The Best American Poetry

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. 

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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

 ∞

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.

Pain doesn't hurt. Fear does: an interview with poet Gustavo Barrera Calderón [by Kathleen Heil]

Gustavo Barrera Calderón.

Dear Readers,

As many of us process the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election with anger and sadness, I hope that Gustavo Barrera Calderón's words might be a small source of light and strength. When I read his response for the first time yesterday, I was deeply moved and heartened by the grace and fortitude of this man who spent his entire childhood living under Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship. (His poetry is remarkable, too.)

The text in Spanish is posted below. Thanks for being with me this week. I wish you well--

Yours,

Kathleen 

-----------

Gustavo Barrera Calderón (Santiago de Chile, 1975) has published eight books of poems, and received fellowship support from the Neruda Foundation, among others. I am currently translating his 2010 verse novel, Cuerpo perforado es una casa [Punctured Body Is a Home], which I first encountered while visiting Santiago in 2014, when I was struck by the direct, unadorned beauty of his poems, the way the seemingly straightforward language of Calderón's lines reveal much deeper emotional, familial, and political complexities. Excerpts from his book in my translation have been published in Issue 13 of SAND, and are forthcoming in the Issue 26 of Two Lines. This week we exchanged emails to discuss identity and the process of generating poetic material.

KH: You've mentioned to me before that, while working with Gabriela Mistral's manuscripts in the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, you came across many letters from the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz to Gabriela, which always began with “Cara Poetisa,” “Dear Poetess.” Although the poems in Punctured Body stand on their own, the book reads as a verse novel as well, since the arc of what's recounted is as important as the individual poems. There's also an epistolary quality to the book, written as it is in conversation with Dulce María's Jardín, that lends it an intimate, tender tone, as though the reader were listening in on a private exchange. You even lifted a handful of lines from her book as a way structuring your own. Could you tell us a bit more about how Punctured Body […] grew out of your engagement with Dulce María's voice, and how you arrived at the poetic voice of your book? 

GBC: As you say, I became familiar with Dulce María’s work thanks to her letters to Gabriela Mistral. I found the formalities and way in which she began her correspondence amusing: ‘Cara poetisa’ is already a dated expression, the word cara having been supplanted by querida or ‘estimada’; and ‘poetisa’—in Chile, at least—fell out of use at the request of female poets in the 1980s, who considered it a pejorative term. They felt that the word ‘poeta,’ ‘poet,’ should apply equally to both men and women, because language—especially in Spanish, which assigns all nouns a gender—is where discrimination and omissions originate (collective plurals in Spanish are all masculine—for example the word ‘children,’ ‘niños,’ refers to both niños and niñas). In my writing, I look to neutral forms, as I’m interested in having the text remain situated in an ambiguous, indeterminate territory that allows for multiple meanings. This is also my approach to literary genres: my poetry traverses the narrative and my prose the lyric, in many of my texts characters appear and begin to speak, and there are even descriptions of dramatic scenes; it could be called, perhaps, a literary trans-genre.

Returning to the connection with Dulce María Loynaz, I was stunned by her novel Jardín (Garden) and her poem “Últimos días de una casa” (“A home’s last days”). I’ve always been interested in the relationship between bodies and spaces, of lives lived in spaces, and earned a degree in architecture motivated by this interest. In both texts by Loynaz, the passing of time and the spatial dimensions of a crumbling, dilapidated historic building left me with a kind of epiphany about the echoes or resonances that I had with my own experience, especially with my childhood. The first house I lived in, until I was nine years old, was a palatial neoclassical building with marble floors located right in the middle of El Golf district, which was one of the most expensive districts in Santiago and next to a golf club. The house was only about three hundred meters from Augusto Pinochet’s home, and a few years earlier it had been the ambassador to the Soviet Union’s residence. When the military coup happened, the house was under the protection of the Indian Embassy, and my grandmother, who was close to the Russians—although they never gave me a clear explanation as to why—wound up in charge of the building's care. We were a big family, my mother, my aunt, my great-grandmother, all of us lived there, but the house was so vast that it was very difficult to come across anyone. The building was rundown but still beautiful. The first floor was empty and there were two rooms underground, part of a bunker that the Russians had left half-built. The people in the neighborhood hated us, to them we were Communists, weirdos, an affliction. I was the only child in the house, and playtime consisted of exploring these spaces: discovering objects left behind by former inhabitants, observing plants, insects, animals, mirrors, images, and scenes on TV, as well as the rain and the way the sun came in through the windowpanes.

The writing of Punctured Body is a Home happened over three days, in a flood of images that I wanted to get down simply to show myself what I'd observed, heard, and dreamt during my childhood years; to make it evident. Without issuing any judgement or commentary from my present situation or mental condition, I wanted to convey the same sense of surprise I felt when confronting these phenomena in their original state. The only subsequent intervention came precisely from the reading of Jardín unlocking this flood of images. For me, writing is always a dialogue; in this case, the dialogue became more explicit by incorporating traces of the text that acted as a catalyst for this process. 

KH: Given that you're still at the National Library, I'm curious to know more about the work you do there, and whether it informs your current writing process. What are your projects at the moment, poetic or otherwise?

GBC: I’m currently working in the Writer’s Archives, which is a section of the National Library where they keep literary manuscripts, letters, and photographs of Chilean writers—Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, among them. Oftentimes, I’ll find multiple versions of the same poem, narrative or dramatic texts with marginalia, erasures, and edits, as though the texts were still in the process of being created, or letters that refer to the past in the present tense, every day is like a small trip through time. I find it hard to make sense of the contrast when I leave the National Library’s historic building, which I imagine as a kind of boat washed up on the shore of space and time, which doesn’t have any windows facing the street, only beams of indirect light and days that all seem to run together. Right now I’m working on a dramatic anthology of Joaquín Edwards Bello’s work based on his unpublished writings, many of them unfinished, written on slips of paper, and in some of the plays entire scenes are missing. My work feels like that of a pattern-cutter and seamstress. Edwards Bello is a writer I admire, primarily because he was an terrific reporter. He also wrote novels full of autobiographical elements that were fiercely critical of Chilean society, but that were, at the same time, light and funny. Besides that, I’m working on a book of poems entitled  “La familia chilena es peligrosa” (“Chilean families are dangerous”), which investigates the peculiar nature of these interpersonal dynamics that I’ve lived so intensely. Unlike in other parts of the world, where each person is guided by his or her own interests and affinities, in Chile, whether out of economic necessity or because of something deeply culturally ingrained, families never separate, children never truly leave their parents’ homes, and grandparents, uncles, cousins, all sorts of relatives are deeply bound to each other physically and sociologically, which can result in unimaginable pathologies stemming from a fear of ‘what will people say,’ a fear of poverty, loneliness, or of sexual repression due to religious fears or superstitions. The impulse to write these texts arose two years ago, coinciding with the death of various people close to me: my grandmother, my grandfather, my cousin (who was like a sister to me), and two poet friends of my generation. These deaths all happened in the span of one month and in each instance, their respective families were involved or, from my point of view, they hastened these outcomes.

KH: This is a fraught question, but I'd like to know how you view identity in relationship to your work—in part because I have conflicted feelings about this topic myself. As a woman born and raised in New Orleans, I'm wary of labels such as “Southern Author” or “Woman Writer,” which can carry connotations of condescending reductionism when used within traditional power structures, as though writers marked by such labels haven't earned the right to simply be called a “writers,” full stop. In the U.S., Knausgård and Ferrante notwithstanding, books in translation are often treated similarly, as pet projects for special audiences, marked by their 'difference.' As such, part (most?) of me wants to resist such categorical distinctions and let texts, in all their complexity, speak for themselves. At the same time, my gender and geography (and ethnicity and class, for that matter) inform the place from which I write, and I certainly don't want to deny or gloss this over. Especially since, politically speaking, marking 'difference' allows us to recognize historically marginalized voices, and have conversations about the conditions precipitating their marginalization. Garth Greenwell, in embracing the label "gay writer," speaks beautifully to this (and oh how I adored his novel What Belongs to You).

Maybe it's a matter of shifting the framework, of inviting readers to see the different/universal as a false dichotomy. I wonder if the last lines of your book, addressed as they are to Dulce María, offer a possible response: “Distinguida poetisa: / Cuando yo muera, ¿usted y yo seremos una misma cosa?” “Esteemed poetess: / When I die, will you and I be one and the same?”

