The Best American Poetry

Ron Padgett on Apollinaire (an excerpt)

 Here is an excerpt from Ron Padgett's essay, "A Few Things about Apollinaire and Me." The occasion for this essay was the publication, by New York Review Books, of Ron's long-awaited translation of Guillaume Apollinaire's Selected Poems. It is a coincidence only in the sense Gertrude Stein gave that word, that I, too, was influenced deeply by Apollinaire in my time in Paris, a few years after Padgett's year there. Unlike Ron's, my attempts to translate Apollinaire are limited to two of his poems, "Zone" and "Hotel," and that makes me appreciate all the more the accuracy and the intelligence that Ron brings to the translator's task. He has done a noble service to literature. -- DL

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I wish I could recall the first time I learned of [Apollinaire, pictured left]. I do remember hearing, in the very early 1960s, Kenneth Koch talking enthusiastically and often about his poetry. I also recall being attracted to the sound of his name, which of course was not his real one. Would I have felt as much allure in a poet named Wilhelm de Kostrowitzsky (his real name)? Probably not: less euphony and no suggestion of Apollo.

The first two poems of his that I tried translating, “The Pont Mirabeau” and “The White Snow,” have moments of complex word play, but, being enthusiastic and naïve, I didn’t let that deter me. Over the years I got deeper into his work by translating more of his poems, as well as his novella The Poet Assassinated, which I tackled as a student in Paris in 1965. Well, I wasn’t really a student, I was a Fulbright fellow who attended no classes; instead I kept on being the poet that I had become, but now one who was falling deeper and deeper into what I imagined to have been Paris before World War One, a Paris whose writers and artists I had been drawn to since my teen years. Living below the poverty level—my wife and I subsisted on a Fulbright stipend allocated for one person—gave me the impression that I had even more in common with the threadbare poets I was captivated by, such as Reverdy, Cendrars, and Jacob, and among them Gui stood at the center of things, representing the exciting and innovative cultural world of pre-war Paris. My just being there, walking his neighborhoods—there were back streets whose buildings still had turn-of-the-century signs painted on them, cafes and restaurants that had hardly changed in 70 years—visiting his grave and sensing him there in the ground, standing mesmerized in front of the Bateau Lavoir, feeling the late-night danger and poverty of the Montmartre of 1907, and, perhaps above all, holding in my hands, just as he had, his manuscripts, corrected proofs, and letters—I was hooked for life. More than that, I assumed that as a young (avant-garde!) poet I had every right to be hooked, for we had something in common. However, fueled by youthful energy and adoration, I never stopped to ask myself exactly what it might be.

Although the poems I wrote that year in Paris reflect my being there, only a few of them show an obvious influence of Apollinaire, despite the fact that the book I cherished most was the Pléiade edition of his Oeuvres poétiques (the same copy I use today). I was already well acquainted with the two major collections he published in his lifetime, Alcools and Calligrammes, but the Pléiade edition included many poems I had never seen, and among them I found some gems, some of which didn’t sound like “Apollinaire.” All the better! For I was bent on not sounding like myself all the time, either, and I didn’t mind sounding like him sometimes. Take a look at his little poem, “Hotel”:

My room looks like a cage
The sun sticks its arm through the window
But I who want to smoke and make mirages
I light my cigarette with daylight
I don’t want to work I want to smoke

“I light my cigarette with daylight” is fanciful (and delightful), but it’s the final line that determines the feeling of the whole poem. The poet is feeling dreamy and lazy. Plunk. That’s it. The epigraph of a poem of mine I wrote in Paris that year, “Tone Arm,” runs in a similar vein:

The clouds go rolling over
The rooftops of the 17th-
18th- or 19th-century buildings—
They are really rolling
You people of the future
How I hate you
You are alive and I’m not
I don’t care whether you read my poetry or not

Fifty years apart, two poets sit in their hotel rooms in Paris and thumb their noses at the conventional bourgeois world, he charmingly, I arrogantly.

Apollinaire’s influence on me consisted of more than a superficial and temporary adoption of a self-indulgent attitude. What affected me more deeply was the elasticity of his work, which ranged from traditional, euphonious forms to avant-garde calligrammatic verbal collages. He certainly wasn’t the only experimenter of his day, but I can’t name another poet of his time who showed such aesthetic range, aside from Mallarmé, and even then the latter’s Coup de dés is an aberration for him. As for myself, coming from a country whose emblematic monument was the Statue of Liberty, and from a state (Oklahoma) with a freewheeling history, and from a father who liberated himself from social conventions (and laws) when it suited him, I was primed to become an adept of a poet of freedom and adventure such as Apollinaire, who, in one of his last poems, says, “We want to give you vast and strange territories / Where flowering mystery offers itself to anyone who wishes to gather it.” While cherishing the formal music and sweet diction of the Elizabethan and Metaphysical poets, the way Apollinaire revered Villon and Racine, I saw myself as a fellow explorer of those vast and strange territories, though I would never have articulated such a thought. It was yet another unspoken assumption that carried me forward.

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Catullus #25 (trans. Molly Arden)

Thallus, you letch: softer than rabbit fur
is your phallus and sack of nuts
that dangle from your old man crotch, 
festooned with cobwebs, and still
you’re as greedy as a gonif

[line missing here]

Give back the things you stole from her --
her cape, handkerchief from Spain,
etchings from Carthage, bracelet of Salome --
things you claim you inherited from your folks.

Spare me your obnoxious jokes.
Get your sticky hands off her stuff, and send it
to her, or I swear I’ll kick your ass
and make you twist like a toy battleship
in the bathtub when a hurricane hits the sea.

Catullus # 53 translated by Molly Arden

Listening to the learned Calvus
castigate, with many an oratorical flourish,
the demagogue Vatinius,
a man in the crowd lifted his hands
in astonishment, and said,
"God, that little prick can talk!"

-- translated by Molly Arden

Catullus # 25 translated by Molly Arden

Thallus, you letch: softer than rabbit fur, goose down, ear flap
is your phallus and sack of nuts
that dangle from your old man crotch,  festooned
with cobwebs, and still you’re as greedy as a gonif
[line missing here]
give back the things you stole from me --
my cape, handkerchief from Spain,
etchings from Carthage, bracelet of Salome --
things you claim you inherited from your folks.
Spare my your obnoxious jokes.
Get your sticky hands off my stuff,
and send them to me, or I swear I’ll kick your ass
and make you twist like a toy battleship
in the bathtub when a hurricane hits the sea.

-- translated by Molly Arden (2009)

Pictured above are Molly Arden and friend Charlotte Goren in 2009.

"Sexism" in Two Languages [by David Lehman, trans. Saulius Vasiliauskas]

Sexism [by David Lehman]

The happiest moment in a woman’s life
Is when she hears the turn of her lover’s key
In the lock, and pretends to be asleep
When he enters the room, trying to be
Quiet but clumsy, bumping into things,
And she can smell the liquor on his breath
But forgives him because she has him back
And doesn't have to sleep alone.

The happiest moment in a man’s life
Is when he climbs out of bed
With a woman, after an hour’s sleep,
After making love, and pulls on
His trousers, and walks outside,
And pees in the bushes, and sees
The high August sky full of stars
And gets in his car and drives home.

Seksizmas [translated into Lithuanian by Saulius Vasiliauskas]

Laimingiausia akimirka moters gyvenime,
Kai ji išgirsta, kaip durų spynoje trakšteli
Mylimojo raktas, ir apsimeta mieganti,
Kai jis įslenka į kambarį, bando būti
Tylus, bet žengia kaip dramblys, kliudydamas daiktus,
Ir ji užuodžia nuo jo tvoskiant alkoholiu,
Bet atleidžia, nes susigrąžino vyrą,
Ir nebeteks miegoti vienai.

Laimingiausia akimirka vyro gyvenime,
Kai jis išsiropščia iš lovos,
Palieka joje moterį – po valandos miego,
Po sekso, ir užsimauna
Kelnes, ir išeina į lauką,
Ir myža ant krūmų, ir regi
Giedrą rugpjūčio dangų, pilną žvaigždžių,
Ir įlipęs į savo mašiną patraukia namo.

Sexism [as translated back into English by unknown person or entity]

The happiest moment in woman's life
When she listens, she's gonna break the door lock
The beloved key, and pretends to be sleeping
When he enters into the room, he tries to be
Quiet, but goes like an elephant, blocking things,
And she shines with alcohol in her spirits
But forgive, because he has restored the husband,
And you will not sleep anymore.

The happiest moment in a man's life,
When he scissors out of bed,
Leaving a woman there - after an hour of sleep;
After sex, and hang on
Trousers and goes out into the field
And the moss is on the shrubs, and see
Girless August sky full of stars
And getting on your car pulls home.

Link here for the original page of Siaures Atenai, the cultural weekly (Kultūros savaitraštis) in which appear the translations into Lithuanian of "Sexism" and two other poems by David Lehman. Saulius Vasilauskas (pictured left), who translated the poems, is a graduate of Vilnius University who plays basketball for Egzistenciniai klausimai, an amateur team whose name you could, with poetic license, render as the Existential Clauses or possibly the Existential Queries. Although it would be difficult to do better than "The moss is on the shrubs" three lines from the end of "Sexism," what happens when you re-translate "When a Woman Loves a Man" back into English, using rudimentary computer tools, is an equally high form of surrealism: When a woman loves a man, there is ten minutes after the first,/ she is sleeping, he watches baseball and cremation of the guinea pigs. The poem concludes on a sublime note: Stars fluctuate like vintage earrings. -- DL

 http://www.satenai.lt/2018/02/02/poezijos-vertimai-50

Isaac Babel's essential fictions––and poetry? [By Val Vinokur]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Andrey Gritsman and David Lehman to Read at the Cornelia Street Cafe

Join us at the Cornelia Street Cafe on Wednesday, December 13th for an evening with Andrey Gritsman and David Lehman, who will read their translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky, among other poems.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

 

at the Cornelia Street Cafe

Wednesday, December 13, 6 PM

29 Cornelia Street

NYC

212 898 9319

 

On Cornelia Street, where W. H. Auden once lived and was quoted, saying that "the art of living in New York City lies in crossing the street against the light."

 

The event is sponsored by Intercultural Poetry. Lehman will read his versions of "Brooklyn Bridge" and parts of "The Cloud in Trousers." Gritsman will read "Brooklyn Bridge" in Russian as well as translations of such poets as Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and contemporaries Vladimir Gandelsman and Vladimir Druk. 

 

For an enticing taste of these two poets, check out the following links to their work!

"Amnesia" by David Lehman

"5 АДАР II 5771" by Andrey Gritsman

Poetry in outer space with Billy Collins and Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli [by David Lehman]

Billy Collins went to outer space, at least his voice did, and launched Emily Dickinson in orbit.

Come fly with me, let;'s fly, let's fly away
If you can use
Some exotic booze
There's a bar in far Bombay

Come fly away, I'll take you to the stars
To Juipter 
I'll sup on soup with her
and drink champagne on Mars
with all its cool cool bars

Come fly with me let's fly up to the stars

[the first stanza by Sammy Cahn, the second by DL]

. Grazie a Billy Collins, il più grande poeta contemporaneo vivente, grazie all'astronauta Paolo Nespoli nel ruolo di lettore dei versi di Emily Dickinson. 

Or the full treatment:

Abbiamo visto un poeta ed un astronauta parlare di poesia. Il poeta era un americano, e interveniva dalla sede dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei a Trastevere. L'astronauta era un ingegnere aeropaziale italiano, e interveniva da bordo della stazione internazionale in orbita attorno alla Terra. Chi avrebbe detto che un giorno i ruoli assegnati dalla storia contemporanea - l'arte agli italiani, la tecnologia agli americani - avrebbero potuto così paradossalmente scambiarsi? Oggi, forse, comprendiamo meglio il significato primario del termine "rivoluzione": che nel linguaggio della scienza, l'unico che è sempre sinonimo di progresso dell'umanità, significa compiere un giro per ritornare, gli astri ad esempio, nella stessa posizione tra le stelle. Il 12 ottobre, anniversario della scoperta dell'America, abbiamo visto annullarsi la piega del tempo e rivisto un italiano, esploratore degli spazi fisici dell'universo, incontrare un americano, esploratore degli spazi metafisici del linguaggio. Grazie a Billy Collins, il più grande poeta contemporaneo vivente, grazie all'astronauta Paolo Nespoli nel ruolo di lettore dei versi di Emily Dickinson. Grazie alla John Cabot University che li ha invitati in occasione dell'apertura dell'ottava edizione di "Italy Reads Program" http://www.johncabot.edu/italy-reads/default.aspx , grazie all' Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, all' ESA - European Space Agency e alla NASA Earth.

