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Radical Shadows
Previously Untranslated and Unpublished Works by Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Masters
Conjunctions, Vol. 31
Edited by Bradford Morrow
CONJUNCTIONS
Bi-Annual Volumes of New Writing
Edited by
Bradford Morrow
Contributing Editors
Chinua Achebe
John Ashbery
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Guy Davenport
Elizabeth Frank
William H. Gass
John Guare
Robert Kelly
Ann Lauterbach
Norman Manea
Patrick McGrath
Mona Simpson
Nathaniel Tarn
Quincy Troupe
William Weaver
John Edgar Wideman
published by Bard College
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Anton Chekhov, Fourteen Stories (translated from Russian by Peter Constantine)
Yasunari Kawabata, Silence and The Boat-Women: A Story and a Dance-Drama (translated from Japanese by Michael Emmerich)
Djuna Barnes, Eighteen Poems (edited by Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman)
C. P. Cavafy, Seven Unfinished Poems (translated from Greek by John C. Davis)
George Seferis, Cavafy’s Ithaka (translated from Greek by Susan Matthias)
Eugène Ionesco, From Black and White (with lithographs by Eugène Ionesco, and translated from French by Esther Allen)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Life Sentence, A Missing Passage from “The House of the Dead” (translated from Russian by Peter Constantine)
Antonia Pozzi, Twelve Poems (translated from Italian with an afterword by Lawrence Venuti)
Marcel Proust, The Indifferent One (translated from French by Burton Pike)
Truman Capote, Christmas Vacation (edited by Bradford Morrow, with a facsimile of the original manuscript)
Mary Butts, Fumerie (edited by Nathalie Blondel and Camilla Bagg)
Robert Musil, The Snowstorm (translated from German by Burton Pike)
Michel Leiris, 1944 Journal (translated from French by Lydia Davis, with afterword text by Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, translated from French by Jeff Fort)
Thomas Bernhard, Claus Peymann and Hermann Beil on Sulzwiese (translated from German by Gitta Honegger)
Paul Van Ostaijen, Hollow Haven (translated from Dutch with an afterword by Duncan Dobbelmann)
Anna Akhmatova, Poems and Fragments 1909-1964 (translated from Russian by Roberta Reeder with Volodymyr Dibrova)
E. M. Cioran, From Cahiers (selected with an afterword by Norman Manea, translated from French by Richard Howard)
Mikhail Bulgakov, Three Stories (translated from Russian by Anneta Greenlee)
Hermann Broch, Frana (translated from German by Susan Gillespie)
Elizabeth Bishop, Three Poems (edited by Alice Quinn)
Louis Couperus, Of Monotony (translated from Dutch by Duncan Dobbelmann)
Vladimir Nabokov, The House Was There (with a drawing by Vladimir Nabokov and an afterword by Sarah Funke)
Federigo Tozzi, Three Stories (translated from Italian with an afterword by Minna Proctor)
Zinaida Gippius, Three Poems (translated from Russian by Anneta Greenlee)
Vaslav Nijinsky, From The Unknown Fourth Notebook (edited by Joan Acocella, translated from Russian by Kyril FitzLyon)
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
INTRODUCTION
THIS PROJECT BEGAN AS serendipity, then developed into an international search. Last winter, Joyce Carol Oates wrote me about an acquaintance who had completed work on some previously untranslated stories by Yasunari Kawabata—was I interested in seeing the manuscript? That same week, I happened to be speaking with Peter Constantine, himself a translator of writings from some twenty languages, who offered me a group of short stories by Anton Chekhov that had not yet seen their way into print in English. This set me and Peter, and a host of other friends, on a quest to see if we couldn’t uncover works by some major literary writers from the late nineteenth century forward, that were lost, forgotten, suppressed, rare, unknown—or, at minimum, unknown in English—and commission translations or secure rights to bring them into the light.