I've been thinking about this, too, in light of what you told me recently about your friend, the Cuban journalist Álvaro Álvarez, who is a nephew of Dulce María Loynaz and lives in Chile. Álvaro’s nephew, who is also related to Dulce María, died tragically earlier this year at only eighteen years of age in the Orlando nightclub shooting. Clearly, these issues aren't abstractions, since people who promote hatred and violence in the world based on ideological notions of 'difference' obligate us to contend with these ideas independent of how we view ourselves. All of which is to say: as a queer Chilean writer who came of age under Pinochet's dictatorship, how do you feel about labels that mark you by your nationality, sexuality, or otherwise? Do you embrace them? Resist them? Both?

GBC: It’s a difficult question; I believe that our objective as a culture is to try to move beyond labels of ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation, but I don’t think that we can arrive at that point without first making difference, and the injustice and violence that’s been perpetrated in the name of difference, visible. In Chile I think things have changed considerably in recent years. No one spoke of homosexuality during or before Pinochet’s dictatorship: for the conservative and Catholic right is was a mortal sin, and for the supposedly-revolutionary left, there was no thought given to the subject. The Left circumscribed things same as the right, though the justification was different: homosexuality was called one of many perversions of man created by the corrupting influence of capitalism. My entire childhood was spent under Pinochet’s regime; I thought he was in charge of everything: the mountains, the cities, and people. I received a military education. At school we had to line up before going to class and sing the national anthem, and it was considered more important to have your hair properly cut and shoes properly shined than it was to know about math or literature. In Spanish, which is now called Language and Communication, we had to memorize the maritime, aeronautic, police, and military hymns. Men were expected to act and look masculine and women to act and look feminine in accordance with strict codes. It was said that the way to get a fag to stop being a fag was to beat it out of him—and, if that didn’t work, to beat him to death; and that for trees born crooked you had to fix them while they were small. This was accepted at every level of society, by all adults, and teachers allowed this corrective violence to happen without stepping in to stop it. I was constantly attacked; to the point, I think, of discovering that I had a very high tolerance for pain, and that's when I stopped being afraid. I discovered, with my own body, that pain doesn’t hurt. Fear does. I think this realization came to many people who were marginalized in Chile—to women, to the indigenous peoples, and to the poor, because Chilean society is extremely classist. Repeated assault and injury only served to make us stronger. Those who didn’t die or go mad were left with a kind of armor, in possession of a strength that many people don’t have; it created a paradox of sorts: those of us who were discriminated against for being the weakest and for having delicate tastes became the strongest. Our strength lies precisely in having formed a solid identity and concept of being and belonging, which in contemporary culture is becoming increasingly widespread.

In my earliest books of poems I didn’t work from a place of gender identity because I was interested in other topics: death, mass media, spatiality and the human condition as it unfolds over space and time; how common it seems and how surprising it actually is. It was only when I wrote about love, eroticism, or my personal experience that my label appeared, imposed by others, of being a gay poet; before, I didn’t have it. I believe that art, poetry included, is a space of freedom and exploration, not a field for political battles or social recognition; these are matters that don’t exist outside of poetic creation, but aren’t its final aim. 

I believe that strength, which is something worthy of striving toward, should never become hardness. It makes no sense to respond to violence with hardness, stones, or bitterness, because if we do we convert ourselves into weapons and nothing more. The key, I think, is to never lose our capacity for tenderness, for affection, delicacy, and laughter; all of our soft parts, which aren’t synonymous with weakness, but rather are human traits necessary for understanding others, for being able to communicate deeply and meaningfully, and, as in the poem you mentioned, for realizing that we already are and always have been one and the same.

Thinking about the case of my friend Álvaro and his nephew Alejandro (the one who died in the Orlando attacks), I was moved by the way in which Álvaro, for an entire week, posted different family photos of the two of them together on Facebook—singing, celebrating someone’s birthday, laughing, dancing at party, kissing a friend on the cheek—and his words made reference to conversations, trips, jokes, and meals that they’d enjoyed together. There wasn’t a single word devoted to hatred, fear, or death.

Interview responses translated from the Spanish by Kathleen Heil

El dolor no duele, el miedo sí: una entrevista con el poeta Gustavo Barrera Calderón [por Kathleen Heil]

Gustavo Barrera Calderón (Santiago de Chile, 1975) ha publicado ocho libros de poemas y ha recibido el apoyo de becas de la Fundación Neruda, entre otras. Actualmente traduzco su novela en verso Cuerpo perforado es una casa, que encontré por primera vez durante una visita a Santiago en 2014 y me sacudió por la belleza de su lenguaje directo, sin adornos; por la forma en que el lenguaje aparentemente sencillo de Calderón revela complejidades emocionales, familiares y políticas muy profundas. Extractos de su libro traducidos por mí han sido publicados en el número 13 de SAND, y serán publicados en breve en el Número 26 de Two Lines. Hemos intercambiado mensajes de correo electrónico para discutir los procesos de identidad y la generación de material poético.

KH: Me has comentado que, mientras trabajabas con los manuscritos de Gabriela Mistral en la Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, encontraste muchas cartas de la poeta cubana Dulce María Loynaz a Gabriela, y que éstas comenzaban siempre con la frase Cara Poetisa. Aunque los poemas en Cuerpo perforado es una casa funcionan por cuenta propia, el libro se lee a la vez como una novela en verso, ya que la trayectoria de lo que se relata es igual de importante que los poemas en sí. El libro tiene también un timbre epistolario que le da un tono íntimo y tierno, como si la lectora escuchase un intercambio de palabras privadas, dado que el texto dialoga con el Jardín de Dulce María. Tomaste incluso un par de frases de su libro para configurar el tuyo. ¿Podrías hablarnos un poco más sobre cómo Cuerpo Perforado es una casa nació de tu fascinación con la voz de Dulce María, y cómo llegaste a desarrollar la voz lírica de tu libro?

GBC: Como bien dices, mi encuentro con la obra de Dulce María ocurrió gracias a las cartas escritas a Gabriela Mistral. Me resultaba gracioso en un comienzo el modo y las formalidades de su correspondencia, Cara poetisa es una expresión ya en desuso, cara, fue reemplazado por querida o estimada, y poetisa, al menos en Chile, se eliminó como término a pedido de las poetas de la década de 1980, que consideraron peyorativo el uso de la palabra poetisa. Consideraban que poeta se debía aplicar tanto a hombres como a mujeres sin distinción, porque el lenguaje, en especial el español, que atribuye género a todos los sustantivos, es donde se origina la discriminación y las omisiones (los términos plurales en español son todos masculinos, por ejemplo al decir los niños, estás queriendo decir los niños y las niñas). En mi escritura recurro a formas neutrales, me interesa que el texto se mantenga en un territorio ambiguo, indeterminado, que admita más de un significado. Eso también me ocurre con los géneros literarios, mi poesía transita hacia lo narrativo y mi prosa es lírica, en muchos textos intervienen personajes que dialogan y hay descripciones de escenas propias del teatro, es algo que podría llamarse transgénero literario.

Volviendo a la relación con Dulce María Loynaz, me sorprendió la novela Jardín y el poema Últimos días de una casa. Siempre me ha interesado la relación de los cuerpos con el espacio, de las vidas en el espacio. Estudié arquitectura guiado por este interés. En ambos textos, el paso del tiempo, el espacio de una casa antigua en deterioro y ruina, me dejó una suerte de revelación sobre de los ecos o resonancias que tenía con mi propia experiencia, en especial con mi infancia. La primera casa donde viví hasta los nueve años, era una casona neoclásica con pisos de mármol en medio del barrio El Golf, que en Santiago era uno de los barrios más caros junto al club de golf. Estaba situada a unos trescientos metros de la casa de Augusto Pinochet, y pocos años atrás había sido la casa del embajador de la Unión Soviética. Cuando ocurrió el golpe militar, la casa quedó bajo la protección de la Embajada de la India, y mi abuela, que era cercana a los rusos, nunca me dieron una explicación clara del porqué, quedó encargada de cuidarla. Éramos una familia numerosa, mi madre, mi tía, mi bisabuela, todos vivíamos ahí, pero la casa era tan grande que era muy difícil encontrarse con alguien. La casa estaba deteriorada pero seguía hermosa. El primer piso estaba vacío, había dos subterráneos, eran parte de un búnker que los rusos habían dejado a medio construir. En el barrio nos odiaban, éramos para ellos los comunistas, los extraños, la lacra. Yo era el único niño de la casa y mis juegos consistían en recorrer estos espacios, encontrando objetos dejados por los antiguos habitantes, observando las plantas, los insectos, los animales, los espejos, las imágenes y diálogos de la televisión, la lluvia o la forma en que el sol llegaba por las ventanas. 