Or, in an official translation amended by DL, with some parts left in the original translationese (the troles "could have so paradoxically exchanged")

<< 
We [heard] a poet and an astronaut talk about poetry. The poet was an American, and [did whatever he did] from the headquarters of the accademia nazionale dei lincei in trastevere. The Astronaut was an Italian Engineer, and [took part] from the international station in orbit around the earth. Who would have [predicted] that one day the roles of contemporary history - the art of Italians, technology to the Americans - could have so paradoxically exchanged [could be flipped to their mutual profit, DL guesses]? Today, perhaps, we understand better the primary meaning of the term "revolution": which in the language of science, the only [language] that is [indispensable is  the] progress of humanity, is [DL gives up] to take a turn to return, the stars, for example, in the same position among the Stars. On October 12th, the anniversary of the discovery of America, we saw cancel the fold of time [DL would like to do that] and revised an Italian, explorer of the physical space of the universe, to meet an American, explorer of the spaces of the language [DL likes the idea of revising an explorer as if he were a poem,]. Thanks to Billy Collins, the greatest living contemporary poet, thanks to the astronaut Paolo Nespoli in the role of of Emily Dickinson [DL !]. Thanks to the John Cabot University that invited them to the opening of the eighth edition of "Italy reads program" http://www.johncabot.edu/italy-reads/default.aspx, thanks to Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, ESA-European Space Agency and NASA Earth

I toast thee, Billy Collins. -- DL

Three Poems by Baudelaire, translated by Richard Kutner

Portrait of Charles Baudelaire in Profile by Édouard Manet

This is my last post as Author of the Week. It’s been an exciting experience. Since this is the Best American Poetry website, I’ve decided to end the week with three poems I translated by Charles Baudelaire, my favorite French poet. This is my first attempt to translate poetry, and I hope that you’ll enjoy them. Please listen as you read.

Sincere thanks to all of you have read and responded to these posts.

Connections

Nature is a temple, where living pillars
Sometimes utter indistinct words.
We wander through it amidst forests of symbols
That observe us with familiar looks.

Like long echoes blending from afar,
In a deep, dark unity
As vast as darkness or light,
Smells, colors, and sounds speak to one another.

There are smells as fresh as children’s flesh,
As sweet as oboes, green as prairies
--And others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant,

That spread without end:
Amber, musk, benzoin, and incense,
Which sing of the rapture of the mind and the senses.

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, 1857  

Translation by Richard Kutner © 2017

 

Autumn Song
I.
Soon we will be plunged into icy darkness.
Farewell, bright glow of our too-short summers!
I can already hear the echo in the courtyards
As logs fall to the pavement with a funereal thump.

All of winter will penetrate my soul: anger,
Hate; chills; horror; drudgery,
And, like the sun in its polar hell,
My heart will be only a frozen block of red.

Trembling, I listen to the crash of every log;
There is nothing to mute the sound of the mounting gallows.
My mind is like a tower, collapsing
Beneath the blows of a relentless battering ram.

Rocked by this monotonous pounding, I seem to hear
A coffin being hastily nailed shut.
For whom?—Only yesterday it was summer; now autumn is here!
This mysterious sound rings like a departure.

II.
I love the greenish light of your long eyes,
My lovely, yet today all is bitter to me.
Nothing--not your love, not your bed, nor the hearth--
Can compare with the sun glistening on the sea.

And yet, love me, tender heart! Be a mother,
Even for one so ungrateful--for one so bad;
Mistress or sister, be the fleeting sweetness
Of a glorious autumn or a setting sun.

So quick a task! The tomb awaits, its appetite so huge!
Ah! While my head rests on your knees
As I mourn the white, torrid summer, let me taste
The sweet, yellow rays of this late fall.

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, 1861 edition  

Translation by Richard Kutner © 2017

 

Spleen LXVIII
When the sky, heavy and low, weighs down like a lid
On the moaning soul, prey to long bouts of ennui,
And, embracing the arc of the horizon,
Spills upon us a black light sadder than the night,

When all the earth is transformed into a damp dungeon
Where Hope, like a bat,
Beats its timid wings against the walls,
Knocking its head on the rotten ceiling,

When the rain, falling in thick, dark strands
Mirrors the bars of a vast prison,
And a host of vile, silent spiders
Spin their webs at the back of our minds,

Bells suddenly cry out with fury,
Launching a terrible scream into the sky,
Like homeless, wandering spirits
Moaning incessantly.

--And long hearses, without drums or music,
Pass slowly through my soul; Hope,
Vanquished, sobs, as Anguish, atrocious and despotic,
Plants its black Flag on my bowed skull.

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, 1857 edition      

Translation by Richard Kutner © 2017

Working at the Morgan [by Richard Kutner]

Last December, while searching for some volunteer translation work, I found this description from the Morgan Library and Museum, in New York, on idealist.org: 

This is a wonderful opportunity for an individual with a serious
interest in 19th-century art and literature and a high proficiency
in French translation to assist the Cataloguer of the Morgan’s
Gordon Ray Collection.  Duties include deciphering and translating
handwritten letters of luminaries from the worlds of art and
literature, conducting research where necessary or appropriate,
and preparing concise summaries of the letters for inclusion in
CORSAIR, the Morgan’s online collections catalog.

I thought, “This is for me,” applied, underwent a six-part background check, and was accepted.

Since January, I have been translating and summarizing mostly nineteenth-century French letters by noted authors, artists, scientists, politicians, and other public figures—Balzac, Baudelaire, Dumas (father and son), Condorcet (eighteenth century), George Sand, Renoir, counts, kings, and queens: the list goes on and on. Some of the letters are fairly mundane: “Thank you for your gracious dinner invitation. I will see you at 6:00 on Thursday.” Others involve intrigue about entry into the Académie Française, letters on various subjects from authors to their publishers, requests by generals for troops, lawsuits (many), and complex political, philosophical, or artistic discussions. I have learned a great deal about people I knew about and others I had never heard of.

It’s difficult to describe the constant thrill of reviewing documents in the handwriting of someone I’ve read or studied and realizing that I may be only the sixth person ever to have set eyes on them: the author, the recipient, the dealer, the collector, the cataloguer, and me.

Writing a summary is sometimes complicated, especially when the handwriting is difficult to read (either illegible or very small), when I’m dealing with a fragment or unsigned document, or there is little or no information about either the author or the recipient. I end up doing a lot of detective work. Is the person who wrote the letter really who the file label says it is? Sometimes it’s a relative, often with the same first and last name. Occasionally, the document turns out to be about the subject, not written by him or her. And at times the author is known by various names.

Often I need to research dates and addresses, check to see if the author’s correspondence has already been published (which makes it much easier to read), and look for postmarks. When I suspected that a letter was from Balzac, writing about the woman he would later marry, I went online to see if he had indeed been in Karlsrühe at the time the letter was written. (I was right.) Sometimes there is little or no punctuation, even when it’s a letter from a famous author, and often words are run together. There are people, like George Sand, whose handwriting changed dramatically during their lifetime. And once in a while, French is not the writer’s mother tongue, and there are many errors (for example, a letter from Caroline of Ansbach, the German wife of King George II of Great Britain).

If the letter is long or the handwriting is difficult to read, I transcribe it into readable French first. Then I do the translation in my head. I can summarize short, easy-to-read documents directly from the original. Often, the letters are witty or droll, and they’re always full of French charm, especially when written to someone of the opposite sex. Occasionally, what I’m working with isn’t a letter at all, but rather an excerpt from a play or novel.

In any case, I get to use my love for language and sharpen my skills, using materials from the period of French culture about which I’m most passionate. And my supervisor, whose intelligence and problem-solving skills are dazzling (and whose patience is remarkable) is always a great help.

I’m in France soaking up everything French I can right now, but I’m looking forward to seeing what Victor Hugo has to say when I get back to New York. And I can’t wait to start in on Flaubert.

Translating After the Roundup [by Richard Kutner]

What was it like to translate the memoir of a boy who escaped from a French-Nazi internment camp in 1942? One of my biggest challenges was recreating the exuberant, authentic voice of a scrappy eleven-year-old Paris street kid. I kept asking myself, particularly when translating dialogue, “Does this sound like a child?” I think that being an elementary school teacher for so many years helped me to understand how children think and talk. But kids today do not talk they way they did 75 years ago. I had to learn the street slang of 1940s Paris and put it into English that was appropriate for that period. Paris street slang is particularly spicy, and I needed to make sure that I kept its zing.

Sometimes it took many tries to capture the vitality of the language. How, for example, was I going to say, “Je dévale l’escalier à tout berzingue”? I worked on it for a long time and finally came up with “I zoom down the stairs full speed ahead,” which I think captures the energy of the French and keeps the important buzzing “z” sound.

Joseph Weismann, the author of After the Roundup, is unusually clearheaded, and his style is extraordinarily lively and direct. It is this very clearheadedness (and his out-of-the-box thinking) that saved his life. It was therefore of the greatest importance to me to use clear, direct language. Like him, I used vivid verbs and sentences that were short and uncomplicated (yet never choppy) to create a strong sense of immediacy. I avoided any language that sounded stuffy or slowed down the pace and force of his words.

The greatest challenge perhaps was dealing with overwhelming waves of emotion that I knew I’d have to face once again with every rereading. I have never experienced anything like what Joseph went through beginning in July 1942, when he was rounded up, put in an internment camp, brutally separated from his parents--and then decided to make a daring and difficult escape. In order to cope with this intense emotion, rather than shutting it out, I decided to try to imagine myself in Joseph’s situation, to feel his emotions as much as I possibly could, like an actor preparing a role, so that I could convey them in their full depth.

Despite its dark moments, After the Roundup is an uplifting and hopeful book. Joseph wrote it when he was 80, having kept his experiences locked away for 69 years, yet he was able to recall every detail of his ordeal. While some might not consider his style highly intellectual or literary, it clearly reflects his positive outlook and amazing life force. His book makes for compelling reading because of his intelligence, frankness, and energy, not to mention his one-of-a-kind, sometimes hair-raising experiences. It is a lesson for the world of today about what can happen when people are viewed as “others.”

After the Roundup is the true memoir of eleven-year-old Joseph Weismann, who was rounded up in Paris by the French police with 13,000 other Jews on July 16-17, 1942. He and 8,159 others—half of them children—were held in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver. From there, they were transported by cattle car to the transit camp of Beaune-la-Rolande. After being brutally separated from his parents and sisters, who were sent to Auschwitz, Joseph made a daring escape, inching his way under the barbed wire for five hours. Then what? How would he survive the war and reconstruct a life for himself? His problems had only just begun.

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the Vélodrome d'Hiver Roundup.

Joseph is the only living survivor (of two) of the camp of Beaune-la-Rolande.

After the Roundup, by Joseph Weismann
Translated by Richard Kutner
© Indiana University Press, 2017

Translating Fear of Paradise [by Richard Kutner]

Translating  Fear of Paradise

Like any translation, Fear of Paradise was an artistic endeavor and an act of creation. As always, I needed to maintain the author's tone and voice and make the book sound as though it were written in English rather than translated. But Fear of Paradise involved some extra challenges.

Most of the novel is set in Puglia, the heel of Italy, a rugged, sunbaked, glorious region of olive trees and fishermen, of deep blue sky and golden cliffs overhanging the green Adriatic. It was important to keep the setting in mind at all times, because in this book it plays a key role in defining the characters’ personalities and directing their thoughts and actions. Furthermore, Belgian novelist Vincent Engel is a master at describing setting. I therefore had to be very careful in choosing words that evoked the landscape just the way he wanted. Vincent’s style is both realistic and poetic, and I worked hard to bring out both these aspects of it, fundamental to understanding the book.

European authors tend to write in long sentences and paragraphs (sometimes very long). We avoid doing this in English, so I had to find where I could divide things while still maintaining the beautiful flow of the text. French authors also tend to repeat words, even in close proximity, something we discourage in English. That meant finding just the right synonym with the appropriate nuance to express Vincent’s meaning. In many cases I changed the verb tenses, since they are not used the same way nor have the same implications in English and French. Sometimes I changed words altogether, because what sounded right in French sounded wrong in English.