Why Radical Shadows? As a title for this collection of fiction, poetry, plays and journals written by some of our great nineteenth- and twentieth-century innovative forebears—some undiminished shades of the relatively recent past—Radical Shadows seemed apt. But as a larger idea, one that raises some intriguing questions, Radical Shadows becomes more provocative than I might first have imagined. We who value literature must ask ourselves: What else has been left behind in the mad rush of this frenzied century? What other works remain safe but unexplored in private or institutional archives, or were published in their original languages in ephemeral reviews known only to specialists, or were until recently suppressed by governments to whom certain writers were (and are, in some cases) considered dangerous and thus have languished, out of official critical favor? How much important material has been overlooked? How many works by major writers such as Proust have been published in honorable, but very limited deluxe editions that few but book collectors will have the chance to read? What other texts have come down to us in versions expurgated or altered by members of the authors’ families, such as in the cases of Vaslav Nijinsky and Antonia Pozzi? If works as interesting as Musil’s play and Federigo Tozzi’s stories and Dostoevsky’s prison passage haven’t found their way into English until now, what other remarkable literature is out there, unknown to so many readers? How was it that a magnificent poem by Djuna Barnes, once rejected by Marianne Moore when she worked at The Dial, until now remained unpublished along with many of Barnes’s personal favorites, unknown to those among us who like her Jacobean line better than Miss Moore did?
Norman Manea, the great Romanian writer who was kind enough to bring to my attention both the Cioran and delightful Ionesco works in this issue, tells me that his own manuscripts were lost when he had to flee his homeland, and that other of his papers are “locked in the censor’s safebox” in Romania—unavailable not only to his readers, but to the author himself! In a perceptive introduction to a collection of political essays by Günter Grass some years ago, Salman Rushdie proposed that one of the themes central to all twentieth-century writing is that of the migrant. Rushdie writes, “The very word metaphor, with its roots in the Greek words for bearing across, describes a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into images. Migrants—borne-across humans—are metaphorical beings in their very essence; and migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere around us. We all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all migrant peoples.”
One need not invoke Thomas Mann, Primo Levi, Milan Kundera or anyone else (the list is long) who left home in order to survive and write, to catch the validity of Rushdie’s assertion. A quick glance at the group of writers gathered here—from Seferis and Cavafy to Gippius and Nabokov—reveals how many migrated, exiled themselves or were exiled. Which again brings up the salient question about what’s been lost along the way.
Radical Shadows invites, I hope, more of this sort of cultural investigative work, and an appreciation both of translators—those who “bear-across” work from one language to another—and everyone else who strives to complete the canons of our important writers.
I owe a debt of gratitude to many people who helped make Radical Shadows possible, above all m
y co-editor, Peter Constantine. Also, I would like to thank others who brought manuscripts to our attention, as well as those who helped with securing permissions, and gave us leads and suggestions: André Aciman, Beth Alvarez (University of Maryland Library, College Park), Jin Auh (Andrew Wylie Agency), Cal Barkside (Arcade), Daisy Blackwell and Georges Borchardt (Borchardt Agency), Andreas Brown, Gerald Clarke, Caroline Donner, Susan Drury (Authors League Fund), Brian Evenson, Jonathan Foer, Robert Giroux, Florence Giry (Editions Gallimard), Lynn Goldberg (Goldberg McDuffie Communications), Alia Habib, Petra Christina Hardt (Suhrkamp Verlag), Glenn Horowitz, James S. Jaffe, Robert Kelly, Chuck Kim (French Publishers’ Agency), Franz Larese (Erker Verlag), Nancy MacKechnie and Gita Nadas (Vassar College Library, Special Collections), Anna Magni, Tom McGonigle, Bruce McPherson, Alice Methfessel, George Robert Minkoff, Kenneth Northcott, Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Page, Randy Petilos (University of Chicago Press), Alan Schwartz (Truman Capote Literary Trust), Gary Shapiro, Avi Sharon, Dan Simon (Seven Stories Press), Nikki Smith, Frederick Vanacore, Kathy Varker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Lawrence Venuti, Tom Whalen, John Wronowski and of course everyone at Bard College for their continued support of this project.