La escritura de Cuerpo perforado es una casa, fue un proceso de tres días, un flujo de imágenes quise remitirme sólo a mostrar lo que observé, lo que oí o lo que soñé en esos años de infancia, a mostrar. Sin emitir ningún juicio o comentario desde mi situación o estado mental presente, quise transmitir la misma sorpresa que experimenté ante los fenómenos en su estado original. La única intervención posterior, proviene precisamente de la lectura de Jardín que desencadenó este flujo. Para mí la escritura es siempre un diálogo, en este caso el diálogo se hizo más explícito al dejar registradas las huellas que dieron origen al proceso.

KH: Dado que estás aún en la Biblioteca Nacional, tengo curiosidad por saber más sobre el trabajo que haces ahí, y si éste alimenta tu escritura actual. ¿Cuáles proyectos, poéticos u otros, tienes en ese momento?

GBC: En este momento trabajo en el Archivo del escritor, que es una sección dentro de la Biblioteca Nacional donde se conservan manuscritos literarios, correspondencia y fotografías de escritores chilenos, entre ellos de Gabriela Mistral y Pablo Neruda. Muchas veces encuentro diferentes versiones de poemas, textos narrativos o dramáticos con anotaciones, borrones y correcciones, como si estuvieran aún en proceso de creación, o encuentro cartas que remiten al pasado como un tiempo presente, cada día es como un pequeño viaje en el tiempo, me cuesta asimilar el contraste al salir del antiguo edificio de la Biblioteca Nacional, que imagino como una especie de barco que encalló en el tiempo y en el espacio, que no tiene ventanas hacia la calle, sólo entradas de luz indirecta y los días parecieran ser siempre el mismo. En este momento estoy trabajando en una antología de teatro de Joaquín Edwards Bello a partir de textos inéditos, muchos de ellos inconclusos, escritos en papeles sueltos, en algunas obras de teatro faltan escenas completa. Siento que hago una labor de corte y costura. Edwards Bello es un escritor que admiro, en primer lugar porque fue un cronista excepcional, y escribió novelas cargadas de elementos y claves autobiográficas, muy críticas de la realidad social chilena, pero al mismo tiempo, ligeras y graciosas. Por otro lado, estoy trabajando en un libro de poesía que lleva el título “La familia chilena es peligrosa”, y que indaga en esta particularidad de las relaciones humanas que vivo muy de cerca. A diferencia de lo que ocurre en otras partes del mundo, donde cada uno se guía por sus propios intereses y afinidades, en Chile, ya sea por problemas económicos o por algo muy arraigado en la cultura, las familias nunca se separan, los hijos nunca se van del todo de las casas de sus padres, están muy presentes los abuelos, los tíos, primos, y toda clase de parientes, en una cercanía física y sicológica que puede terminar en patologías inimaginables producto del miedo al qué dirán, del miedo a la pobreza, a la soledad, de la represión de la sexualidad por temores religiosos o supersticiones. Mi motivación para escribir estos textos surgió hace dos años, en que coincidieron las muertes de varias personas cercanas, mi abuela, mi abuelo, mi prima, que fue como mi hermana, y dos poetas amigos de mi generación. Estas muertes ocurrieron en el plazo de un mes y en cada una de ellas, las respectivas familias estuvieron involucradas o, según mi punto de vista, precipitaron estos desenlaces.

KH: Esta es una pregunta complicada, pero me gustaría saber cómo concibes la identidad en relación con tu trabajo artístico, en parte porque, para mí, este es un tema aún resuelto. Es verdad que soy una mujer de Nueva Orleans, pero no me fío mucho de etiquetas como “Southern Author” o “Woman Writer,” ya que están cargadas muchas veces de un tono simplista y condescendiente cuando son utilizadas dentro de estructuras de poder tradicionales, como si las escritoras nombradas por esas etiquetas no tuvieran el derecho a ser llamadas “Writers” y punto. De forma similar, en los EE.UU., a excepción de Knausgård y Ferrante, los libros en traducción suelen ser tratados como si fueran proyectitos para un público especial, destacados por ser “distintos”. Por eso, una parte (¿casi toda?) de mí ser quiere oponerse a esas distinciones categóricas y dejar que los textos hablen por sí mismos, en su plena complejidad. Pero quisiera reconocer también que mi género y mi geografía (e, igualmente, mi identidad étnica y clase social) indican el lugar desde el que escribo; sobre todo porque, a nivel político, nombrar una “distinción” nos permite reconocer voces y personas que habían sido marginadas por la historia y tener un discurso sobre las condiciones que precipitan su marginación. Garth Greenwell, al nombrarse a sí mismo un “gay writer”, habla de una forma elocuente sobre el tema (¡y cuánto me encantó su novela What Belongs to You!).

A lo mejor es una cuestión de cambiar el esquema, de invitar a los lectores a concebir lo distinto/lo universal como una falsa dicotomía. Igual me pregunto si las últimas lineas de tu libro, destinadas como son a Dulce María, ofrecen un tipo de respuesta: “Distinguida poetisa: / Cuando yo muera, ¿usted y yo seremos una misma cosa?”

He estado pensado en esto, también, en relación a lo que me dijiste hace poco sobre tu amigo, el periodista cubano Álvaro Álvarez, que es sobrino de Dulce María y vive en Chile. El sobrino de Álvaro, también emparentado con Dulce María Loynaz, con tan solo 18 años falleció trágicamente en la masacre de Orlando de este año. Queda claro que estos temas no son abstractos, dado que la gente que difunde el odio y la violencia en el mundo por conceptos ideológicos de lo “distinto” nos obliga a enfrentar esas ideas a pesar de cómo nos veamos a nosotros mismos. En fin: como escritor chileno gay que creció bajo la dictadura de Pinochet, ¿cómo te sientes acerca de las etiquetas que te señalan por tu nacionalidad, tu sexualidad u otro aspecto? ¿Las acoges? ¿Las rechazas? ¿Ambos?

GBC: Es una difícil pregunta, creo que el objetivo que tenemos como cultura es poder sacarnos las etiquetas de etnia, estrato social u orientación sexual, pero no creo que se pueda llegar a esa etapa sin antes visibilizar las diferencias y la injusticia o la violencia que se ha perpetrado en nombre de esas diferencias. En Chile creo que hubo un cambio considerable en los últimos años. Ni durante la dictadura ni antes de la dictadura de Pinochet se hablaba siquiera sobre la homosexualidad, para la derecha conservadora y católica era un pecado mortal, y para la izquierda, supuestamente revolucionaria, no había ninguna reflexión en torno al tema. Mantenía los mismos parámetros de la derecha, pero los explicaba de otra manera: se decía que la homosexualidad era una de las tantas perversiones del hombre creadas por la corrupción del capitalismo. Yo viví toda mi infancia bajo el régimen de Pinochet, creía que él era el dueño de todo, de las montañas, de las ciudades y de las personas. Recibí una educación militarizada. En el colegio debíamos formarnos antes de entrar a clases, cantar la canción nacional, y era mucho más importante tener el cabello muy corto y los zapatos lustrados, que saber de matemáticas o de literatura. En las clases de castellano, que ahora se llama lenguaje y comunicación, debíamos memorizar los himnos de la marina, de la fuerza aérea, de carabineros y del ejército. Se exigía a los hombres verse y comportarse masculinos y a las mujeres femeninas, obedeciendo códigos estrictos. La manera, según se decía, en que a un maricón se le quitara lo maricón era pegándole y si no se le quitaba, se le pegaba hasta la muerte, y que a los árboles que nacían torcidos había que corregirlos cuando eran chicos. Eso era algo aceptado por todos los grupos sociales, los adultos, los profesores permitían esta violencia correctiva, sin intervenir frente a las agresiones. Yo era agredido constantemente, hasta que creo que descubrí que tenía una tolerancia muy alta al dolor y dejé de temer. Descubrí con mi propio cuerpo que el dolor no duele, el miedo sí. Creo que esta toma de conciencia ocurrió a muchas personas que eran marginadas en Chile, a las mujeres, a los indígenas y a los pobres, porque la sociedad chilena es en extremo clasista. Con las agresiones y daños reiterados sólo consiguieron hacernos más fuertes. Los que no murieron ni enloquecieron, quedaron blindados, dueños de una fortaleza que muchos no tienen, se creó una paradoja, los que éramos discriminados por ser más débiles y por tener gustos delicados nos convertimos en los más fuertes y nuestra fortaleza reside precisamente en haber conformado una identidad sólida y un concepto de ser o de pertenecer, que en la sociedad contemporánea está cada vez más difusa.