Most of Vincent Engel’s books take place in Tuscany, where the characters are worldly and well educated. In Fear of Paradise, however, they are poor, uneducated, superstitious, and uncommunicative. They hardly speak at all, so whatever dialogue there is must sound realistic and fit each character and situation with no wrong notes. I needed to penetrate the characters’ thinking so that I could use the correct language to express their thoughts and feelings even though they couldn’t. This was a particular challenge. Luigi does not talk like Valentina, and Basilio doesn’t think like Forza, so each person’s way of speaking had to capture his or her character perfectly even if they’re all taciturn. Moreover, the action begins during the rise of Mussolini in the 1920s, continues to the 1940s, and jumps to the 1960s. I had to make sure that the dialogue was always in sync with the times and that it reflected the changes in the characters’ ages and ways of thinking.

Fear of Paradise is a haunting book. It stays with you for a long time after you finish reading it. That was one of the reasons I wanted to translate it. Because of the nature of his characters and setting, Vincent used language to create a special music for this book. It was very important to me to keep this musical quality—the flow, the sound of the words, the rhythm. I think that my training as a musician was helpful in this regard. I thought about the cadence of the sentences, about the number of syllables in them, and a great deal about how they ended. A sentence that ends in a vowel sound floats off into the air, while one that ends in a hard consonant has a sense of finality or even brutality. One that ends with a word of two or more syllables makes a soft landing, while one that ends with a one-syllable word crashes down. Faced with a choice of words, I chose the one that conveyed my sense of the author’s idea most successfully.

Translating Fear of Paradise was a privilege and a pleasure. My wife and I read it and reread it so many times to make revisions and corrections that we both felt we had to go to Puglia to see the landscape we had inhabited for six months. We weren’t disappointed. I hope that when you read this wonderful book, you will think about my concerns in translating it and take the time to reflect on the choices both Vincent and I made. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Fear of Paradise is a story of longing and missed opportunities, of separation, the passage of time, and the unforeseen consequences of innocent decisions. Set against the rise of Fascism in 1920s Italy, Vincent Engel’s novel takes us on a journey through a wild and romantic landscape where two lonely adolescents forge a strange and wonderful relationship. Between the sea and the forest, in the heart of Puglia, lies the remote fishing village of San Nidro, frozen in time. Here, Basilio and Lucia swear their love and loyalty until an irreparable act sets them on a collision course with the tragic realities of history.

Fear of Paradise, by Vincent Engel
Translated by Richard Kutner
© Owl Canyon Press, 2015

What Does a Translator Do? by Richard Kutner

It is a great honor to have been invited by The Best American Poetry to be their author of the week. Translators do not get much respect. In Italian, they even say, “Traduttore, traditore,” which means “The translator is a traitor.” Hmm. I am going to spend the week trying to disprove this dictum. Of course, the work we do is transformational, but we are artists and poets, too, and, while we try our  hardest to be faithful to the author’s style and intent, we have our own concerns.

I hope that you’ll enjoy this week’s posts and that you’ll gain insight into what a literary translator does and the challenges he or she faces.

What does a translator do? What we don’t do is just change one language to another, word by word, like a machine. We have to get into the author’s mind, internalize his emotions and language patterns, and set down his ideas in flowing language that sounds as though it was originally written in English. At the same time we need to make sure every word has the correct nuance, deal with untranslatable expressions, capture the music and spirit of the author’s words, and, most of all, be faithful to his style and tone. Yet the language cannot be self-conscious, calling attention to itself. The translator’s words are there to be the invisible vehicle for conveying the author’s ideas and concerns. However, in the end, the translation is still something different from the original.

But that’s just the beginning. Every author has his or her own music—a personal rhythm, cadence, and sound—and the translator must capture it even when the language he or she is translating into may have a different structure and sound profile. The music conveys the ideas in varying ways. Short sentences with hard consonants and long vowels are useful for portraying quick action or strong, even violent emotion. Longer sentences with soft consonants and short vowel sounds are more successful at portraying lyrical scenes or tender moments.

How many syllables should a word have? Words of one syllable have a different effect from multisyllabic words. What kind of ending do you want the sentence to have—one that ends with a thud or one that floats off into the air? And what about words that seem to mean the same thing in two languages but have the slightest shade of difference? Every word a translator uses involves a choice, and it is essential to read a translation aloud to make sure that it sounds right.

It is important as well to keep the time period in which the work one is translating takes place. People in the 1920s or the 1940s did not talk the way people do now. Just watch an old film and listen closely. And there are more subtle gradations between the formality and informality of other languages and English, in terms of vocabulary, usage, and structure. For example, in 1850s Italy, people did not say, “Yo, dude, what’s up?” Pieces of furniture or architectural features that existed 50 or 100 years ago many no longer exist, yet the translator has to find a way to name or describe them so that the reader can understand.

Literary translation is hard work and just as much an art as writing, and I’m glad to see that translators are beginning to get the recognition they deserve. It is difficult to understand, though, why just 3% of the total annual book production in the US is works in translation (of which only one-third is fiction), when there is so much to learn and enjoy from the varying perspectives of authors from other countries. I especially encourage educators to use books in translation to give their students access to how people think and express themselves in other parts of the world.

Richard Kutner, Guest Author July 17-21

This week we're thrilled to welcome Richard Kutner as our guest author. Richard graduated from Yale University with a major in French Literature. His translations from French to English include After the Roundup: Escape and Survival in Hitler's France by Joseph Weismann (Indiana University Press, 2017). Now 85, Weissman is a survivor of the 1942 Vél' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris. His story inspired the French film, La Rafle. Richard has also translated the novel Fear of Paradise by Vincent Engel (Owl Canyon Press, 2015), three Greek myths, and three graphic novels. He was awarded a Hemingway Grant from the Book Department of the French Embassy for his translation of Cast Away on the Letter A by Fred (TOON Graphics  2013). 

Richard also works in the other direction and has translated 31 songs for Disneyland Paris, an entertainment website, and four Ghanaian folktales from English to French. 

Richard taught at the United Nations International School in New York City for 33 years. He and his wife, Lynn, live in Manhattan, a short subway ride from both their sons. This year he began to translate and summarize nineteenth-century French letters at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.

Welcome, Richard.

-- sdl

Francois Villon Begins His Journey [trans. David Lehman]

for Paul Violi

In my thirtieth year,
Drunk and no stranger to disgrace,
I grin wisely from ear to ear
Despite the fear I’ve had to face,
Clown that I am, condemned
By Thibaud d'Assole’s command
Threatened and even damned
By the faker with the crozier in his hand.

Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms and the State [by Alex Cigale]

Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings, part of the Northwestern World Classics series, is officially published today!

While today's publication of the book, all by itself, represents the most meaningful validation of my work begun ten years ago as a labor of love, and thus is a reward onto itself, I would of course like to appeal to you to purchase a copy, to recommend it to your friends and on Goodreads, and to like/join the Russian Absurd Facebook page to receive updates as the book goes forth into the world. I want to make it perfectly clear that I am painfully aware of the bitter irony inherent in the fact that, should you choose to support my own work in bringing Russian poetry into English, I stand to benefit from the work of an author written without even a shred of hope of publication in his own lifetime, a writer who had been literally starving to death for the final five years of his life, and who finally did so, during the Siege of Leningrad, in 1942. While I do take this awesome responsibility before the court of your judgment very seriously, I have every intention of pursuing my own work, with or without financial remuneration or even the prospect of the publication of another book; among my next book projects is a Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the most important Russian poet of the 20th Century, one who has been most consequential to me personally, and yet another poet repressed by the Soviet regime. With this in mind, this, my last post dedicated to this book, is on DANIIL KHARMS and the STATE.

∞

AN OBSTACLE

Pronin said, “You have very pretty stockings.”
Irina Mazer said, “So you like my stockings?”
Pronin said, “Oh, yes. Very much.” And he ran his hand down her leg.
Irina said, “But what do you like about my stockings?”
Pronin said, “They are very smooth.”
Irina lifted her skirt and said, “Do you see how high they go?”
Pronin said, “Oh, yes. Yes.”
Irina said, “They end all the way up here. And there, I am nude.”
“Oh,” said Pronin.
“I have very thick legs,” said Irina. “And I’m very broad in the thighs.”
“Show me,” said Pronin.
“I can’t,” said Irina. “I’m not wearing any underwear.”
Pronin knelt on his knees before her.
Irina said, “Why did you get down to your knees?”
Pronin kissed her leg just above the stocking and said, “Here’s why.”
Irina said, “Why are you lifting my skirt? Didn’t I tell you that I’m not wearing any underwear?”
But Pronin lifted her skirt anyway and said, “That’s alright.”
“What do you mean by that, alright?” Irina said.
At that moment someone knocked on the door of Irina’s room.
Irina quickly righted her skirt. Pronin got up off the floor and went to stand by the window.
“Who is it?” Irina asked at the door.
“Open the door,” a voice commanded.
Irina opened the door, and in walked a man wearing a black coat and high boots. Behind him were two soldiers, armed with rifles, and the apartment super. The soldiers guarded the door, and the man in the black coat approached Irina Mazer and said, “Your last name?”
“Mazer,” Irina said.
The man in the black coat addressed Pronin: “Your last name?”
Pronin said, “Pronin. My last name is Pronin.”
“Are you armed?” said the man in the black coat.
“No,” Pronin said.
“Sit here,” said the man in the black coat, pointing to a chair.
Pronin sat down.
“And you,” said the man in the black coat, addressing Irina, “put on your coat. You will have to take a ride with us.”
“What for?” Irina asked.
The man in the black coat didn’t reply.
“I have to change,” Irina said.
“No,” said the man in the black coat.
“But I have to put on a little something,” said Irina.
“No,” said the man in the black coat.
Irina silently grabbed her fur jacket.
“Good-bye,” she said to Pronin.
“Conversation is forbidden,” said the man in the black coat.
“Do I have to go with you also?” Pronin asked.
“Yes,” said the man in the black coat. “Get your coat.”
Pronin got up, grabbed his coat and hat off the hanger, put them on, and said, “Alright, I’m ready.”
“Follow me,” said the man in the black coat.
The soldiers and the apartment super clicked their heels.
Everyone exited into the hallway.
The man in the black coat locked the door to Irina’s room and sealed it with two brown seals.
“Everybody out,” he said.
And they all walked out of the house, slamming the apartment door shut.

August 12, 1940

MOB JUSTICE

Petrov saddles up his horse and declaims, directing himself at the crowd that’s gathered round, what would happen if in place of the public gardens they erect an American skyscraper. The crowd seems to agree. Petrov scribbles something into his notebook. From the throng emerges a man of medium height and he asks Petrov what it was he jotted down. Petrov answers that it concerns no one but himself. The man of medium height continues to pester him and, after words are exchanged, they come to blows. The crowd allies itself with the man of medium height and Petrov has to save his life by flogging his horse and disappearing around a corner. The crowd surges with anxiety and, having no one to sacrifice, grabs the man of medium height and cracks his head open. The decapitated head rolls down the bridge paving stones and becomes wedged in the sewer drain. The crowd, its lust for violence appeased, disperses.

[1940]

ON UNIVERSAL BALANCE

Everyone knows these days how dangerous it is to swallow stones.
One of my acquaintances even coined an expression for it: “Waisty,” which stands for: “Warning: Stone Inside”. And a good thing too he did that. “Waisty” is easy to remember, and, as soon as it comes up, or you need it for something, you can immediately recall it.
Аnd this friend of mine worked as a fireman, that is, as an engine stoker on a locomotive. First he rode the northern lines, then he served on the Moscow route. And his name was Nikolay Ivanovich Serpukhov, and he smoked his own hand-rolled cigarettes, Rocket brand, 35 kopeks a box, and he’d always say he doesn’t suffer from coughing as bad from them, and the five-ruble ones, he says, they make him gag.
And so, it once happened that Nikolay Ivanovich found himself in Hotel Europe, in their restaurant. Nikolay Ivanovich sits at his table, and the table over from him is occupied by some foreigners, and they’re gobbling up apples.
And that’s when Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself: “A curious thing,” Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself, “What an enigma the human being is.”
And as soon as he had said this to himself, out of nowhere, before him appears a fairy and says:
“What is it Good Sir that you desire?”
Well, of course, there’s a commotion at the restaurant, like, where did this little damsel suddenly appear from? The foreigners had even stopped stuffing themselves with apples. Nikolai Ivanovich himself caught a good scare and he says, just for the sake of it, to get rid of her:
“Please, forgive me,” he says, “But there is nothing in particular that I need.”
“You don’t understand,” the mysterious damsel says, “I’m what you call a fairy,” she says. “In a single blink of an eye, I can make for you anything you wish. You just give me the word, and I’ll make it happen.”
That’s when Nikolay Ivanovich notices that some sort of a citizen in a gray suit is attentively listening in on their conversation. The maître d’ comes running in through the open doors and behind him, some other character, with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.
“What the heck!” Nikolay Ivanovich thinks to himself, “Who the hell knows how this thing will turn out.”
And indeed, no one can understand what is going on. The maître d’ is hopping across the tops, from one table over to another, the foreigners are rolling up all the carpets, and in general, who the hell can tell what’s really going on! Who is capable of what, that is!
Nikolay Ivanovich ran out into the street, forgetting even the hat he’d left behind earlier at the coat check, and he ran out onto LaSalle Street and said to himself: “Waisty! Warning: Stone Inside!” And also: “What haven’t I seen already in this whole wide world!”
And, having returned home, Nikolay Ivanovich said this to his wife:
“Do not be afraid, Ekaterina Petrovna, and do not worry. Only there isn’t any equilibrium in this life. And the mistake is only off by some kilogram and half for the entire universe, but still, it’s amazing, Ekaterina Petrovna, it is simply remarkable!”

