Babel on a stud farm.
The event that occasions my guest bloggery for BAP is the recent publication of my annotated translation of seventy-two stories by Isaac Babel, The Essential Fictions. Anyone who knows a little about Babel will note the pun in the title of the collection. For Babel, fiction was essential to real life, which, in his words, "wants nothing more than to resemble a well-made story," and real life––or at least Babel's deployment of "autobiography"––was also essentially fiction.
About ten years ago, in my book The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern, 2008), I wondered about why Babel never wrote poetry. Now seems a somewhat propitious time to revisit and reassess what I wrote then. To paraphrase: You could argue that Babel, who composed his stories on tiny strips of paper, was really a poet. It's even been suggested that he wrote prose as a somewhat mercenary adjustment, to fulfill the young Soviet establishment’s desire for a “Red Tolstoy,” and that Red Cavalry was Babel’s version of Tolstoy's debut, The Cossacks (1863). Perhaps the assumption here is that only a repressed poet could compress a 150-page draft of “My First Goose” into a few sheets. But I would offer another view: Babel was a committed writer of prose, one who admired Tolstoy’s obsession with fiction as a mode of seeking the truth, of following the aesthetic and ethical imperative to love experience—an obligation that compels narrative. Tolstoy and Babel shared a specific kind of curiosity, if utterly different temperaments. As Babel once put it: "When you read Tolstoy, you feel the world is writing, the world in all its variety, . . . [but] although I am a devotee of Tolstoy, in order to achieve something I have to work in a way opposite to his. . . . Tolstoy was able to describe what happened to him minute by minute, . . . whereas I, evidently, have it in me to describe the most interesting five minutes I’ve experienced in twenty-four hours."
No, Babel’s world does not “write itself”; and in a certain sense, Babel’s condensed art may be more humble and honest than Tolstoy’s "loose, baggy monsters." I also wonder if Babel’s “most interesting five minutes”—released from the formal parameters of the realist novel—are a response to Dostoevsky’s novels, which are strung together from scores of intense five-minute encounters. But if it's true, as George Clay once helpfully put it, that "Tolstoy is what happens the most and Dostoevsky the most that can happen," then maybe Babel’s Dostoevskian “five minutes” are taken from Tolstoy’s “twenty-four hours.” In other words, where Dostoevsky, according to Babel and others, offers us a revealing (but often unkind) intensification of the human condition, and where Tolstoy is the apotheosis of a transparent (and often overbearing) objective descriptiveness, Babel arrives at a poetic and narrative distillation of the world as it is––"the essence of things," in his words. Babel’s best fiction reduces the world to its irreducible ambivalence—but it is a passionate ambivalence that will forever call out for some kind of ethical and aesthetic commitment. To remain in some kind of decadent poetic indifference would be to misread Babel’s lyrical reduction entirely. Poetic precision in fiction, besides having aesthetic force, often cuts with more ethical depth and subtlety, just as a faint light shining through a pin-prick can have a more interesting intensity than a fluorescent lamp. Why didn't Babel write poems? Perhaps he needed to move past the stasis of the purely lyrical, past its prophetic eruption and otherworldly challenge. Maybe only prose can move beyond the daughter’s implacable demand at the end of “The Crossing of the Zbruch,” the first story of Babel's Red Cavalry: “I wish to know where in the whole world you could find another father like my father . . .” There might be a simple reason why Babel did not write poems: prose takes you places.
Well, that's what I thought ten years ago. My broad-brush description of "poetry" seemed strange to me even then. Richard Pevear has described the translation of prose fiction as more like writing poetry than anything else: "A good prose writer has to make a house, put furniture in it, open doors, bring people in, give them hair and eyes and clothes. They have to make a world and populate it. For a translator, that’s all been done.” That's exactly what translating Babel felt like. I spent days rubbing, teasing, tweaking every phrase as if it were a beloved rosary––knowing full well that my work would be compared with a half-dozen other translations. Was I fixing Babel's prose––his "army of words," nimble as the tachanka machine-gun carts of the Red Army––into some kind of lyrical stasis?
This is a tachanka! Note the pointed hat, known as a budennovka (in honor of Semyon Budenny, who organized the 1st Cavalry Army), similar to one I liked to wear as a young boy in the Soviet Union. Babel describes the tachanka: "Hay carts are prepared for battle and seize towns. A wedding procession approaches the local district council, opens concentrated fire, and a puny little priest unfurls a black flag of anarchy, orders the authorities to serve up the bourgeois, the proletariat, the music, and wine."
Val Vinokur is the author of The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern University Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2009 AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies. His poetry, prose, and interviews have appeared in The Boston Review, McSweeney's, Zeek, Common Knowledge, The Literary Review, New American Writing, The Massachusetts Review, The Miami Herald, Public Seminar, and LitHub. His co-translations, with Rose Réjouis, from French and Creole have been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lewis Galantière Award. Since 2001, he has taught literature at The New School, where he is chair of Liberal Arts in the BA Program for Adults and directs the minor in Literary Translation. His annotated translation of seventy-two stories by Isaac Babel, The Essential Fictions (Northwestern UP), was published last fall. Vinokur is also the founding editor of POETS & TRAITORS PRESS, which publishes hybrid books of original and translated poetry.
<< if it's true, as George Clay once helpfully put it, that "Tolstoy is what happens the most and Dostoevsky the most that can happen," then maybe Babel’s Dostoevskian “five minutes” are taken from Tolstoy’s “twenty-four hours.” In other words, where Dostoevsky, according to Babel and others, offers us a revealing (but often unkind) intensification of the human condition, and where Tolstoy is the apotheosis of a transparent (and often overbearing) objective descriptiveness, Babel arrives at a poetic and narrative distillation of the world as it is––"the essence of things," in his words. >> Beautifully said. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | January 10, 2018 at 11:54 AM