There could
be no more suitable a gift for a writer, especially one sent to a Soviet labor camp
for what he had written. The giver remains nameless. The recipient is Abram
Tertz, aka Andrei Sinyavsky, in A Voice from the Chorus (trans.
Kyril Fitzlyon and Max Hayward, 1976). Sinyavsky spent 1966 to 1971 in Dubravlag,
a labor camp in Mordovia, some three-hundred miles southeast of Moscow. The
entry is dated Oct. 13, 1969, five days after his forty-fourth birthday. The
passage continues:
“Oh, that
onion! How many times it has saved me! I would allow all who ever gave me one
to climb up to heaven on it, as on a ladder.”
Here, a
footnote from the translators is helpful: “Reference to the legend (told by
Grushenka in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov) about an evil woman whose
only good deed in life had been to give an onion to a pauper. She tries (but
fails) to clamber out of the pit of Hell by holding on to this onion proffered
to her by her guardian angel.”
Let's hope Boris Dralyuk never runs out of pens – or onions. Boris was born thirty-eight years
ago today, in Odessa. Give yourself a present in his name. Read his
translations of Babel, Zoshchenko, Ozerov, Osipov and Tolstoy, among others. Read
his poem “My Hollywood: a Triptych.” Here is his translation of “The Jolt” a
poem by Anna Semyonovna Prismanova, dating from the late 1930s or early 1940s
and collected in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015):
“The jolt
must come from far away:
the start of
bread is in the grain.
A stream,
although still underground,
aspires to
reflect the sky.
“A future
Sunday’s distant light
reaches us
early in the week.
The jolt
must come from far away
to trigger
earthquakes in the heart.
“A shoulder
alien to me
controls the
movement of my hand.
In order to
acquire such strength,
the jolt
must come from far away.”
3 comments:
I recently purchased Boris Dralyuk's Lives and Deaths, (Pushkin Press, 2019) his translations of Tolstoy stories.
I neglected to note in my previous comment that along with the Tolstoy stories, I ordered a CD of the master Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov performing Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart (Deutsche Grammophon, July 2020). Those of your readers who have a taste for this music, should give hear Sokolov, whose playing can take your breath away.
Saw Sokolow in a solo performance at the Berliner Philharmonie in 2018. Truly amazing. Six encores.
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