THAT’S ALL.

September 18, 1934

The above three pieces where previously published, respectively, in Narrative Magazine, Eleven Eleven (California College of the Arts), and The B O D Y.

∞

Kharms, while a pacifist and eventually a "conscientious objector," was strictly apolitical. Before the Oberiu were suppressed, he had toyed around with the idea of positioning the group as a successor to Mayakovsky's Left artist movement (the New Left). In his late anecdotes (“Pronin,” “Mishin's Victory,” etc.,) Kharms comes uncomfortably close to describing the actual horror, to bearing witness, but for the most part, he makes due with parables, like the following, and it is precisely that compression and allusiveness that we love him for so much. (I think you will agree how prescient, timely, and still relevant the first of these just now happens to be).

Theme for a Story

A certain engineer sets before himself the task of building a huge brick wall across all of Petersburg. He ponders how this may be
done, and stays up all night mulling over it. Gradually, a circle of thinker-engineers forms and develops a plan for building the wall.
It is decided to build the wall at night, and in such a way that it is all built in a single night, so that it appears as a surprise. The workers are called together. Assignments are handed out. The civic authorities are distracted, and finally the night arrives upon which the wall is to be built. Only four people are aware of the plan to build the wall. The construction workers and the engineers receive precise assignments, where it is they should stand and what they should do. Thanks to such exact planning, they succeed in building the wall in a single night. On the next day, Petersburg is all up in a topsy-turvy. And the inventor himself is feeling in the dumps. How this wall should be used didn’t occur to him either.

[1929–30]

The conclusion of “Let us look out of the window”

So I go to the food cooperative and say: Give me that can of sardines over there. And they tell me: We have no sardines, these cans are empty. And I tell them: Why are you pulling my leg? And they tell me: It’s not our idea. So whose idea is it? It’s due to the shortages, because the Kyrgyz have rustled away all the split-hoofed ungulates. So are there any vegetables? I ask them. No vegetables either. All bought up. Keep quiet, Grigoriev. And the human being finished with a song:

I, Grigoriev, just shut up,
And began to carry binocs.
I look through them and look,
And see the stacks to come.

The End

[1930]

How strange it is, how inexpressibly strange, that behind this wall, behind this very wall, a man is sitting on the floor, stretching out his long legs in orange boots, an expression of malice on his face. We need only drill a hole in the wall and look through it and immediately we would see this mean-spirited man sitting there. But we shouldn’t think about him. What is he anyway? Is he not after all a portion of death in life, materialized out of our own conception of emptiness? Whoever he may be, God bless him.

June 22, 1931

An Inoculation

A gentleman slight in height with a pebble in his eye approached the door of a tobacco shop and stopped. His polished black shoes shone by the stone steps leading up into the tobacco shop. The tips of the shoes were pointing inside the shop. Two more steps and the gentleman would have disappeared behind its door. But for some reason he tarried, as if intentionally, to place his head under the brick that had just fallen off the roof. The gentleman even removed his hat, as if only now discovering his bald skull, so that the brick hit the gentleman squarely on his naked head, breaking his skull bone and getting stuck in his brain....

...Don’t you worry, gentlemen, I’ve already had an inoculation. You see, the pebble sticking out of my right eye? This had happened to me once already. I’ve gotten used to it by now. It’s all a piece of cake now.

And with these words the gentleman put on his hat and went off somewhere, exiting stage right, leaving the confused crowd in complete befuddlement.

[1939-1940]

 

∞

Seated at a table, flighty thoughts,
shoulders spread, inflated chest,
I pronounced empty speeches,
still as a statue and just as loved.

[1930– 33?]

From “To Oleinikov”

Wait! Turn back! Where, with your cold and calculated
Thought, are you fleeing, forgetting the law of the crowd?
Whose chest was pierced by arrow so morose? Who’s
Enemy to you, who friend? And where’s your gravestone?

January 23, 1935

 

This is how hunger begins:
you wake early and full of life
but soon begin to weaken;
the onset of boredom arrives,
the sense of loss impending
of quickening powers of mind,
followed by a peace descending.
And then, the terrifying ending.

[1937]

You will be murdered by your dreams.
Your interest in this life of struggle will
disperse like the mist. Simultaneously,
the heavenly messenger’s wings will miss.
Your wants and desires will wither and wilt
and the inflamed ideas of your youth scatter.
Let them go! Leave them behind, my friend,
your dreams, so your mind is free for the end.

October 4, 1937

The end is here, my strength expires.
The grave is calling me to my rest.
And suddenly life’s trace is lost.
Quieter and quieter beats the heart.
Death races toward me like a cloud
And in the sky the sun’s light goes out.
I see death. It’s forbidden for me to live.
Good-bye, dear earth! Earth, farewell!

[1937]

We have been killed in the field of life.
Not even a shred of hope remaining.
Our dreams of happiness are over—
The only thing left for us is penury.

[1937]

They shoved me under the table,
But I was very weak and a fool.
The freezing wind blew through
The cracks and landed on my tooth.

It was torturous for me to lie so,
But I was very weak and a fool.
The atmosphere is too cool
For comfort at any time of the year.

I would have lain on the floor in silence,
Flung open my coat of sheepskin wool,
But it became insanely dull to lie so,
For I am very weak and a fool.

April 23, 1938

I thought of eagles for a long time
and understood such a whole lot:
the eagles soar above the clouds,
they fly and fly and touch no one.
They live on cliffs and on mountains
and are intimate with water sprites.
I thought a long time about eagles
but confused them, I think, with flies.

March 15, 1939

∞

From the Diaries (1937– 1938)

June 1, 1937. 2 hours 40 minutes.

An even more terrifying time has arrived for me. At the Children’s Literature publishing house, they are up in arms about one of my
poems and have begun to bait and persecute me. They have stopped publishing me, explaining it away with “We can’t pay you because of some clerical error.” My sense is that something mysterious and evil is taking place behind the scenes. We have nothing to eat. We go unbearably hungry.

I know the end has come. I am now going off to visit ChildLit to receive a refusal of my request for payment.

November 16, 1937

I no longer wish to live. I have no need of anything: not a shred of hope left. I have not a prayer for the Lord, let His will be done, whatever He intends for me, be it death or be it life— whatever He intends. Into thine hands, oh, Lord, Jesus Christ, I commit my spirit. Keep me from harm, have mercy on me, and grant me eternal life.
Amen.
Daniil Kharms
——
I don’t have the strength to do anything. I don’t want to live.

January 12, 1938

I am amazed by human perseverance. It is already January 12, 1938. Our situation has become even more desperate, but we’re still scraping by. Dear Lord, please send us a prompt and easy death.
——
How low I have fallen; few have fallen this low. One thing is certain: as low as I’ve fallen, there is no getting up.

All people love money. They pat it and kiss it and press it to their hearts and wrap it in pretty strips of cloth and cradle and rock it as though it were a doll. Some take a dollar sign and confine it to a frame, hang it on their wall, and worship it as though it were an icon or an idol. Some feed their money: they open its mouth and stuff it with the most succulent, fat morsels of their own food. In summer heat they put their money in the cold storage of a root cellar and in winter, in the bittermost frost, they throw the money in the wood stove, into the flames. Others simply hold a conversation with their money, or read to it aloud from interesting books, or sing to it pleasant songs. I personally give money no particular attention and simply carry it around in my wallet or in a billfold and, as need arises, spend it. Yowza!

October 16, 1940

Previously published in Gargoyle 60.

"If a state could be likened to the human organism then, in case of war, I would like to live in its heel." — Daniil Kharms, 1938

∞

And this one final appeal... As I had mentioned in my first post in this series, having edited the Spring 2015 Russia issue of the Atlanta Review, I have been slated to edit the magazine's Spring 2018 Baltic poetry issue, along with Kevin M. F. Platt and Rimas Uzgiris. Given that the sanctions against Russia, and even the future of NATO and the EU themselves, are currently in doubt, there is a great sense of urgency, and I have been given the green light by the journal's new editor, Karen Head, to edit a Special Summer 2017 issue, if we are able to raise $5,000 for it. This link to the Kickstarter campaign to raise that money will go live shortly.

Daniil Kharms on Spirit; Selections from Russian Absurd [by Alex Cigale]

DANIIL KHARMS on SPIRIT; Selections from Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings (NWUP, 2017)

From Daniil Kharms's magnum opus, “Starukha” (1939)

“You see,” I say, “it seems to me that there are no believers or disbelievers. There are only those who wish to believe and those who wish not to believe.”

“So you mean that those who wish not to believe already believe in something?” says Sakerdon Mikhailovich. “And those who wish to believe already, a priori, do not believe in anything?”

“It may be so,” say I. “I do not know.”

“But believe or disbelieve in what? In God?” asks Sakerdon Mikhailovich.

“No,” I say. “In immortality.”

“Then why did you ask me if I believe in God or not?”

“Well, simply because asking ‘Do you or do you not believe in immortality?’ sounds somehow foolish,” I say to Sakerdon Mikhailovich and get up from the table....

From "A Treatise More or Less in he Spirit of Emerson"

IV. On approaching immortality

It is characteristic of every person to strive toward enjoyment, which is always a kind of sexual fulfillment, either satisfaction or acquisition. But only that which does not lie on the path of enjoyment leads to immortality. All the systems leading toward immortality, in the final analysis, are reducible to a single rule: at all times do that which you do not want to do, because every person always wants to either eat, or to satisfy their sexual urges, or to acquire something, or all of the above, more or less, at the same time. Interestingly, immortality is always connected with death, and is represented by the various religious systems either as eternal enjoyment, or eternal suffering, or an eternal absence of both pleasure and suffering.

V. Of immortality

Righteous is he on whom God had bestowed life as a perfect gift.

February 14, 1939

From “The Conversationalists” (1940)

On the tram sat two men engaged in the following conversation. One was saying: “I do not believe in life after death. No substantial evidence exists that life after death exists. No such authoritative testimony is known to us. And in religions also, it is mentioned either not particularly convincingly, as in Islam, or quite nebulously, as, for example, in Christianity, or it is not mentioned at all, as in the Bible, or it is directly said not to exist, as in Buddhism. The instances of visions, prophecies, various miracles, and even accounts which relate direct experiences of life beyond the grave neither possess nor may serve as definitive proof of its existence. I am not interested one jot in such tales, like the one about a man who saw a lion in his dream and the next day was killed by a lion escaped from the zoological exhibit. I am only interested in one question: does life after death exist or does it not? Tell me, what are your thoughts on the subject?”

The second Conversationalist said: “This is my answer to you: you will never get an answer to your question, and if you ever do get an answer, you will not believe it. Only you will be able to answer this question. If you answer yes, then it will be yes, if you answer no, then it will be no. Only one must answer with complete conviction, without the shadow of a doubt, or, speaking more precisely, with complete faith in your answer....

From “A Young Man Who Had Surprised the Night Watchman” (undated)

Hey, you, ogre! a young man wearing yellow gloves hailed the night watchman.

The watchman realized immediately that his attention was required but he continued examining the fly. I’m talking to you! the young man screamed once more. You dumbass!

The watchman squashed the fly with his thumb and, without turning his head to the young man, said:

And you, shit-for-brains, what are you yelling at? I can hear you. There ain’t no need to raise a racket!

The young man wiped his gloves on his pants and delicately asked, pointing to the sky:

Would you please tell me, grandpa, how do I get up there?

The watchman looked the young man over, squinted in one eye, then squinted in the other, then scratched his little goatee, looked the young man over one more time, and said:

Well, there’s no reason to loiter here, go on, get going, sonny, get going....