Postscript: Our longtime Senior Editor Pat Sims, highly respected by her colleagues at Conjunctions as well as the hundreds of authors she’s worked with, is leaving to pursue other interests. On behalf of all of us who’ve worked with Pat, I wish her the best in her new career. I would also like to welcome Laura Starrett, who joins Conjunctions with our next issue, Eye to Eye.
—Bradford Morrow
October 1998
New York City
Fourteen Stories
Anton Chekhov
—Translated from Russian by Peter Constantine
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
“Don’t lick clean, don’t polish—be awkward and
bold. Brevity is the sister of talent!”
—Anton Chekhov to his older brother Alexander, February 1889
CHEKHOV WROTE THESE fourteen prose works during the early 1880s, his most productive and prolific period. He had just arrived in the big city and was energetically studying medicine, supporting his parents and siblings, and exploring the streets, taverns, markets and brothels of Moscow, absorbing the city’s color and commotion and working it into quick, vivid prose. By the time he was twenty-six he had already published over four hundred short stories and vignettes in Moscow and St. Petersburg magazines.
Young Chekhov amazed his audience of the early 1880s. He was particularly interested in the absurd, and repatterned the anecdote and vignette forms of the popular press into innovative forms of writing: pieces in the guise of National Census questions, a test set by a mad mathematician, a proposal to the board of a medical school, the twisted “questions and answers” of popular women’s magazines. The story in “After the Fair” is told in fragmented paragraphs—the “torn and tattered papers covered with smudged writing” that a Moscow housewife finds in her husband’s pockets after the Nizhgorod fair. As she reads the bits of paper, a story unfolds. “A Lawyer’s Romance, A Protocol” uses the gruff legalese of a divorce petition to tell the cynical love story of a Moscow lawyer.
Traditional storytelling with a beginning, middle and end is no longer important. Chekhov aims for effect, an uncommonly pioneering approach for the time.
Almost a century has passed since Chekhov’s death, and it is surprising that these masterpieces have not been previously translated into English. Earlier generations of translators overlooked these pieces, which until recently were often considered shocking in terms of literary technique. As the Chekhov specialist Julie de Sherbinin points out in a letter to Harper’s Magazine, which had published other previously untranslated stories of Chekhov, “The gaps in English translation of his early work can be attributed to various factors: these stories were long considered products of an ‘immature’ writer, they are rich in colloquialisms and wordplay and thus are hard to translate, and they often depend on cultural context for their humor.”
These remarkable stories do not present the Chekhov that we know in the West. In them, one sees the exuberance, energy and craft of a young writer of genius. They are some of the pieces that made Chekhov famous in his day.
AFTER THE FAIR
A MERCHANT FROM the First Traders Guild of Moscow had just returned from the Nizhgorod Fair, and in his pockets his wife found a bunch of torn and tattered papers covered with smudged writing. She managed to make out the following:
Dear Mr. Semyon Ivanovitch:
Mr. Khryapunov, the artiste you beat up, is prepared to reach an out-of-court settlement of 100 rubles. He will not accept one kopeck less. I await your answer.
Sincerely, your lawyer, N. Erzayev.
_____________
To the brute who dares call himself a trader:
Having been insulted by you most grossly, I have relegated my complaint to a court of law. As you seem incapable of appreciating who I am, perhaps the justice of the peace or a public trial will teach you to respect me. Erzayev, your lawyer, said that you were not prepared to pay me a hundred rubles. This being the case, I am prepared to accept 75 rubles in compensation for your brutish behavior. It is only in lenience for your simple-mindedness and to what one could call your animalistic instincts that I am prepared to let you off so cheaply. When an educated man insults me, I charge much more.