En mis primeros libros de poesía no había un trabajo a partir de la conciencia de género, porque abordaba otros temas, la muerte, los medios masivos de comunicación, o el espacio, la condición humana desenvuelta en el espacio y el tiempo, lo corriente que parece y lo sorprendente que eso es en realidad. Sólo cuando me escribí sobre el amor, sobre el erotismo o sobre mi experiencia personal, apareció mi etiqueta, impuesta por otros, de poeta gay, antes no la tenía. Creo que el arte, y la poesía como parte de él, es un espacio de libertad y de exploración, no un campo de batallas políticas o reivindicaciones sociales, asuntos que no quedan fuera de la creación poética, pero no son su fin.

Creo que la fuerza, que es algo valioso que conseguimos, no debe convertirse en dureza. No tiene sentido responder a la violencia con dureza, con piedras, con aspereza porque así nos convertimos en armas y sólo en eso, creo que la clave es no perder la ternura, el afecto, la delicadeza o la risa, o todas nuestras partes blandas, que no son sinónimos de debilidad, sino rasgos humanos necesarios para comprender a los otros, para poder comunicarnos en profundidad, y como en el poema que mencionaste, darnos cuenta que ya somos y siempre hemos sido una misma cosa. 

Pensando en el caso de mi amigo Álvaro y su sobrino Alejandro (que que murió en el atentado en Orlando), me emocionó la manera en que él, durante una semana, subió a facebook diferentes fotografías familiares junto a su sobrino, mientras cantaban, mientras celebraban un cumpleaños, riendo, bailando en medio de una fiesta, dando un beso a una amiga, y sus palabras hacían referencias a conversaciones, a viajes, a chistes, a comidas que disfrutaron juntos, no hubo una sola palabra dedicada al odio, al temor o a la muerte.

Preguntas y texto de introducción traducidos del inglés por Kathleen Heil y Denise Nader

Seeking the Feet, part 1 [by Kathleen Heil]

Warhol & an unidentified breakdancer in his Factory, early 1980s. Photo: Paige Powell

 

The connections between painting and poetry have long been explored—Ut pictura poesis and all that good stuff—yet it seems to me that the closest cousin to poetry is not painting or music but dancing. Utilizing breath, syncopation, and space (as a field through which to carve the articulation of language, whether with words or with the body), dance and poetry move to keep things whole. Zadie Smith gets it; exploring the compositional relationship between writing and dance is a rich but neglected realm.

So what I'd like to do this week is investigate and celebrate the possibilities inherent in collapsing the false Cartesian distinction between the writing mind and the dancing body. Part of my interest in collapsing these distinctions lies in the fact that, though I have been both dancing and writing since childhood, the mechanisms by which I create in either context still feel all too compartmentalized in my own body. I don't necessarily feel present in my dancing body when I write, and I am usually trying to get out of my own meta-cognitions when I am composing in a dance space. So, in the past few years, I've been “seeking the feet” in my artistic work, to borrow a phrase from the twentieth-century poet and dancer Mark Turbyfill; I'm trying to get grounded, to let the nervous system, bones and muscle tissue, the head and heart work in concert with each other, to avoid prioritizing the imperatives of one aspect of the creative body over another. Maybe it's a matter of opening ourselves up, of trusting that, in the moment of composition, our faculties will be present in the way we need them to be—that, in seeking the feet, we can become more connected to what's within and without. Naturally, it's also a matter of just showing up to do the work, even when it doesn't work. On Sunday I attended an evening of three instant composition pieces here in Berlin. Two worked, one didn't. The relative success of each piece didn't have anything to do with the movement vocabulary used, it had to do with “being inside time,” as Berlin-based movement researcher Jan Burkhardt says. Of course, failure is as instructive as success, and in watching the two dancers and one musician improvise outside of time, fussily moving about the space in an attempt to be interesting, in the guise of personas removed from their personhood, I began to understand all that had gone wrong with my approach to a novel manuscript I worked on for several years: there we were, performing toward our idea of an idea, end-gaining, imposing rather than composing, our ambitions impeding the possibility of being present. We needed to stop describing what we wanted the moment to look like and embody it instead, to be brave and risk vulnerability, to be humble and allow what needed to happen to happen.

In recent years, I've also been engaged in the practice of literary translation, and so am especially curious about what it means to 'translate' modalities of movement into poetic contexts, and vice-versa. Just as a word-for-word rendering of an Italian phrase in English is a way of describing but not translating the phrase, to use poetry to describe dance seems to me to miss the point, or just graze it. As with successful translations, effective ekphrastic dance poems, capture, in my view, the essence of a dancer or dance by embodying structures and qualities of movement in language particular to the demands of the poem itself, rendering an equivalent effect rather than an observational gloss. If that sounds exceedingly abstract, fear not: I will follow with some favorite examples in subsequent posts.

But for now, here's a delightful example of ekphrasis flipped backwards: an excerpt from Nederlands Dans Theater's 2003 piece “Shutters Shut,” by resident choreographers Sol León and Paul Lightfoot, set to Gertrude Stein's 1923 recording of her poem “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” Jerry Hochman writes rather beautifully on the expansive nature of this choreographic translation in a review of NDT2's performance at the Joyce in New York last year. I also love what NDT2 dancer Spencer Dickhaus says about “being the track” when performing the piece (a variation on “being inside time,” perhaps?) in this interview from Jacob's Pillow (min 1:50 to min 3:55).

What other propositions can dance offer to enrich poetic language, and poetry the vocabulary of dance? Dear Reader, I invite you to comment: I'm curious to know your thoughts on this, your favorite ekphrastic dance poems, and/or your own examples of poetry translated into choreographic contexts. In Parts 2 and 3 of “Seeking the Feet,” I'll share with you some poems that distill, in my moving mind, essential aspects of dancers and dance.

"sweet home lambs": an interview with translator Jake Schneider [by Kathleen Heil]

Jake Schneider is a Berlin-based editor and translator from the German, born in 1988 in New Jersey. The incoming Editor-in-Chief of SAND, Berlin's English-language literary journal, his literary translations have appeared in Circumference, Washington Square, and the Massachusetts, Chicago, and Boston Reviews, among others. I recently exchanged emails with Jake over his forthcoming first book, Fragmented Waters, translations from the German of poems by Ron Winkler. Winkler, the author of four collections of poetry, has had his poems translated into twenty languages, and has also translated from the English books by poets such as Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Forrest Gander, and Sarah Manguso, among others.

KH: You worked on the poems in this book over the course of a decade, starting as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College, and are still, to date, the youngest translator to ever receive an NEA Translation Fellowship, at the ripe young age of 23. Now that you're the ripe young age of 28, can you tell us what was it like to cut your teeth on translation so early? Has your voice as a translator of Winkler's work changed in the intervening years?

JS: I always credit the poet Jeffrey McDaniel, whose work Ron has long been translating into German. At eighteen, I was sitting in his office at Sarah Lawrence, trying to convince him to let me into his workshop, and during our conversation I mentioned that I spoke German. He pulled out a copy of Ron’s first book, and asked me to tell him about the first poem, curious about his translator’s own work. I was baffled by it, but I took the book home and gave it a shot. I’ve been translating Ron’s poems, on and off, ever since.

I think maturing as a translator means seeing the text in larger and larger units. As a novice who had spent all of a month in a German-speaking country, I was too preoccupied with Ron’s chemically synthesized neologisms and compounds (which I couldn’t find in any dictionary) to capture the flow of the lines. After moving to Berlin and listening to German in its own habitat, I began to understand better how Ron plays with the conventions of conversation and the absurdity lurking in ordinary stock phrases, both now and in the vanished East Germany of his childhood. He merges a memorized punctuation rule with a Cold War imperative—“a comma / always belongs between subordinate countries”—and, fast-forward to the age of CD-Rs, he sets fire to friendly music-sharing in a poem about the forest: “I can burn it for you, no problem.”

KH: In your translator's note, you explain that words in Winkler's poems often serve as double agents, “animalating” their environments, as in “animalated poem,” with multiple meanings: meteorological, morphological, metaphor-ological; the poems are rich with weather, flora and fauna that transmute on the noun-edge: “Lake Nonsense,” “birdbrackets,” “goose prairies,” and the “liquigevity of fish” for example. Can you tell us a bit about the process of arriving at these inspired metaphor-ological choices?