∞

From my Introduction to Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings: "Explaining his program, Daniil Kharms wrote: 'I am
interested only in pure nonsense, only in that which has no practical meaning. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation. I find heroics, pathos, moralizing, all that is hygienic and tasteful abhorrent . . . both as words and as feelings....' In some of his other work, we may find a precedent, for example, for the Theatre of Cruelty; but there is also, in his depictions of the minutiae of daily life (byt), a precedent for the postmodernist, documentary yet paradoxically ironic approach of the Moscow Conceptualist artists and poets of the 1970s who acknowledged Kharms as an essential influence. One of them, Ilya Kabakov, wrote: 'Contact with nothing, with emptiness, makes up, we feel, the basic peculiarity of Russian conceptualism....'* Kharms was similarly central for the postwar generation of nonconformist poets of the 1950s and 1960s (Kropivnitsky, Nekrasov, Satunovsky, Kholin, Sapgir, Eremin, Khvostenko, to name just a few) as well as for the Russian Minimalist poets of the 1970s and 1980s. Just to enumerate some of his aesthetic (that is, anti-aesthetic) values: plain speech, written as it is spoken, folksy simplicity, byt, but also the spiritual values of Absurdism— the ridiculous as a reaction and an alternative to revulsion and resignation before an absurd age. (*Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.)

The point I would like to make here is that our reading of Kharms in the West has so far been constrained, accounting I believe primarily for the negativist aspects of Russian Absurdism, and not at all for its 'afterlife,' and that a fuller consideration of his work might be facilitated if we were to pay particular attention to Kharms’s development as a writer over the short span of some decade and a half of creative life.... It seems to me that, as Kharms’s work matures, the elements of protoexistentialism present in all his writings emerge to the fore. My argument here is that we must take Kharms and Russian Absurdism more 'seriously,' as a species of protoexistentialist writing within which context Kharms, Vvedensky, and their circle may be viewed as essentially metaphysical poets. In closing, I once again wish to emphasize the afterlife of Kharms’s oeuvre, being a widely acknowledged influence on the postwar revival of the Russian avant-garde in its experimental, unofficial, nonconformist manifestations— Kharms as a patron saint to the Minimalists and Conceptualists of the 1960s and 1970s. There is something about Kharms that is emblematic of the condition of the Russian soul, for lack of a more precise word, and thus of our own modern condition. In this, he may well be thought of as a worthy member of the postwar generation of existentialist writers— Sartre, Beckett, and Camus— and (it is my hope) enlisted in the canon of world literature among their ranks."

And a bit more from the Introduction:  "Another key to these writings is the Kharmsian whimsical narrative 'I' and his many heteronymous stand-ins—the Grigorievs, the Myshins, the Pronins, the Kuznetsovs—all of them objects of defilement and self-abasement. These 'perversions of self' may be viewed through the lens of Michel Foucault’s 'biopower,' the state’s subjection of the body to absolute control through its exercise of the right to punish (and not publish), a secular equivalent of the usurpation of God’s will on earth. (I have written elsewhere of this spiritual foundation of Kharms’s work, in the contexts of minimalism and of his fellow Absurdist Alexander Vvedensky’s 'prison prose....') However, such seething nihilism doesn’t preclude a spiritual dimension, it makes it necessary, something I believe to be true of all minimalist practice. And it is this particularly that will likely remain most incongruous to contemporary Anglophone readers. How is it possible to reconcile nihilism (I would argue Kharms was not a nihilist) and make it coherent with, and even motivated by, a personal conception of God? While the folk and Russian Orthodox contexts that are particularly evident in the writings of his friend Alexander Vvedensky (who was a genuinely religious person) and in the content of Kharms’s irreverence (he was the son of the religious mystical philosopher Ivan Yuvachev -- see photo to the right -- and seemingly an irrepressible person) are outside the scope of this introduction, it is fitting to end by noting that Kharms falls squarely within the Russian tradition of the yurodivy, the 'holy fool,' even to the point of feigning insanity to avoid arrest. I believe that in this naive and sacred ethnographic role, as court jester and sad clown, Kharms can tell us more about the spirit of his, and our, age than the millions of lives and deaths that became (to paraphrase the heartless tyrant) merely a statistic."

∞

From "The Sabre"

...The death of the ear is hearing,
the death of the nose is nausea,
the death of the sky is silence,
the death of the eye—blindness...

Question: Strange. Then how are we to fit ourselves into the other objects, distributed in the world? By observing how much longer, wider, and taller the wardrobe is than we? Like so, is it?

Answer: The one is symbolized by us as the sign with the appearance of a stick. This icon for one is only the most convenient one for symbolizing the one, as is every other sign for a number. Just so we ourselves are but the most convenient form of ourselves.
The one, in registering the two, does not with its sign correspondingly fit within the sign of the two. The one registers numbers through its quality. And that is how we must act.

Question: But what is the meaning of our quality?

Answer:
            The death of the ear is hearing,
            the death of the nose is nausea,
            the death of the sky is silence,
            the death of the eye—blindness.

We also know the abstract quality of this singularity. But this understanding exists in us as an understanding of something. Let’s say, a fathom. The one registers the two—there is this: one fathom fits within two fathoms, one match fits within two matches, and so forth. There are many such singularities. Just so man is not one, but many. And we have just as many qualities as there are people in existence. And each of us possesses our own particular quality....

[November 19-20, 1929]

From “The Whorld”

But as soon as I understood that I saw the world, I ceased to see it. And I was afraid, thinking the world had ended. But as long as I thought so, I understood that, had the world indeed vanished, then I would no longer be thinking this. And I looked out, seeking the world, but found it not.

And then there was no longer anywhere left to look.

That is when I understood that as long as there was somewhere to look, around me was the world. And now it is no longer. There is only me.

But the world is not me.
Though, at the same time,
I am the world.
But the world isn’t me.
But I am the world.
But the world isn’t me.
But I am the world.
But the world isn’t me.
But I am the world.
And then I thought no more.

May 30, 1930

                * * *

I am incapable of thinking smoothly
My fear gets in the way
It severs my train of thought
As though a ray
Two or even three times each minute
My conscience is contorted by it
I am not capable of action
Only of spiritual angst.

The rain’s thunder spoke,
Time has come to a stop.
The clock helplessly tocks.
Grass grow; you have no need of time.
God answer, you have no need of words.

Papyrus flower, how wonderful your calm is.
I also want to be at peace. But all for nothing.

Detskoe Selo, August 12, 1937

∞

One man went to sleep with faith, and woke up faithless. As luck would have it, in this man’s room stood very precise medical scales, and the man was in the habit of weighing himself daily, every morning and every night. And so, before going to bed the previous evening, having weighed himself, the man determined that he weighed four stone and twenty-one pounds. And on the next morning, having woken up without faith, the man weighed himself again and determined that he now weighed only four stone and thirteen pounds. “It may thus be determined,” the man concluded, “that my faith had weighed approximately eight pounds.”

[1936– 37]

∞

I would like to conclude this post with a collection of links to reviews of Daniil Kharms's work available heretofore in English translation, including the piece by Ian Frazier I had referred to in an earlier post, so that those who are interested may explore further.

"The revelatory rediscovery of Russian absurdist writer Daniil Kharms" by Chris Cumming in Bomb Magazine

"Samuel Beckett's career is one possible model for how Kharms' writing may have evolved had he lived. Beckett, too, spent many years hammering out a mature style after deciding that the could go no further in the direction of experimental modernism, which he felt had reached its end point with Finnegan’s Wake. Both Beckett and Kharms experimented with absurdity, grotesquerie, and black humor in their early works; throughout their lives both were obsessed with logic, mathematics, chess, and arcane knowledge, and both believed that the highest goal of literature is to access the irrational that hides behind conventional language and categories of thought. Beckett was just three months younger than Kharms, and at age 36 he was working on Watt (1953), a novel whose craziness cedes no ground to anything Kharms wrote, and whose mixture of the bizarre and the pedestrian it recalls. With Mercier and Camier (1946), Beckett began to bring this aspect of his work under control, and his greatest books—spare, classically controlled, but no less artistically or intellectually radical—were all written when he was in his 40s. Kharms’ turn toward classicism in his last years makes me think he might have developed in a similar way.... His attitude toward the real world, the world of politics, history, war, and revolution, remains a puzzle. And his reticence on the great events that swallowed him up adds to the pathos of his diaries. He was killed over a game he had no stake in. 'I’m a tiny little bird who’s flown into a cage with big angry birds,' he wrote in 1935."

My personal favorite is this essay-review, "Art is a Cupboard!" by Tony Wood in the London Review of Books.

"Throughout his life, Kharms cultivated an eccentric public persona that reinforced the singularity of his written output. This involved such oddball stunts as perching on the façade of the Singer building on Nevsky Prospekt in plus fours and spats to invite the passing crowds to a poetry evening. One visitor to his apartment reported seeing a contraption made of bits of metal, wooden boards, springs, a bicycle wheel and empty jars; Kharms said it was ‘a machine’, and, when asked what kind, replied: ‘No kind. Just a machine.’ He also seems to have collected unusual friends: in her 1982 monograph on Kharms, Alice Stone Nakhimovsky mentions a Dr. Chapeau; apparently ‘ideally attentive’ as a physician, Chapeau also ‘drank a great deal and tended to urinate on the floor’. An obliging Kharms, we are told, ‘simply kept a mop on hand’....

Kharms’s ... short pieces do much more than parody the observational mode. There are wonderful send-ups of any number of genres. The epistolary: ‘I am writing to you in answer to your letter, which you are planning to write to me in answer to my letter, which I wrote to you.’ Literary biography, as in the deliberately misspelled ‘Anegdotes from the Life of Pushkin’, in which the poet writes abusive poems about his friends – He called these poems 'erpigarms”’ – and where we discover that ‘Pushkin had four sons and all of them idiots. One didn’t even know how to sit on a chair and was always falling off. Pushkin himself was not so great at sitting on chairs.’ Here the principal foil for Kharms’s wit is the Russian literary tradition, irreverently plundered and distorted, as in the novella ‘The Old Woman’, which effectively reverses Crime and Punishment by having an old woman turn up and die unaided in the narrator’s flat...."

Here is Ian Frazier writing on Kharms, "A Strangely Funny Russian Genius," in the New York Review of Books.

"Daniil Kharms, a Russian writer who came of age in the worst of Soviet times, is categorized as an absurdist, partly (I think) because it’s hard to know what else to call him. To me he makes more sense as a religious writer. He is really funny and completely not ingratiating, simultaneously...."

Here is Joshua Cohen's brief and witty summation, "Incidences," written in Kharms's own curtailed style, in Bookslut.

"One of his children’s stories features a man who goes out to buy cigarettes, and never returns. Presumably, he’s arrested. Like Kharms was again, in 1941. He died in February a year later, of starvation, in a Leningrad prison hospital a few blocks from his home. German bombs were falling that winter. Apparently, there was a war.... If I were Kharms, I’d be smoking its pages...."

"Daniil Kharms, Master of Deadpan, Father of the Absurd" by Freidemann Kohler in Russia Beyond the Headlines

"Many view his absurdity as a political seismogram from an evil age. 'Incidences', a work replete with chain dances of death, was written in 1936, during the reign of terror known as Stalin's Great Purge.... American critics called his work 'exhilarating' and even came up with a name for his powers of anti-description, calling it 'Kharmsifying'....What are the most important points for new readers? Kharms was witty, charmingly deadpan, cryptic and doomed. But seventy [five] years later, he now has the last word."

And last but not least, "Soviet Deadpan," George Saunders writing on Daniil Kharms in The New York Times.

Daniil Kharms's brilliantly weird stories, written during Stalin's terror, reflect an aesthetic and political crisis. "When I first discovered Kharms, my answer (like the answer of many readers and critics before me) was, These stories are an absurdist response to the brutality of his times...."

∞

What else is there to say about infinity and the eternal? Kharms, in “The Permanence of Dirt and of Rejoicing” (1933): “…And then the fleeting years go flying by, / and people, arrayed in their orderly rows,/ march into their graves and disappear.” And later: “Motion itself has become more viscous, / and time’s acquired the consistency of sand.” And in “The Physicist who Broke his Leg” (1935): “Flashing joints of mechanical motion / A policeman is seen approaching. / Reciting the multiplication table, / A young student tries to help him." In his many meditations on immortality, numbers theory, and infinity, Kharms, having adopted for his critique of reason the languages of both the Old Testament and of Science, rejects all soulless automatism and circular reasoning in favor of a mystical philosophy, at the core of which is the Khlebnikovian Budetlyanin, or the man of the future – the Poet-as-Creator.

How satisfying to write without missing a beat!
And then what I have written out loud to read.
Yes, this is a most pleasant way to pass the time.
Whence at once participate both body and soul.

That's when I feel myself in the universe's stream.