Khryapunov, artiste
_____________
… concerning our demand of 539 rubles and 43 kopecks, the value of the broken mirror and the piano you demolished in the Glukharev Restaurant …
_____________
… anoint bruises morning and evening …
_____________
… after I manage to sell the ruined fabrics as if they were choice merchandise, I plan to get totally soused! Get yourself over to Feodosya’s this evening. See to it that we get Kuzma the musician—and spread some mustard on his head—and that we have four mademoiselles. Get plump ones.
_____________
… concerning the I.O.U.—you can take a flying jump! I will gladly proffer a ten-kopeck piece, but concerning the fraudulent bankrupter, we’ll see what we shall see.
_____________
Finding you in a state of feverish delirium due to the excessive intake of alcohol (delirium tremens), I applied cupping glasses to your body to bring you back to your senses. For these services I request a fee of three rubles.
Egor Frykov, Medical Attendant
_____________
Dear Semyon, please don’t be angry—I named you as a witness in court concerning that rampage when we were being beaten up, even though you said I shouldn’t. Don’t act so superior—after all, you yourself caught a couple of wallops too. And see to it that those bruises don’t go away, keep them inflamed …
_____________
~ BILL ~
1 portion of fish soup.................................1 ruble, 80 kopecks
1 bottle of Champagne..............................8 rubles
1 broken decanter......................................5 rubles
Cab for the mademoiselles........................2 rubles
Cabbage soup for the Gypsy......................................60 kopecks
Tearing of waiter’s jacket...........................10 rubles
_____________
… I kiss you countless times, and hope to see you soon at the following address: Fayansov Furnished rooms, number 18. Ask for Martha Sivyagina.
Your ever-loving Angelica
CONFESSION—OR OLYA, ZHENYA, ZOYA: A LETTER
Ma chère, you asked me, among other things, in your sweet letter, my dear unforgettable friend, why, although I am thirty-nine years old, I have to this day never married.
My dear friend, I hold family life in the highest possible esteem. I never married simply because goddamn Fate was not propitious. I set out to get married a good fifteen times, but did not manage to becaus
e everything in this world,—and particularly in my life—seems to hinge on chance. Everything depends on it! Chance, that despot! Let me cite a few incidents thanks to which I still lead a contemptibly lonely life.
FIRST INCIDENT
It was a delightful June morning. The sky was as clear as the clearest Prussian blue. The sun played on the waters of the river and brushed the dewy grass with its rays. The river and the meadow were strewn with rich diamonds of light. The birds were singing, as if with one voice. We walked down the path of yellowish sand, and with happy hearts drank in the sweet aromas of the June morning. The trees looked upon us so gently, and whispered all kinds of nice—I’m sure—and tender things. Olya Gruzdofska’s hand (she’s now married to the son of your chief of police) lay in mine, and her tiny little finger kept brushing over my thumb … her cheeks glowed, and her eyes … O ma chère, what exquisite eyes! There was so much charm, truth, innocence, joyousness, childish naiveté, in those blue sparkling eyes of hers! I fell in love with her blond braids, and with the little footprints her tiny feet left in the sand.
“I have devoted my life, Olga Maksimovna, to science!” I whispered, terrified that her little finger would slip off my thumb. “The future will bring with it a professorial chair … on my conscience there are questions … scientific ones … my life is filled with hard work, troubles, lofty … I mean … well, basically, I’m going to be a professor … I am an honest man, Olga Maksimovna … I’m not rich, but … I need someone who with her presence … (Olya blushed and shyly lowered her eyes; her little finger was trembling) who with her presence … Olya! Look up at the sky! Look how pure it is … my life is just as boundlessly pure!”
My tongue didn’t have time to scramble out of this quagmire of drivel: Olya suddenly lifted her head, snatched her hand away from mine and clapped her palms together. A flock of geese with little goslings was waddling towards us. Olya ran over to them and, laughing out loud, stretched her arms toward them … O what beauteous arms, ma chère!
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