A welcome
reminder in this age of Russia-vilifying -- and it rhymes! Talk of Lenin and
Putin, of course, but don’t forget Pushkin and Mandelstam. That would be like
remembering Jefferson Davis and Richard Nixon while forgetting Emily Dickinson
and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Boris Dralyuk goes on:
“Indeed,
historically, Russian poets have borne a mammoth, all too often a crushing burden.
They have been looked to – variously or all at once – as carriers of the
national idea, voices of dissent, embodiments of personal freedom, and prophets
of the coming day.”
Boris’
welcome reminder comes in his introduction to Ten Poems from Russia (2018), an elegantly designed pamphlet edited
by him and published by Candlestick Press and Pushkin Press. Think of it as a
compact Whitman (sorry) Sampler of a poetic tradition still too little known and
appreciated in the U.S. The poets, from Pushkin to Julia Nemirovskaya, are
translated by Boris, Peter France and Robert Chandler. Here is France’s version
of a Mandelstam lyric from November 1920:
“Take from
my palms some sun to bring you joy
and take a
little honey - so the bees
of cold
Persephone commanded us.
“No loosing
of the boat that is not moored,
no hearing
of the shadow shod in fur,
no
overcoming fear in life's dense wood.
“And kisses
are all that's left us now,
kisses as
hairy as the little bees
who perish
if they fly out of the hive.
“They rustle
in transparent depths of night,
their home
dense forests on Taigetos' slopes,
their food
is honeysuckle, mint and time.
“So for your
joy receive my savage gift,
a dry and
homely necklace of dead bees
who have
transmuted honey into sun.”
France tells
us here that this poem and two others are suffused with “the South, the Crimea
and thence to the Greece that meant so much to Mandelstam.” He was frequently
the guest of Maximilian Voloshin in Koktebel. “Take from my palms . . .”,
however, was “apparently written in Petrograd (Petropolis for Mandelstam) . . .
. in the winter of 1920, in conditions of poverty, cold and hunger.” Nadezhda
Mandelstam in Hope Abandoned (trans. Max
Hayward, 1974) often writes of her husband’s love of the South: “The Crimea is
mentioned in ‘Conversation About Dante’ in the passage where he says that,
reflecting on the structure of The Divine
Comedy, he had consulted the pebbles of Koktebel.” Of a later visit to the
Crimea, the widow writes: “The Crimea we now saw prompted thoughts not of the
genesis of our culture, but on the destruction and end of everything.”
Boris closes
the pamphlet with two poems written by Russian émigrés, the second answering
the first. Here is “I still find charm. . .” by Georgy Ivanov (1894-1958):
“I still
find charm in little accidental
trifles,
empty little things—
say, in a
novel without end or title,
or in this
rose, now wilting in my hands.
“I like its moiré
petals, dappled
with trembling
silver drops of rain—
and how I
found it on the sidewalk,
and how I’ll
toss it in a garbage can.”
And a response,
“Bouquet,” from Julia Nemirovskaya (b. 1962):
“No, I won’t
throw it out, for the sake of that tulip:
still fresh
and so white, that satiny curl—
a
sea-captain’s collar folded over his tunic,
a theatrical
backcloth, like a windowless wall.
Its petals
are like cupped and half-turned palms,
Its bloom a
head, a gleaming cherry in its mouth.
“. . . if it
must go, let somebody else throw it out—
As God will
say of me when my turn comes.”
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