Daniil Kharms, 1935

Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms on Children [by Alex Cigale]

Beaverson was walking down the road pondering: why is it that when you pour sand in the soup, its taste becomes spoiled?
All of a sudden, he saw a tiny little girl sitting in the road, holding in her hands a worm and crying loudly.
What are you crying about? Beaverson asked the little girl.
I’m not crying, said the little girl, I am singing.
Then why are you singing like that? asked Beaverson.
To make the worm happy, the girl said, and they call me Natasha. 
So that’s how it is? Beaverson said, taken aback.
Yes, that’s how it is, said the girl. Good-bye. And the girl hopped up, climbed on a bicycle, and pedaled away.
So small and already riding bicycles, Beaverson thought to himself.

[1930]

Previously published in The Literary Review, Vol. 56, Issue 03 , "Cry Baby"

 

I was born among the cattails. Like a mouse. My mother gave birth to me and placed me in the water. And I swam off.
Some kind of fish with four whiskers on its nose circled around me. I started to cry. And the fish started to cry also.
All of a sudden we saw, swimming on the surface, a porridge. We ate the porridge and started to laugh.
We were very happy and we swam along with the current and met a lobster. This was an ancient, giant lobster and he was holding in his claws an ax.
Swimming behind the lobster was a naked frog.
Why are you always naked? the lobster asked her. How come you aren’t ashamed?
There is nothing shameful in this, the frog said. Why should we be ashamed of our beautiful bodies, given to us by nature, when we aren’t ashamed of our despicable deeds, that we ourselves create?
You speak the truth, said the lobster. And I don’t know how to give you an answer to this. I propose that we ask a human being, because a human being is smarter than we are. Because we are wise only in fables, which human beings compose about us, so that it again appears here that the human being is wise and not we. So that’s when the lobster saw me and said:
And we don’t even have to swim anywhere because here’s one— a human.
The lobster swam up alongside me and asked:
Should one be ashamed of one’s own naked body? You are a human so tell us.
I am a human being and I will answer your question: we should not be ashamed of our naked bodies.

[1934?]

 

And now I will tell you about how I was born, how I was raised, and how the first signs of my genius were recognized. I was born twice. It happened in just this way:
My father married my mother in the year 1902, but my parents brought me into this world only at the end of the year 1905 because my father had wished that his child be born precisely on the New Year. Father had calculated that the impregnation must occur on the first of April and only on that day did he take a ride over to mother with the proposition that she become “with child.”
The first time my father visited my mother’s was on April 1 of the year 1903. Mother had long waited for this moment and was terribly overjoyed. But father, apparently, was in a very jovial mood and could not restrain himself and so said to mother: “April Fool’s Day!”
Mother was terribly hurt and would not on that day allow father near her. And so we all had to wait until the following year.
In the year 1904, on the first of April, father again prepared to arrive at mother’s with the same proposition. But mother, remembering the events of the previous year, said that now she no longer wished to be placed in such a preposterous position, and again would not let father near her. No matter how much father fumed, nothing helped.
And only a year hence did my father succeed in breaking down my mother’s resolve and siring me.
And so my germination took place on the first of April in the year 1905.
However, all of father’s plans were quashed, because I turned out to be premature and was born four months prior to term.
Father became so incensed that the neonatal nurse who delivered me, in her confusion, started to stuff me back in where I had just crawled out from.
One of our acquaintances who was present during the event, a student at the Military Medical Academy, declared that stuffing me back in would not work. Despite the student’s warning, they stuffed me in, though, it should be noted, and as was later confirmed, stuff me in they did but, being in a rush, they managed to do it into the wrong place.
That’s when the total pandemonium ensued....

Previously published in The Literary Review, Vol. 56, Issue 03, "Cry Baby" (you may, of course, read the rest of the story there or in the book.)

∞

In his lifetime, Daniil Kharms was known primarily as a children's poet. As I note in my introduction to the book, "The Lacanian psychoanalytic of the 'abject,' the sadomasochistic dyad inherent in Kharms’s oft-repeated and vicious attacks on children, [as well as on] women, the old, and mankind in general, is reminiscent of W. C. Fields’s comical persona. (One can only imagine the bitter irony inherent in the fact that Kharms owed his very physical existence to his “official position” as a children’s writer!)"

Today, I will try to represent a small portion of that work. But first of all.... Daniil Kharms was the pen name Daniil Yuvachev adopted while still in his teens. He spelled it variously: Harms, Charms, Daan Daan, Shardam, etc. Among his favorite models (Kharms knew English well, having studied it at the elite German Peterschule) were the alogism of Lewis Carroll and the nonsense of Edward Lear. It has also been conjectured that the name he chose for himself is close to the Russian pronunciation of that creation of another of his favorite authors, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Since the 1980s, an entire cottage industry has sprung up in Russia consisting of Kharms's illustrated children's poems and animated films based on his work:

Perhaps my favorite of his children's verses is “Kak Papa Zastrelil Mne Khor'ka” (“How Father Shot me a Weasel”). The link to this page contains reproductions of the pages of the illustrated book, the text of the poem in Russian, followed by a very full tribute to his children's verse (also in Russian).

Here is an animated version of “Plikh i Plyukh,” Kharms's adaptation into Russian from the German of Wilhelm Busch. It should be noted here that the status of children's poets is much higher in Russia than in America, perhaps partly due to the fact that, because so many serious poets were not permitted to publish their "mature work," they turned either to children's verse or to translation to survive, both physically, by thus gaining admission to the Writer's Union, and as poets. Another cultural difference is that adaptation from foreign languages has always been a standard Russian translation practice, as for example Alexey Tolstoy's immensely popular adaptation of Pinocchio, Buratino, and Korney Chukovsky's Doctor Aybolit, an adaptation of  Doctor Dolittle. One of Russia's most beloved children's poets was the noted Shakespeare translator, the Jewish Soviet poet, Samuil Marshak.

Here is a late Soviet version (1987) of perhaps Daniil Kharms's most popular children's verse, “Ivan Ivanych Samovar”. Here is an illustrated audio book version of the same poem, and yet another one, this, perhaps the most popular illustrated version from my own childhood.

Here are a few more cartoon versions of Kharms's fables “A Fable," “One time...” and  “One Old Man”. And here, for good measure, is “An Unexpected Binge” (warning: adult content).

THE BRAVE HEDGEHOG

On the table there stood a box.
The animals approached the box, and started to examine, smell, and lick it.
And the box suddenly – one, two, three – and popped open.
And from the box – one, two, three – popped out a snake.
The animals got scared and ran off.
Only the hedgehog didn’t get scared and yelled: “Kukareku!”
No, not that way! The hedgehog yelled: “Af-afaf!”
No, not like that either! The hedgehog yelled: “Meow-meow-meow!”
No, again not like that! I myself don’t know how.
Who knows; how do hedgehogs scream?

[1935]

* * *

Upon the river floats a boat
That’s traveled very very far
And on this boat the sailors four
Are very brave and very broad.

They have two ears upon their skulls
And tails protruding from their bums
And the only thing that scares them
Are little kittens and full-grown cats.

[1936]

A VERY TERRIFYING TALE

Two brothers walking in the alley
Were finishing up a roll with butter.
Suddenly from around the gutter
A huge dog jumps out barking loudly.

The youngest to the oldest said:
He intends to draw first blood.
So that we don’t end up dead
Let’s toss him the bread instead.

In the end, all came out smoothly.
The brothers immediately understood
That for every morning stroll
It’s best to carry a breakfast roll.

[1938]

From the Notebooks:

I detest children, old men, old crones, and elderly wise people.
Poisoning children is cruel. But something needs to be done about them!

[second half of 1930s]

From Daniil Kharms's magnum opus, "Starukha (Old Woman)"

I can hear the loathsome cries of boys coming from the street. I lie there, inventing ways to punish them. I like the idea of infecting them with tetanus best of these, so that they freeze in their tracks. And then the parents drag them to their homes. They lie in their little beds and can’t even eat, because they can’t open their mouths. They feed them artificially. The lockjaw passes in a week, but they are so weakened that for another full month they must stay between the sheets. Then they begin to gradually improve, but I make them relapse with another bout of tetanus, and they all perish.
I lie on the daybed with my eyes open and can’t fall asleep....

From It was Summertime

...Plato extracted himself from the hammock and followed the cat.
Behind the bush, balancing on one leg, stood a heron.
Seeing Plato, the heron flapped her wings, swung her head, and made a clicking noise with her beak.
“Greetings!” said the heron and extended its foot to Plato.
Plato, wanting to shake the heron’s foot, held out his hand.
“Don’t you dare!” the pussycat said. “Handshakes have been forbidden! If you wish to exchange greetings, you must do so with your feet!”
Plato stretched out his leg and touched the heron’s foot with his own foot.
“That’s good, now you’re acquainted,” the pussycat said.
“Arethen Letusfry!” the heron said.
“Yes, let us fly!” said the pussycat and jumped on the heron’s back.
“Fly where?” Plato asked. But the heron had already snagged him by the back of his neck and taken off.
“Let me go!” Plato screamed.
“Nonsense!” the pussycat said, sitting on the heron’s back. “If we let go of you, you will fall and die.”
Plato looked down and saw the roof of his house.
“Where are we going?” Plato asked.
“Over there,” the pussycat said, flapping his paws in all directions at once.
Plato looked down once again and saw below him the gardens, the streets, and the tiny houses. Several people stood on the town
square and, shading their eyes with their hands, gazed up at the sky.
“Save me!” Plato yelled.
“Sirence!” the heron screamed, opening its beak wide.
Plato felt something constricting in his chest and heard a deafening noise in his ears, and the square with the tiny people began to grow quickly.
And then Plato heard the pussycat’s voice above him: “Catch him! He’s falling!”

[late 1930s]

You may read this story in its entirety in the book, or in Narrative Magazine, where it was previously published (free registration required)

The Four-Legged Crow

Once upon a time there lived a four-legged crow. Truth be told, she had five feet, but there’s no point in talking about that.
So once upon a time, the four-legged crow bought herself some coffee and thought: “So here I am, got myself some coffee, but what to do with it?”
And then, as bad luck would have it, a fox came trotting by. She saw the crow and yelled to her:
“Hey!” she yells. “You, crow!”
And the crow yells back at the fox:
“You’re a crow yourself!”
And the fox yells at the crow:
“And you, crow, are a pig!”
That’s when the crow, being upset, spilled her coffee. And the fox scrammed. And the crow climbed down to the ground and slunk off on all four or, more precisely, all five of her feet to her despicable house.

February 13, 1938

Northern Fable

An old man, for no particular reason, went off, into the forest. Then he returned and said: Old woman, hey, old woman!
And the old woman dropped dead. Ever since then, all rabbits are white in winter.

[1940]

The days are fleeing like fleet swifts
And we are flying like little sticks
The clock on the shelf is ticking and
I sit here wearing a wool-knit cap
The days are fleeting like the cups
And we are fleeing like the swifts
The sky is shimmering with lamps
And we are flying like the stars

DANIIL KHARMS, 1936

Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms's Women (Belated Happy Valentine's Day!) [by Alex Cigale]

From ON UNIVERSAL BALANCE

...And, having returned home, Nikolay Ivanovich said this to his wife:
“Do not be afraid, Ekaterina Petrovna, and do not worry. Only there isn’t any equilibrium in this life. And the mistake is only off by some kilogram and half for the entire universe, but still, it’s amazing, Ekaterina Petrovna, it is simply remarkable!”

THE END.

[September 18, 1934]

From Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings (Northwestern University Press, World Classics series; officially published on February 17, 2017)

∞

First of all, my apologies for the delay in posting this: I must again excuse myself by repeating that, like so many of us, I've only just returned from DC and the AWP. And so, dear reader, please accept this, my belated Happy St. Valentines's Day wishes to us all: may each of us seek to daily find within ourselves those inner resources that enable us to feel and express our love. Yesterday, I was helped on this occasion, during a particularly difficult personal time and in this unsettling historical moment, by going to see a film with two people I care about very much. While Lion is far from a perfect picture, what else is there in this world that can better evoke in us those cathartic and complex feelings of pity and empathy more than the innocence of a child?

I also wish to say that I had all the relevant selections from the book ready to go before I got on the road, but, to quote E. M. Foster: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" What I want to tell you about today is an experience of censorship I had with the Russian Absurd, Daniil Kharms Facebook page I had started, intended to promote the book with a series of selections, including the poem that follows here. The response I received to it was: "Your ad wasn't approved because it doesn't follow our Advertising Policies for adult products or services. We don’t allow images or videos that show nudity or cleavage, even if it’s portrayed for artistic or educational reasons." While I appealed the decision repeatedly, including finally to a live person, explaining that the post contained neither nudity, nor cleavage, nor certainly any videos, it got me exactly nowhere.