JS: All the inventions you mention are his. The fun part about translating the work of someone not handcuffed to the dictionary is that I get to coin words in my own language. The hard part is finding new coinages that “work” or subjectively “sound good.”

Feuchtlebigkeit is a good example of the stackability of German’s Lego blocks.Feuchtlebig literally means wet-lived, analogous to long-lived. Since Greek and Latin roots are easier to work with in English, I went for “liquigevity,” like longevity, as the noun form.

“Goose prairies,” a play on goosebumps, is a funny one. For obvious reasons, I decided against the more direct translation citing an Old-World landscape, which would have been “goose steppes.”

“Birdbrackets” is pretty one-to-one. I try to make music when I can because the original is musical and sometimes the English equivalents aren’t. Also, every line in Ron’s poem ends in a compound of some kind, so I tried to follow suit, even if English nouns usually demand more personal space.

KH: As a follow-up, what were your priorities as a translator/poet “animalating” the English-language landscape of these poems? Did these priorities stem from features particular to the syntactic structure of the German language, which is much more flexible than standard English in allowing modular constructions of complicated noun composites, as much as they did from Winkler's style and tone?

JS: My goal was to keep the poems startling without making the Anglophone reader feel like an outsider to an inside joke. That said, I don’t think any native German-speaker would pick up on every last allusion or know which words Ron’s punning on every time. I wanted to make the game internal to English rather than domesticating the wildness and adventure out of a worldly body of work.

The collection does treat language very differently from contemporary American poetry, which has its own set of interests and influences. The greater “fertility” of German words no doubt plays a part, but Ron is also exploring different stylistic questions and responding to different predecessors. I need to be careful not to let my own aesthetic background skew his voice.

KH: Winkler is an avid translator of poetry from the English. As such, I'm curious as to his involvement in your process of writing the English-language versions of the poems—did he give you free rein to make the choices you thought necessary to best embody the English versions of his poems? Or was the process more collaborative and interactive?

JS: Ron was involved with the translations the whole time, from answering early questions to checking the proofs, and I couldn’t imagine translating his poems without him. He always has expansive explanations for the smallest choice, and I’ve been very privileged to have so much input but also so much trust, which he offers all his translators who approach him. By the way, it was great to meet his Mexican translator last year, Daniel Bencomo, and discuss our shared experiences and trials. In fact, I even borrowed one solution from the Spanish version.

KH: I also loved the translation-ary telephone, the literal carrying across of language, that happens in the poem “the extent of deer,” which Winkler wrote in German after reading an earlier version of your English translation of his “deer meter.” To that end, “the extent of deer,” in the English, then, is a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation (if I've counted right [if I counted, would he like it, would he like it, if I counted]), as though the final lines of each poem/translation articulate an ars poetica for poetry in translation:

In “deer meter”their decelerated evolution gave us time. / so we abandoned them to radial decay and calmly went / back to our apartment products.”

and then, in “the extent of deer”: “their evolution was approaching the limit: to our / advantage, so we reverse-engineered them and headed home / to sleeker things

For example, in the first poem, the line “(→Schrödinger flickering).” flickers forward into “(=Schrödinger flare).” If observation renders translation (and language, for that matter) unstable, how does it feel to look back on your own translations? Do they shape-shift beneath your gaze? Or do that they feel finished, abandoned to radial decay?

JS: By now, after working on and editing them over a span of ten years, they feel finished. I read the final proof in one sitting without wincing. But a few times along the way, while I was looking for a publisher and focusing on other projects, I’d pull out the manuscript and despair that I needed to start over from scratch.

I do wish I could find that first English version of “deer meter,” which was one of the first poems I ever translated at 18. At the time, I was embarrassed about Ron’s amusement at my amateurish rendering. Now I’m pleased to have played a small role in the original collection.

KH: You're also getting ready to take over as Editor-in-Chief of SAND, Berlin's English-language literary journal, after serving as Poetry Editor for the past two issues. As Issue 14 launches this Friday with a party and readings by Lizzie Roberts, Lucy Jones, and Inger Wold Lund, what are your ambitions for upcoming issues of SAND, and what role do you see the journal playing in Berlin's literary scene?

JS: After six years, SAND is becoming a local fixture, like one of those rare Berlin expats who decides to make their life here. As a translator, I’m especially keen to bring in a variety of global voices. In the last two issues, we’ve published writing and art from five continents, including several translations, and I want to keep cultivating connections in some of these places. But we always print work by Berliners, who are themselves a very international bunch.

Apart from those all-night issue launches, I’d love to branch out to more types of events and collaborations. Our outgoing Editor-in-Chief Lyz Pfister has a cookbook coming out, and it would be fun to do something bringing together literature and food. I once organized an event called “Untranslatable,” a kind of round robin of impossible literary imports, and I’m always hoping to find time to do a sequel someday. Really, we all have dream projects in the back of our heads, so we’d like to make as many of them happen as we can.

KH: In a moment of serendipitous synchronicity, I sat down to write you these questions next to a letter that had just arrived from a friend, the artist Hilla Steinert, with this written across the envelope: “Ich stoße auf Spuren von Rehhufen im Schnee. / Sprache, aber keine Wörter” (“I come upon traces of deer hooves in the snow. / Language, but no words”). And so, to close: what's with the many deer populating the poems in Fragmented Waters. Are they a recurrent motif in Winkler's work? Or does he just like deer? Do you?

JS: Deer are just implausible creatures living in a parallel dimension. And don’t get me started on the ridiculousness of antlers. When I first arrived here in the second-largest city in the EU, I discovered a flock of deer living in the park across the street. They were just going about their business like the rest of us. That priceless, caught-off-guard look they pull—wait, do I belong here? do you?—defies translation.

---

Sweet Home Lämmer

du warst dir sicher, die Wahrheit dieser Räume

sei größer als Wolle, ihr über große Distanzen hinweg

gereichtes flauschiges Staksen eine Hoffnung,

übersetzt zu werden: in weniger sauerstoffhaltige Dinge

vielleicht. vielleicht nicht. vielleicht

wären sie gern eine Art Distanz zu sich selbst

(die Tierart Distanz zu sich selbst).

wären sie Kapitalismus, sie könnten alles verkaufen.

nur müsste der Zaun eine andere Ordnung haben.

[From Fragmentierte Gewässer by Ron Winkler. Published by Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2007. © Schöffling & Co. Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Frankfurt am Main]

 

sweet home lambs

you were positive that the truth of these spaces

was greater than wool, that their fluffy wading

spread through great distances was a longing

to be translated: into something less oxygenated

maybe. or maybe not. maybe

they want to be a kind of distance from themselves

(the species distance from themselves).

if they were Capitalism, they could sell everything

only the fence would need to be reorganized.

[From Fragmented Waters by Ron Winkler, translated by Jake Schneider. Shearsman Books, 2016, Bristol]

 

Wu Xia's resistance via softness

Wu Xia works in a clothing factory. She frequently works twelve-hour days or twelve-hour nights. At the age 35, she has been working in various factories for 21 years, or nearly two-thirds of her life. What is striking about Wu Xia, and this comes through clearly in her appearance in the documentary film Iron Moon, is the way she accepts the burdens that poverty and the migrant-worker lifestyle have placed on her and her family, and, simultaneously, how much her poetry resists it.

 

Bowls Wearing Earrings

 

The factory cafeteria is lined with

bowls of different patterns. They’re sent one by one up to the counter,

and perhaps one will vanish. That’s disturbing,

because losing a bowl is like losing one’s soul.

Mama bored holes in the sides of her bowl and of mine

and attached loops of iron wire,

so when we pick them up, they shake and clatter.

When I went to get my food, my coworkers laughed and said the bowl

was wearing earrings. But soon they were copying it.

More and more bowls wearing earring appeared in the cafeteria,

like girls just beginning to dress up.

We all worry about losing our jobs,

but the bowls don’t have to worry about getting lost.

This poem reveals much about the migrant worker lifestyle: the cafeteria lined with anonymous bowls, and the way the workers are also treated as essentially anonymous. How mother and daughter work together in the same factory. How the workers here are female, indicating the kinds of internal segregation in workforces these factories perpetrate. How a utilitarian object, even one as seemingly impersonal as a bowl, becomes akin to a “soul.” How these places are pervaded with the workers’ fears of being fired or laid off, and the omnipresent threat of bosses.

