?” The New Republic, Nov. 19, 1990, 28–31; and “Stepping Forward and Back: Issues and Possibilities for ‘World’ Poetry,” Modern Philology 100, no. 4 (May 2003): 532–48.
5 Stephanie Sandler, “Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Lyn Hejinian, and the Persistence of Romanticism,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 1 (2005): 20–21.
ELENA BALASHOVA co-translated the poems in Dragomoshchenko’s Description (1990) and Xenia (1994), both published by Sun and Moon, with Lyn Hejinian.
JACOB EDMOND is author of A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (Fordham University Press, 2012), which addresses the work of Dragomoshchenko, Hejinian, and other Russian, American, and Chinese poets. He teaches at the University of Otago, New Zealand.
LYN HEJINIAN is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, notably My Life, published in several editions since 1980, the latest by Wesleyan University Press (2013). Her travels to Russia resulted in her meeting Dragomoshchenko, writing Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (The Figures, 1991), and contributing to Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (Mercury House, 1991). She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY is the editor and co-translator of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern University Press, 2006), Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets, 2013), and Dmitry Golynko’s As It Turned Out (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008).
GENYA TUROVSKAYA is the editor and co-translator of Red Shifting by Aleksandr Skidan (2008) and The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova (2010), both published by Ugly Duckling Presse.
BELA SHAYEVICH is t
he co-translator of I Live I See by Vsevolod Nekrasov (Ugly Duckling Presse 2013) and It’s No Good by Kirill Medvedev (Ugly Duckling Presse / n+1, 2012).