The situation became only more absurd, when Facebook's response to a prose piece in tomorrow's follow up post, "Daniil Kharms on Spirit," that I thought not only innocuous but genuinely elevated and uplifting was: "Your ad wasn't approved because it calls out to specific user attributes (ex: race, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender, disability or medical condition, financial status, membership in a trade union, criminal record, ethnicity, name). Such ads may offend users and lead to high negative sentiment." To make this already far too long introduction shorter: to put it mildly, Kharms, like so many of us today, had a "complicated relationship" with all of mankind, and even with God "himself".  I hope you will read on for yourself, and I will only add here the following words from my introduction to the book: 

"Humor and horror, Eros and Thanatos, degradation and sadomasochism jostle one another, side-by-side, in these stories and poems. Kafkaesque and Chekhovian situations and motifs from Pushkin and traditional Russian fairy tales are recognizable in Kharms’s sparse prose, yet they appear diseased, stripped down to their bare essentials, as if contorted by the terror of impending arrest and doom." And we might add, "by the terror of love gained and love lost". And now, most of the rest of this, I would like to be in Daniil Kharms's own words.

∞

You can sew. But that’s all bunk.
I’m in love with your pudenda;
it’s moist and smells abundantly.
Another man would peek, let out
a squeak, and, sealing his nose, scram.
And wiping your fluids from his hands
would he return? Oh, what a question;
suddenly, there can be no other.
Your juices are to me sheer joy.
You think my words are an excrescence
but I’m prepared to lick your cunt
without break for breath and swallow
the delicious squim of your mallow
until I begin to burp and grunt.

(Daniil Kharms, 1931)

"Joseph Brodsky once quoted Anna Akhmatova, about an improbable Kharms sentence: 'Only with Kharms could that ever work. Never with anyone else.'" (From Ian Frazier's group review of all the books heretofore available in English translation in The New York Review of Books, which includes his own very personal experience discovering, translating, and failing in the attempt to communicate to Anglophone readers how and why Daniil Kharms's works are "funny".)

∞

From “Thoughts about a Girl”

And when she passes by aflutter,
As if on air, not a word do you utter;
And when with a knowledgeable hand
She makes contact— you understand.

And when she lightly, as though dancing,
Sliding her lovely foot across the floor,
Proceeds to offer her perky breast for
You to kiss— then it is impossible not

To shout out loud and lovingly blow
From her firm breast a dust mote,
And recognize how touching your lips
To her youthful breast is pointless.

January 21, 1935

 

In every church bell there is spite
In every red ribbon there is fire
In every young woman shivering
In every young man his own steed.

[1936]

 

March 20, 1938

Came to the window naked. In the house across the street someone must have taken an exception, the sailor’s widow, I think. A policeman came barging in, with the yard sweeper, and someone else in tow. They declared that I have been disturbing the neighbors across the street from me for over three years already. So I have hung some curtains. What is more appealing to the eye, an old woman wearing nothing but a chemise or a young man, buck-naked? And for whom is it less acceptable to show themselves au naturel?

∞

This was my own "working" version of the book's cover. Being a very visual and concrete person, as I was developing and completing the book, being able to see both the "big picture" and the individual pages helped me in doing so. Here, I had "cut" and reversed what I believed to be a double "wedding portrait" of Daniil Yuvachev and Esther Rousakov. Kharms's first wife, she was the daughter of Jewish Russian-French “expats,” and part of the "reverse immigration" that had returned to Russia after the Revolution.

From the Notebooks. July 27. Who could advise me regarding what I should do? Esther brings with her misfortune. I am being destroyed along with her. What must I do, either divorce her or . . . carry my cross? I was given the choice to avoid this, but I remained dissatisfied, and asked to be united with Esther. I was told yet again, do not be married! But despite “having caught a scare,” I still insisted, I still tied my fate with Esther’s, till death do us part. I myself was to blame for this or, rather, I did it to myself. What has happened to the OBERIU? Everything vanished as soon as Esther became a part of me. Since that time, I have ceased to write as I ought to and have only brought misfortune upon myself from all directions. Is it that I can’t be dependent on women, no matter which one it is? Or is the nature of Esther’s character such that she brought an end to my work? I don’t know. If Esther is filled with sorrow, then how can I possibly let her go....

Kharms developed a highly personal and involved symbology, mostly involving an almost kabbalistic play with the letters of her name (his symbol for her as a whole person was the window). Esther Rusakov (née Ioselevich), was repressed, along with her entire family, in 1936.

Before I enter, I will knock on your window. You will see me in the window. Then I will walk through the door and you will see me in the doorway. Then I will walk into your house and you will recognize me. And I will enter you, and no one, except you, will see me and recognize me.

You will see me in the window.

You will see me in the doorway.

[1931]

∞

The woman in the following picture is Alice Poiret, another of "Kharms's women;” both she and his first wife, Esther, have most often been literally cropped out of the few surviving photos of Kharms that have come down to us. Kharms had dedicated a number of poems to Alice, including the following:

Before me hangs a portrait
of Alice Ivanovna Poret.
She is as gorgeous as a fairy,
devious, worse than a snake,
she is cunning, my Alice,
cunning as Renard the Fox.

[ January 7, 1933]

∞

October 16, 1933

Petersburg

Talent grows, destroying, building.
The sign of stagnation is well-being.

Dear Klavdia Vasilyevna,
You are a remarkable and genuine person! As much as it grieves me not to be able to see you, I won’t be inviting you to the Children’s Theater or to come to my city. How heartwarming it is to know that there still exists one human being animated by dreams! I don’t know what word one can use to express that force which so delights me in you. I usually call it simply p u r i t y. I have been thinking about how wonderful it is, that which is primal...

… I’m genuinely delighted that you take your walks like so, in the Zoological Garden. Especially if you take walks there not just for the sake of walking, but also to observe the animals— I will fall in love with you even more tenderly.

Daniil Kharms

October 20, 1933

I have studied women for a long time now and can definitively say that I know them with flying colors. First and foremost, a woman likes to be attended to. Let’s say she is standing right in front of you or is about to, and you make it seem as though you’re hearing and seeing nothing, and act like there’s no one else in the room; this inflames female curiosity. And a curious woman is capable of practically anything.
The next time I will intentionally stick my hand deep in my pocket with a quizzical appearance, and the woman will plant her eyes on me, like, what’s going on here? And I will slowly draw out of my pocket some sort of spark plug. Well and good; the trap has been sprung, and the fish is in my net!

July 1935

One of the principal sources of divergence of human paths is the matter of preference for either skinny or plump women. I propose we reserve alleys in public gardens for quiet strolling, with two-seat benches distributed two meters away from each other; furthermore, thick bushes should be planted between the benches so that those sitting at one bench are not able to see what is happening at another. On these quiet pathways, the following rules must be enforced:
1. Entrance is forbidden to children, both alone and accompanied by a parent.
2. All noise and loud conversation are strictly prohibited.
3. Only one woman may take a seat next to a man, and only one man next to a woman.
4. If the person seated on a bench is resting their hand or some sort of other object on the free seat, you may not join them. Alleys should also be reserved for walking in solitude, with metal armchairs for single people. Between the armchairs, bushes. Entry is forbidden to children; noise and loud conversation are prohibited.
— —
As a rule, pretty women do not stroll around in gardens.

September 28, 1935

One personage, wringing her hands in sorrow, was saying, “What I need is an interest toward life, and not at all money. I am seeking enhancement, not advancement. I need a husband, and not a rich man but a true talent, the director Meyerhold!”

The Sensual Woodsman

When in the distance flashed saws
And the axes had started ringing,
My girlfriends all became dearer.
I’m in love with them ever since.

Oh, girlfriends, my dear girlfriends,
So pleasant to sense you with my hands!
You’re all so smooth! All so solid!
One more wonderful than the next!

It’s so pleasant to touch your breasts,
Brush my lips the length of your legs.
Oh, help me people, dear people.
Oh, help me God, my dear God!

August 24, 1938

From An Obstacle (August 12, 1940) Previously published in Narrative Magazine (free registration required)

Pronin said, “You have very pretty stockings.”
Irina Mazer said, “So you like my stockings?”
Pronin said, “Oh, yes. Very much.” And he ran his hand down her leg....

From A Lecture (1940)

Pushkov said:
“A woman is the lathe of love.”
And he immediately got punched in the face....

From “The Power of...”

Faol continued: “Take, for example, love. It may be for better or for worse. On the one hand, it is written: you must love . . . but on the other hand, it is said: do not spoil . . . Perhaps it is better not to love after all? But it says: you must love. But if you do love, you will spoil. What to do? Perhaps go ahead and love but in some other way? But then why is it that in all languages, the same word is used to designate both this and the other love? So, this one artist loved his mother and this one plump young girl. And he loved them each differently. He handed over to the girl the larger part of his salary. The mother often starved while the girl ate and drank for three people. The artist’s mother slept in the hallway on the floor, and the girl had at her disposal two very adequate rooms. The girl had four coats and the mother just one. And so, the artist took from his mother her one coat and had it altered into a skirt for the girl. So that, in all respects, the artist spoiled the girl but his own mother he didn’t spoil, but loved her with a pure love. However, he did fear his mother’s death, but the death of the girlfriend he feared not, and when his mother died, the artist cried, and when the girlfriend fell out of a window and also died, the artist didn’t cry but found himself another girlfriend. And so it seems that a mother is prized as one of a kind, as though she were a rare stamp that cannot be replaced with another....”

September 29, 1940

You can read the rest of this powerful late "fiction" in the selection of seven prose pieces I had previously published in International Quarterly.

∞

Daniil Kharms’s second wife, Marina Malich's (Durnovo) memoirs were recorded and published by the literary historian Vladimir Glotser in his book Moi Muzh Daniil Kharms (My Husband Daniil Kharms; available only in Russian).

From the Notebooks. May 26 [1938]

Marina stays in bed all day in a foul mood. I love her so very much, but how harrowing it is to be married.
I am tormented by my “sex.” For weeks, and sometimes months, I have not known a woman.
1. There is one purpose to every human life: immortality.
1a. There is one purpose to every human life: achieving immortality.
2. One pursues immortality by continuing his bloodline, another by accomplishing great mortal deeds in order to immortalize one’s name. And only the third leads a righteous and holy life in order to achieve immortality as life eternal.
3. A man has but two interests: the mundane— food, drink, warmth, women, and rest; and the celestial— immortality.
4. All that is earthly is a confirmation of death.
5. There is one straight line upon which all that is mortal lies. And only that which is not plotted on this axis may serve as confirmation of eternity.
6. And for this reason man seeks a deviation from this earthly road and considers it beautiful or brilliant.

And, last but not least:

From Symphony No. 2

...Well, to hell with him. I will tell you about Anna Ignatievna instead.
But to tell you about Anna Ignatievna isn’t so simple. First of all, I know practically nothing about her and, second of all, I just fell off the stool and forgot what I was about to say. Better I tell you about myself.
I am tall in height, not stupid, dress colorfully and with taste, don’t drink, don’t patronize the horses, but do like the ladies. And the ladies do not avoid me. In fact, they love it when I accompany them. Seraphima Izmailovna has invited me time and again over to her place, and Zinaida Yakovlevna also told me that she is always happy to see me. And with Marina Petrovna I had this amusing episode, which is the one I want to tell you about. The episode is really quite ordinary, but still very amusing, because Marina Petrovna turned, owing to me, entirely bald, like the palm of your hand. It happened this way: I came over to Marina Petrovna’s and she “boom!” and turned completely bald. That’s it.

June 9– 11, 1941

Daniil Kharms and the Russian Absurdists [by Alex Cigale]

"I can’t imagine why, but everyone thinks I’m a genius; but if you ask me, I’m no genius. Just yesterday I was telling them: Please hear me! What sort of a genius am I? And they tell me: What a genius! And I tell them: Well, what kind? But they don’t tell me what kind, they only repeat, genius this and genius that. But if you ask me, I’m no genius at all.
Wherever I go, immediately, they all start whispering and pointing their fingers at me. What’s going on here?! I say. But they don’t
let me utter a word, and any minute now they will lift me up in the air and carry me off on their shoulders."