Wu Xia’s poetry is often plainly “feminine” and soft in tone. She writes about flowers and sundresses and earrings and sunshine. But underlying all of this is a powerful articulation and rejection of the kinds of depravations workers face in their jobs and lives. In her poem “Sundress,” she describes pressing, folding, and carefully boxing up a sundress that will be sent to a boutique where “it will wait for only you.” This is the kind of store that Wu Xia herself does not enter; she wears cheap dresses that she buys from street markets.

Rather than focusing on this imparity, or on what she cannot have, Wu focuses instead on what she is giving to the world: “unknown girl / I love you” she writes. Her resistance also comes in the form of a deep generosity toward her fellow citizens. In a discussion with the filmmakers after the screening of Iron Moon in Shanghai, one of the audience members stood up with tears in his eyes and said that of everything in the film, he had been most moved by Wu Xia. “You never see people like that in China anymore,” he said.

Over the past several years, China has been undergoing a kind of spiritual crisis, a reevaluation of its culture, values, and common decency. The freewheeling economic development that has brought millions of people out of poverty has also led to a profound interpersonal impoverishment. The social structures that held villages, towns, cities, and the whole country together have been crumbling. The group to bear the brunt of these rapid changes are the ordinary workers in factories, coalmines, construction sites, paper mills, chemical plants.

Within that context, Wu Xia’s resistance with softness is a strategy that should not be underestimated. There are many forms of fruitful resistance, but some messages that will be ignored if delivered with anger or resentment may be accepted if delivered with a lighter touch, as the man in the movie discussion demonstrated. He’d never thought much about the workers that are everywhere in Shanghai, he told the audience. But now he couldn’t help but pay attention.

Many, many thanks to Stacey and David for giving me the blog floor for a week! It’s always great a pleasure. Please feel free to visit my website at www.eleanorgoodman.com and the kickstarter page of the movie Iron Moon at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/963482307/iron-moon-the-poetry-of-chinese-migrant-workers. The book Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry will be out this coming spring.

The dark fantastical world of the poet Wu Niaoniao [by Eleanor Goodman]

 

In the documentary film Iron Moon, quotes from this poem reoccur three times:

 

Rhapsody on the Advance of Heavy Snow

 

A snow factory in the sky. Mechanical

assembly line angels, stand day and night in the noise and fluorescent lights

numbly producing beautiful snowflakes

the work overload makes them vomit white froth

while the machines thunder all night. The overload

makes them lose control. The oozing snowflakes

crash down ton after ton. Suddenly my country is a swath of white

and the smiles of thirty provinces are pressed into tears,

the borders are crushed, day and night the army does repairs

and between the earth and sky, only the worker’s white heads

are revealed in the blowing snow,

torches and flashlight factories, overtime production

and the temples’ destruction. The backs of the gods are also broken

and their faithful followers have long since decamped.

The graves give away the game. The comfortable ghosts

have been forced back into the human world

hugging their gravestones and coffins, admiring the snow

while the threatened earth leans toward that snow-burdened edge

and slowly slowly slowly slowly starts to tilt

 

In a movie about manual laborers, one can see why this poem speaks directly to the issues at stake. Here, angels are overworked assembly line workers in the great factory of the sky. Snowflakes have enough weight to crush borders and bring ghosts back to earth. The temples are destroyed and only the workers are left out in the cold.

Such is the dark fantastical world of the poet Wu Niaoniao. In Iron Moon, we watch Wu in a seemingly endless and fruitless search for work at a job fair in the industrial zone in Shenzhen. The jobs on offer: forklift driver, coalminer, construction worker (skilled and unskilled), truck driver, assembly line worker, electronics assembler. The job Wu hopes to find: poet.

Here in the US, there aren’t very many jobs for poets: there are highly sought after university positions, editorial positions, and freelance writing gigs—all of those exist in China too, of course. But someone like Wu Niaoniao, who was born in rural Guangzhou and does not have a college degree, those jobs are unavailable to him, irrespective of his talent and interests. No one at the job fair is the least bit interested in his writing.

This is one of the overlooked tragedies of these workers, in China and across the world: the indifference of the economy to their aspirations. Wherever poverty exists, there will be a part of the society that works for a pittance and whose basic desires are ignored or frustrated. Here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the cafeteria workers at Harvard have been on strike for the last several weeks. They earn approximately $22 an hour—a fortune to someone like Wu Niaoniao who might expect to earn the equivalent of a few dollars a day for backbreaking work. But a $22 an hour wage is not a fortune in Cambridge; subtracting out health care, basic food, and housing costs, and you’re looking at barely making ends meet. And at the same time, workers in the US and China alike are forced to abandon any pursuit that doesn’t help them make rent. That is a tremendous amount of talent being wasted.

I don’t have a solution. And I’m not sure poetry should be a vocation rather than a passion and an artistic pursuit. But watching poets like Wu Niaoniao struggle with the most basic requirements of survival, barely able to muster the time and energy to write despite their abilities, I think we as a global community can and should do better.

Tomorrow: The poet Wu Xia’s resistance via softness.

A Product's Story, A Worker's Story [by Eleanor Goodman]

The poet Zheng Xiaoqiong does not herself appear in the documentary film Iron Moon, a movie about worker-poets surviving in contemporary China, but her poetry does. Zheng has worked a die-mold factory, a magnetic tape factory, a toy factory, and as a hole-punch operator in a hardware factory. She is one of the rare cases of a manual worker escaping the factories for a literary job by dint of her talent and luck. Now a magazine editor in Guangzhou, she has become known for her long, sinewy lines—some of her work verges on a prose poetry—and for her blunt descriptions of what it’s like to work in the harsh factory environments of contemporary Shenzhen, especially as a young woman.

 

A Product’s Story

 

First, it starts with a warped piece of iron sheeting, setting off from a village, iron mine, truck,

steamer, or port, then losing one’s name, getting a serial number, and standing at a workstation;

second is springs and assembly lines, the whinny of nervous motion, pain close by, aluminum alloys,

blueprints, breadcrumbs, cutting machines, familiar sweat, plastic and cardboard boxes,

pleasures and sorrows; third is the pale faces under fluorescent lights, employee IDs, mechanical springs,

gears, card edge connectors, pressure coolants, anti-rust oil, silent overtime;

fourth is certificates, standardized forms, exterior polishing, the lashings of a 3000-degree furnace

the cooling heat treatment of overtime pay, of the raindrops, of being fired, your twisted-up

body appearing in an hourglass; fifth is temporary residence permits, physical exam cards, proof of single status,

migrant worker cards, work permits….they wait in line, silently, leaning on

plastic travel bags with exhausted faces; sixth is young pinned-down arms, back pay

and fines, missed periods, a medical history of flus, listlessness, homesickness

as wide as the sea, noise from the overhead lights, drifting in a far city and paystubs floating on a river;

seventh is the dialects of machines and dorms, Hunanese dreams on the berth above Sichuanese,

Hubeinese is neighbors with Anhuinese, the Gansunese machine bit off half

of the Jiangxinese’s finger, Guangxinese’s nightshift, Guizhounese’s gloominess, Yunanese’s rainsoaked

sleep-talk and Henanese’s dress. Eighth is sticks of fried dough, lumps

of instant noodles, the shape of the city in vegetable soup, masks made of copper, coupling links, certificates of conformity,

a buck and half of fried rice noodles, chili sauce, artificially flavored and colored cola;

ninth is love hidden in stories and fairy tales, shared rented rooms, doors

without keys, iron ladders to upper berths, antiseptic fluids in hospitals, birth control pills, the tears of breaking up,

corroded flesh, baseless promises of love; tenth is train tickets to go home, a door

or a pit, a quick-selling ticket or a possible fake, squeezed in the aisles,

in the toilet, standing on tiptoe, crushed, you just want to find a place on the train or in the world

to live, to love, to slowly grow old

 

What strikes me first about this poem is the form: the long lines, the lists, the blocky shape. Then the specificity of the nouns and the physicality of the descriptions. Finally, the unapologetically female (though not necessarily traditionally feminine) voice. The majority of publishing poets in China are male, and that is all the more true for worker-poets. Many explanations have been offered to for why this is, and I’m sure there is some truth to the idea that girls, and especially girls from rural areas, are taught traditional values, among them the virtues of silence and modesty. I’m sure some women may be more sensitive to the oppressions of the factory environment, including prohibitions against speech, and internalize rules that then make it more difficult for them to write. But it is also the case that women poets are less likely to be accepted into poetry circles. Their writing is taken less seriously, published less frequently, and overall given less attention and support than work by their male contemporaries.