                                                                                                                                                [Daniil Kharms, 1934– 36]

∞

Just a little over a year and a half ago, I had the great pleasure to blog in these pages for my first time, on the occasion of having edited the Contemporary Russian Poetry issue of the Atlanta Review (Spring 2015). When I wrote David Lehman, almost exactly a year ago now, to tell him that my first full book, Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings, was forthcoming early this year from Northwestern University Press, I could not have remotely expected his response, an offer to blog about Kharms and my book, today and for the remainder of this week. And so ... here we are, the book's official release is this Friday, February 17, and I am just back in New York City from yet another overwhelming AWP, this time in Washington, DC that is largely unchanged (other than the construction boom in its Midtown and all the newly gentrified neighborhoods) from that summer of 1984 when, as a budding Sovietologist, I walked every day from my GWU dorm room in Foggy Bottom to my internship at the Georgetown Center for Strategic Studies on 17th and K Street. I had every intention then to pursue a career in the diplomatic service and my special interest was arms control, and though the town is little changed, the world and each one of us in it have been utterly transformed in the space of only several months.

1984: what an exciting year that was for all of us, but especially for those with a keen interest in Russian and East European Studies. In May, the USSR had boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics as payback for the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, all of it, the consequence of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. That war, which would become known as "the Soviet Union's Vietnam," was later thought to have been a major factor in the collapse of the USSR. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev would inherit the helm as the General Secretary of the CPSU, after the deaths of three septuagenerian leaders within the space of three years (Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko) and the rest, as they say, is history. It seemed, then that the collapse of the Russian Empire was imminent, and that the shape of things to come, as predicted by George Orwell in his eponymous novel was farther away than it had ever been throughout that bloodiest of all, our 20th Century. Some had even gone so far as to diagnose the idyllic 90s as "The End of History". But then, just as the 21st Century had dawned, 9/11 happened, followed by perhaps our own second Vietnam, the War in Iraq and, at the end of its first decade, a market collapse that threatened to spawn a second Great Depression, and now, "seemingly" all of a sudden, history has come back, full circle and with a vengeance, to bite us all in the ass.

No one could have predicted even a year ago, when I signed on for this task, that this book would be as timely, cogent, and once again relevant as I had believed it would be when I began work on it ten years ago, and I myself only know this for certain now. As I had written in my introduction: “Covering the entire range between the merely unpleasant, the disturbing, and the hilarious, [Daniil Kharms's] protoexistentialist works succeed in bearing, if only tangentially, remarkable witness to the unspoken and unspeakable reality of life under Stalin.... Getting Kharms, I think, requires cultivating a visceral sense of the sociopolitical-cultural context of the repressions and deprivations of the 1920s and 1930s, and the suppression of Kharms and his immediate circle, the OBERIU ... [who] had assumed, in their generation, the “Slap in the Face of Public Taste” mantle of the Russian Futurists, literally adopting Kazimir Malevich’s encouragement to them as their motto— 'Go and stop progress!'” And so, before proceeding, I must begin my week-long residency here by first briefly establishing the links between the so-called Russian Absurdists and their spiritual and aesthetic "fathers" of the preceding generation, the Russian Futurians (so-called because they wished to distinguish themselves from the nationalistic and militaristic Italian Futurists).

In preparation for doing so, as we approached the turn of the year, in the run up to the Trump Inauguration and the book's official release, having assumed that most if not nearly all of us are also members of Facebook, I had started a Russian Absurd on Facebook book page, as well as a Russian Absurd on Twitter page and a Goodreads page,) where for the foreseeable future, I will continue posting selections from and news about the book, as well as links to "all things Kharmsian," some of which I will also be sharing here in the coming week. For now, I invite you to explore the following links and to join/like, follow, and share the group with your interested friends. I very much look forward to this, our journey together, as I prepare, as it where, to "take this show on the road" and to read from, i.e. "perform the book" to various and varied kinds of audiences. In my design of the book, I had made a very conscious effort to represent, within my own space constraints (280 pages,) as many of the different types of materials present in his notebooks as possible (diary entries, letters, one of his NKVD confessions, etc.) My main purpose in doing so was to pay particular attention to Kharms’s development as a writer over the short span of some decade and a half of his creative life. So that the development I am speaking of become self-apparent, I structured the book to follow as much as possible a strictly chronological order. The chapters that emerged, corresponding roughly to the “Early,” “Middle,” and “Late” periods, could also have been provisionally titled “The Theatre of Cruelty,” “The Theatre of the Absurd,” and “Protoexistentialism.” The brief "biographical sections," taken from Kharms’s notebooks, etc., and interspersed at the beginning and end of every section, were intended to cement a more personal relationship with the author, as well as to establish connections between his creative output and the circumstances and events of his life. I hoped that these "section breaks" would also provide “pacing” and some "breathing room" as it were, as well as a sense of a "life lived," so that these mileposts in Kharms’s biography could be used by the interested reader to map these events -- the initial suppression of the OBERIU (late 1920s), the breakup of his first marriage and his exile to Kursk after his first arrest (1931–32), and the growing desperation of his final years (late 1930s) -- over to his writing. Kharms’s poetry, like the prose that precedes it, likewise arranged chronologically, placed at the end, offers a kind of summation.

∞

The Russian Futurians, a photo gallery; Velimir Khlebnikov's Budetlyani ("people of the future"). 

David Bulyuk, a world-class painter and the self-proclaimed "Father of Russian Futurism," spent the second half of his long life in the Ukrainian community of NYC's East Village and, among a group of painters, including Arshile Gorky, in Long Island's Hampton Bays. 

Along with Velimir Khlebnikov, whom Roman Jakobson, the father of Structuralist linguistics, had called "perhaps the most important modern poet," no other poet made such a lasting contribution to Russian and World poetry as Vladimir Mayakovsky. 

Aleksei Kruchenykh's best known work is the first Russian Futurist Opera, “Victory Over the Sun” (1913,) for which he collaborated with Kazimir Malevich.

The Russian Futurians: A Group Portrait. Vasilisk Gnedov, Igor Severanin (Ego-Futurists), Vasily Kamensky, Elena Guro, Vassily Kandinsky, Nikolai Aseev, Boris Pasternak (Tsetrifuga,) Anatoly Mariengoff (Imaginist), Simeon Kirsanov, et al.

∞

Daniil Kharms (photo gallery) was born on December 29, 1905 and died on February 2, 1942. Today, this one last time, we may celebrate his 111th BIRTHDAY and the 75th anniversary of his DEATH.

As I retell in the introduction to my book, the "Russian Absurdists," the Oberiu (“Obyedenenie Real'nogo Iskusstva” or “Union of Real Art,”) were essentially the second generation of Russian Futurists, and their initial "launching pad," Velimir Khlebnikov and his Zaum' (Za-um, literally”beyond the mind, or the “trans-rational). In that spirit, I'd like to offer you these three very short Kharms poems so close in spirit to Khlebnikov's own miniatures, I believe them to have been intended as homages. Of the section of roughly 50 poems that close the book, many, perhaps most of the others are likewise "in this spirit,” and Daniil Kharms, at least in his poetry, remained a “Khlebnikovian” and a “Budetlyanen” (Khlebnikov's “person of the future”) to the end of his life. The Russian Futurian strategy of epatage, or “shocking the bourgeoisie,” was also at the heart of his personal style: in his dress, his dandyism, and particularly in his early, performative, improvisational, expressionistic theatrical work. (The accompanying photo is Daniil Kharms dressed as one of his personas, his "imaginary older brother".)

CHORUS

A cuckoo sleeps in a tree
A lobster dreams under a rock
In the field lies a shepherdess
And the wind is a two-way street.

[1935]

In every church bell there is spite
In every red ribbon there is fire
In every young woman shivering
In every young man his own steed

[1936]

I was watching a slowly eyelid
that was being lazily lifted
and with its lazy glance
circling the affectionate rivers.

[after August 13, 1937]

∞

ON UNIVERSAL BALANCE

Everyone knows these days how dangerous it is to swallow stones.

One of my acquaintances even coined an expression for it: “Waisty,” which stands for: “Warning: Stone Inside”. And a good thing too he did that. “Waisty” is easy to remember, and, as soon as it comes up, or you need it for something, you can immediately recall it.

Аnd this friend of mine worked as a fireman, that is, as an engine stoker on a locomotive. First he rode the northern lines, then he served on the Moscow route. And his name was Nikolay Ivanovich Serpukhov, and he smoked his own hand-rolled cigarettes, Rocket brand, 35 kopeks a box, and he’d always say he doesn’t suffer from coughing as bad from them, and the five-ruble ones, he says, they make him gag.

And so, it once happened that Nikolay Ivanovich found himself in Hotel Europe, in their restaurant. Nikolay Ivanovich sits at his table, and the table over from him is occupied by some foreigners, and they’re gobbling up apples.

And that’s when Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself: “A curious thing,” Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself, “What an enigma the human being is.”

And as soon as he had said this to himself, out of nowhere, before him appears a fairy and says:

“What is it Good Sir that you desire?”

Well, of course, there’s a commotion at the restaurant, like, where did this little damsel suddenly appear from? The foreigners had even stopped stuffing themselves with apples. Nikolai Ivanovich himself caught a good scare and he says, just for the sake of it, to get rid of her:

“Please, forgive me,” he says, “But there is nothing in particular that I need.”

“You don’t understand,” the mysterious damsel says, “I’m what you call a fairy,” she says. “In a single blink of an eye, I can make for you anything you wish. You just give me the word, and I’ll make it happen.”

That’s when Nikolay Ivanovich notices that some sort of a citizen in a gray suit is attentively listening in on their conversation. The maître d’ comes running in through the open doors and behind him, some other character, with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.

“What the heck!” Nikolay Ivanovich thinks to himself, “Who the hell knows how this thing will turn out.”

And indeed, no one can understand what is going on. The maître d’ is hopping across the tops, from one table over to another, the foreigners are rolling up all the carpets, and in general, who the hell can tell what’s really going on! Who is capable of what, that is!

Nikolay Ivanovich ran out into the street, forgetting even the hat he’d left behind earlier at the coat check, and he ran out onto LaSalle Street and said to himself: “Waisty! Warning: Stone Inside!” And also: “What haven’t I seen already in this whole wide world!”

And, having returned home, Nikolay Ivanovich said this to his wife:

“Do not be afraid, Ekaterina Petrovna, and do not worry. Only there isn’t any equilibrium in this life. And the mistake is only off by some kilogram and half for the entire universe, but still, it’s amazing, Ekaterina Petrovna, it is simply remarkable!”

THAT’S ALL.

[September 18, 1934]

Previously published in B O D Y.

∞

Daniil Kharms was the pen name of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev (1905–1942). With his friend, the poet Alexander Vvedensky, Kharms cofounded the OBERIU, a group of second-generation Russian Futurist or so-called Absurdist writers active in the 1920s and 1930s. Not permitted to publish his mature work in Stalinist Russia, he survived, for a time, by composing poems for children. At the beginning of World War II, he was arrested (a second time) on the absurd charge of espionage and, feigning insanity to avoid summary execution, starved to death in a psychiatric hospital during the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Most of his writings survived only in notebooks, rescued fortuitously from a burned-out building by a friend and fellow OBERIU member, the philosopher Yakov Druskin. His short sketches, illegally circulated in Russia after the war, influenced several generations of underground writers who broke into the mainstream with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Some of the essays, poems, and prose in Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings first appeared and may be sampled in B O D Y, Eleven Eleven, (ĕm): A Review of Text and Image 1 (pg. 134-141), Gargoyle 66, Green Mountains Review, Little Star Journal, MAYDAY Magazine, Narrative Magazine, New American Writing 34, Numéro Cinq, Off Course 41, PEN America 12: Correspondences (pg. 100), The International Literary Quarterly 18, and The Literary Review 56.3.

∞

"Reading this book makes me want to put myself in Kharms’s way." – Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story

“Kharms’s obliquely allegorical dark comedies are both mystical and mythic, Daoist and Dadaist, daring and deranging, surrealist and satiric, metaphysical and metafictional. Charting the experience of everyday life in Russia in the 1920s and ’30s, Kharms is an (anti-)Soviet realist. In a world gone mad, Kharms is, ironically, a last refuge of sanity. Alex Cigale’s sparkling translations bring these works into a new life in English.” – Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at U. Penn and author of A Poetics, Girly Man, and Pitch of Poetry

"Absurdism — the ridiculous as a reaction and an alternative to revulsion and resignation before an absurd age." – Alex Cigale, 2015 NEA Fellow in Literary Translation, from the Introduction

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N.B. An update: After 22 years at the helm, this past year, founding editor Dan Veach passed the reins of the Atlanta Review, to its new editor, Karen Head, and the magazine is now newly affiliated with Georgia Tech University. In the coming year, I will be editing a Baltic Poetry issue of the magazine (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,) and hope to officially announce it in these pages by the end of this week.