And what a shame. For in the work of a skillful poet like Zheng, we discover things that are absent from the work of male poets. The question of “missed periods,” a serious and common health issue in these dangerous, high-pressure work environments, is something I have seen addressed only in women poets’ writing, and for obvious reasons. Similarly, birth control pills are an omnipresent element in women’s lives, especially in the only recently loosened age of the one-child policy. Then there is the attention paid to food that is clearly not homemade, the “baseless promises of love,” the “proof of single status” required by some factories for their female employees. Perhaps surprisingly, there are more women working in factories making goods for export than there are men. Yet their words are still being overlooked and suppressed, both deliberately and as an effect of neglect. I hope the selection of work by women poets such as Zheng Xiaoqiong, Lizi, Shu Zhishui, and Wu Xia (whose work I will discuss on Friday) which I’ve translated in the anthology Iron Moon will bring more of these vital voices to the fore.

Tomorrow: the whimsical and the painful in the poetry of Wu Niaoniao.

The Death of a Poet [by Eleanor Goodman]

The poet Xu Lizhi come to prominence in one of the worst possible ways: he jumped from a high-rise in Shenzhen, ending his life at the age of 24. Before his death, Xu was not well known as a poet; he published very few poems during his lifetime, and he concealed his writing even from his parents because, as he put it, his poetry was dark and he didn’t want them to worry. The documentary film Iron Moon includes amazing footage of the cramped, cheap room Xu was living in when he died; all of his possessions can fit into a few paper bags.

Like Hai Zi and Gu Cheng, both poets of tremendous talent who committed suicide at the ages of 25 and 37 respectively, Xu Lizhi vividly expressed his isolation and desperation in his poetry. What distinguishes Xu is the kind of life he led. Both Hai Zi and Gu Cheng were college-educated and made their livings as intellectuals within a university setting. In contrast, Xu began working in factories immediately after graduating from high school.

Xu Lizhi came to international attention because his death was part of a spate of suicides at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. Foxconn is the world’s largest manufacturer of Apple products, and working on the assembly line there, Xu would have handled devices that ended up here in the United States and across the globe. His descriptions of the life he and his fellow workers endured are remarkable not only for their painful realism, but also for their sheer poetic power.

 

I Speak of Blood

 

I speak of blood, since it can’t be avoided

I also want to speak of breezes, flowers, snow, the moon

speak of the past dynasty, poetry in wine

but reality makes me speak only of blood

blood comes from matchbox rented rooms

narrow, cramped, sunless year round

oppressing the working men and women

distant husbands and wives gone astray

guys from Sichuan hawking spicy soup

old people from Henan selling trinkets on blankets

and me, toiling all day just to live

and opening my eyes at night to write poems

I speak to you of these people, I speak of us

ants struggling one by one through the swamp of life

blood walking drop by drop along the worker’s road

blood driven off by the city guards or the choke of a machine

scattering insomnia, illness, unemployment, suicide along the way

the words explode one by one

in the Pearl Delta, in the belly of China

dissected by the seppuku blade of order forms

I speak of this to you

though my voice goes hoarse and my tongue cracks

in order to rip open the silence of this era

I speak of blood, and the sky smashes open

I speak of blood, and my whole mouth turns red

 

What surprises me again and again as I translate Xu’s work is the incredible technical virtuosity of his writing, a combination of raw talent and self-taught skill. The repetitions that underpin the poem, the powerful nouns, the contrasts between the beautiful (breezes, flowers, poetry, wine) and the dark reality (blood, machines, rented rooms), the use of the direct address (“I speak of this to you”)—it all builds into an undeniably moving and forceful work. The fact that he managed to write so impressively while working 11-hour nightshifts and living in what we would find destitute conditions is a great testament to his talent and strength of character. That in the end he found himself defeated in the face of it all is a tragedy for world literature. Xu Lizhi was potentially a great poet in the making.

If you’re interested in reading more of Xu’s poems, you can find a dozen or so in a feature I did here for the China Labour Bulletin: http://www.clb.org.hk/en/content/obituary-peanut-creatively-cynical-world-worker-poet-xu-lizhi.

Tomorrow: Factories, construction sites, and coalmines may be a man’s world, but there are a lot of women in it. I’ll talk about the poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong, one of the most prominent female worker-poets writing today.

 

Iron Moon and the Lives of Chinese Worker-Poets [by Eleanor Goodman]

I have long admired these lines in Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Unnameable Heart”: “There are so many / lives of which I know nothing. / Even my own.” As a translator of Chinese literature, I frequently encounter the foreign in various guises, but over the past year I’ve had a chance to become unusually closely acquainted with five lives that bear little resemblance to my own.

The following is a poem by Chen Nianxi, a poet who appears in the independent documentary film Iron Moon, which explores the lives of workers in contemporary China:

           Demolitions Mark

Daybreak and my head feels like it’s exploding
this is the gift of a mechanized society
it isn’t the fault of steel
it’s that my nerves have grown old and feeble

I don’t often dare look at my life
it’s hard and metallic black
angled like a pickaxe
when the rocks are hit they will bleed

I spend my middle age five kilometers inside mountains
I explode the rocks layer by layer
to put my life back together

My humble family
is far away at the foot of Mt. Shang
they’re sick and their bodies are covered in dust
whatever is taken from my life
extends the tunnel of their old age

My body carries three tons of dynamite
and they are the fuse

Last night
I exploded like the rocks 

“I spend my middle age five kilometers inside mountains”—that image alone conjures up a set of experiences that are largely alien to most of America, and especially to most American poets. The darkness, the danger, the arduous labor, the heavy machinery, the grime, the isolation. This is a man who does hard physical labor for little compensation, a person whose life is undervalued in the larger scheme of things. He works to support three generations of his family: his parents, his wife, and his child. Imagine the pressure—the explosive pressure—of doing dangerous work for low pay and with few protections, worried you won’t be paid when the job is done and knowing that even if you are the money won’t go very far, while the next job is always an uncertainty. Unlike in the United States, coalminers in China are piecemeal workers: they work one site, are paid (or stiffed by unscrupulous coalmine managers), and are set adrift again to look for more work. There is no health insurance, shamefully little recompense for injuries, and absolutely no security.

This is not unique to the coalmining industry. The same is true for hundreds of millions of people who have moved from the countryside into the cities to look for work, as China has proceeded down its path of economic development and rapid industrialization. This past year I’ve been translating the subtitles and poetry that appear in the documentary Iron Moon, directed by Wu Feiyue and Qin Xiaoyu. The film follows five workers at the very bottom of Chinese society who also happen to be accomplished poets, including Chen Nianxi. The project combines several things I consider vital: poetry, social awareness, an examination of globalism, and of course, contemporary China. I’ve also been translating the poetry of other Chinese worker-poets, and will publish an anthology of workers’ poetry with White Pine Press this coming spring.

This week I’ll be introducing five poets from the film, talking about their poetry, their lives, and what it means for all of us. If you’re interested in the film, more information can be found here, including screenings in NYC and LA this coming November: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/963482307/iron-moon-the-poetry-of-chinese-migrant-workers.

Tomorrow, a look at the most well-known poet in the film, the former Foxconn worker Xu Lizhi.

Eleven Questions for Eleven Poets [by Alan Michael Parker] - Part III

More fantabulous answers by superb poets, including some scary responses... Part III of III... Find Part II here.

Question 9: List five events in your life that mattered to you during the writing of your book. 

Max Ritvo: I read the book Ardor by Roberto Calasso, which is about the Indian Vedic tradition. This religious tradition encouraged its devotees to spend their entire lives in ritual dance to commune with the gods, to the extent there was no time left over to build permanent buildings of worship. Which feels to me like a life writing poems. The Vedas spent much of their time addressing the creation of the world and the fundamental ecstasy of desire. They do so using hallucinatory Freud-like myths in which a god has sex with his interior monologue, Speech, only to have the child rip out the womb of Speech itself and force it on his father's head as a turban so he may never impregnate such a potent womb again. This is all I could ever aspire to have my imagination create. It also is a religion that focuses around the guilt and complication of eating meat, and I am a vegetarian. So Ardor's blood runs strong through this book. Grazzi, Roberto! On a less literary note: I got dumped during cancer. I got married to the most wonderful woman in the world. My illness is now terminal. I am in great pain and on many drugs. All of these things made me feel very strong feelings, and so I wrote poems about them. Since my mentation has certain very idiosyncratic features, the poems cohered into a meaningful whole with kind of a narrative around them. And this, my friends, is Four Reincarnations!

Chris Santiago: Akita. I wrote the first draft of the long title poem as I was graduating from Oberlin and moving to Akita, Japan, to teach English. It was a relatively isolated part of the country, with even more snow than my home state of Minnesota. That experience of isolation— living in another language, one I could hardly read or understand—was a gift. It gave me solitude, distance, and perspective.

Manila. From Japan, I was able to backpack around Southeast Asia. At least a few poems came out of this, including “Photograph: Loggers at Kuala Tahan,” which is about getting drunk with some loggers we befriended in the Malaysian rainforest. I also traveled to the Philippines a few times. My uncle Flu put me up and showed me around. He took me on some adventures, introduced me to his network, and regaled me with stories, many of them harrowing. 

Los Angeles. After Japan, I lived in LA for fifteen years and worked several odd jobs: I worked in a call center; I read scripts and rolled calls at Miramax; I was a substitute teacher in South LA and Long Beach, and a graveyard shift editor for a wire service. I also dealt with mild depression, and would go one or two years at a stretch without writing a poem. When I met my wife, Yuri, it was, as Karl Ove Knausgaard says about meeting his own wife, like day broke. After we had our first son, the poems started coming again.

Minneapolis. A few weeks after I defended my dissertation—which included an earlier draft of TULA, my mother died unexpectedly. Up until that point, it had been a season of joy: not only had I finished the program at USC, but I had gotten a job teaching literature & creative writing. The job was even back in my hometown, where my mother and father were still living when she died.

I was, of course, devastated. Part of me wanted to set the manuscript aside—it was hard for me to look at it. It became clear to me how much the poems had to do with my mother, how she tried to transmit our family’s history to me, through songs and stories. The fact that I never learned her language is the seed the book grew out of: I never learned it, but when I hear it spoken, it’s like a music and a home.

But my circle—from USC, from St. Thomas, from Kundiman—gently kept the pressure up. After Daniel Slager called me to say that A. Van Jordan had picked TULA for the Lindquist & Vennum Prize, I called Yuri and cried for a long time. I’m grateful that my mother was at least able to read a draft of the manuscript.

Megan Snyder-Camp: Falling in love with the Pacific Northwest coast and wondering about the origin of these bleak place names like “Dismal Nitch” and “Cape Disappointment.” The birth of my daughter. Sitting with writer, Native Studies scholar and enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe Elissa Washuta at a bar one night and her rattling off a long list of books I needed to read (she was right). My husband losing his job. Driving the Pennsylvania Turnpike with my dad, a trip we used to make all the time but hadn’t in many years. Encountering the term “ruin porn.”

Clint Smith: It’s impossible to disentangle the poems in this collection from the broader racial justice movement that stemmed from the death of Trayvon Martin, and later Michael Brown. These poems are shaped by and responding to the political moment from which they are birthed. These poems are also deeply informed by my work both a teacher and researcher in prisons over the past two years. I teach creative writing at a state prison in Massachusetts and in my doctoral program, I am being trained as a sociologist focusing on the relationship between prisons and education. My proximity to both the people I worked with in the prison as well as an extensive engagement with the social and historical literature outlining how the prison system came to be very much inform my political, and inevitably artistic, commitments.

Tony Trigilio: The Boston Marathon Bombing. Boston, where I lived for ten years before moving to Chicago, already was a big part of the book. The Marathon bombing occurred very early in the composition process, while I was only a few pages into the manuscript. This is a violent book at times, and it has to be, because it documents the politically turbulent year, 1968, when these Dark Shadows episodes first aired, and the painful world we’re living in now. The Marathon bombing is the book’s first violent act. Even when I wasn’t directly writing about Boston, the bombing shadowed just about everything as I wrote the first section of the book.

Gun violence in Chicago. I’ve lived in major urban areas for almost three decades, and I’ve never seen anything like this. The body count we experience every day is heart-wrenching and infuriating. The episodes I watched for this book originally were broadcast in 1968, and I imagined the book would document the global violence of that year (all but ignored in the show’s fictional, soap-escapist seaport town of Collinsport). I just didn’t anticipate how violent my own city, and at times my own neighborhood, would become as I wrote the book.

Syntax, Sound, and Sensation: Terrance Hayes in Conversation with Alan Michael Parker

In June, 2016, Terrance Hayes visited Florida to read and teach in the University of Tampa low-residency M.F.A. program. In the course of his presentation, he made a comment about syntax and sound that struck me as important, and worth exploring. Despite our both being distracted by the seventh game of the N.B.A. Finals later that evening—a game to ruin any Davidson College professor’s mood—we agreed to correspond via email, and this conversation ensued.

Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry, including How To Be Drawn in 2015. His honors include a 2010 National Book Award, a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. His website is terrancehayes.com.

 

 

 AMP: Welcome to the non-place of email. Let's dive in, over our heads.... If I understood correctly, sometime in your artisitic development, you began to associate the extension of syntax with the production of a different kind of music within the poem. Is that an identifiable moment? Would you care to elaborate?

TH: I was drawn to syntax early in my reading life. It was the feeling something beyond words was being communicated in the bones of  poems. Certainly that was my experience of Keats’ “To Autumn”— specially that first stanza. When I first read it in college, I didn’t associate its power (mellow, carnal oozing power) with the fact it was a single over brimming sentence: 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

The same feeling came in certain passages of prose. I remember a college professor beginning to sob as he read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes in Ulysses. It’s one of the longest sentences in the English language (4391 words according to Wikipedia).  I must have associated the sentence’s breathless charge with his emotional reaction. There were no periods—he couldn’t take a breath to collect himself.  I’m still trying to create that sense of charge and “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in my work.

AMP: I love your description of the “o’er-brimm’d”: that’s a great ambition. In that passage, Keats also holds it together contrapuntally, via end-rhyme and those almost-parallel caesuras in lines 7-9, which lead us to read backwards into memory as we move forward in the sentence. Is that something you do too? Or, rather, what’s your way of managing the length and breath of such a charged sentence?

TH: I see “contrapuntal” and “caesuras” and get a tad nervous. Especially when thinking about my early drafts of a poem. I mostly follow something closer to what Frost called “the sound of sense”:

“Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.”

I am trying to find the sense in a sentence: its sense of rhythm, its sense of verbs and nouns, its sense of thought and sound.  I work in units of sentences as often as I work in units of line and image.

AMP: Cool, those connections that you draw between a sentence’s musical properties and its meanings....

“Rhythm” is a term that I tend to fudge when I’m discussing sound and sense; it’s such a difficult concept. Maybe I can ask you to consider an example from Frost, and talk a little more about rhythm.

In “West-Running Brook,” Frost observes of the water:

It has this throwing backward on itself

So that the fall of most of it is always 

Raising a little, sending up a little.

I think that one way to read these lines is as a discussion of rhythm, the riffles in the water “contraries,” as Frost calls them elsewhere in the poem. Would such a metaphor be consistent with your use of “rhythm”? Or are you thinking of the rhythm of a sentence in another way? Could you elaborate upon your use of the term?

TH: The word “rhythm" is fluid. Sometimes I’m thinking about varying the length and speed of a sentence. As in the first poem in my collection Wind In A Box. (Is it self-important to refer to one my own poems?) That’s sort of an exercise in staccato sentences. And in the ways punctuation impact a sentence. A series of periods, some slashes, a dash:

WIND IN A BOX

This ink. This name. This blood. This blunder.

This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind. This canyon.

This / twin / swiftly / paddling / shadow blooming

an inch above the carpet—. This cry. This mud.

But most times I’m thinking of rhythm as a kind of pattern. As in the ways subordinate clauses and repetition can expand a sentence. Especially the way lists can expand a sentence. The catalogues of Whitman and his Beat progeny, for example. Ginsberg spins wildly creating a fog of image that first long, elastic sentence of “Howl.”  That first sentence is one of the most technically dazzling dimensions of “Howl.” I don’t know if that answers your question. I agree rhythm is a difficult concept. Because it is such a personal/intuitive concept.

AMP: Now that we’re talking about sentences in your work expressly, I’d love to hear you comment upon one or more of the poems in your latest book, How To Be Drawn. In light of this conversation, I’m especially interested in the formal play in “Who Are The Tribes," the “Portrait of Etheridge Knight…," and “Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh”—all of which use words inside boxes and/or charts. Care to dig in a bit?

TH: The notion of “formal play” is on the mark. What it suggests is I’m just playing—or trying to play outside my given tendencies. Since sentences are my default inclination, the poems you mentioned are instances of trying something different. Of trying to shift my focus. They are genuine, intimate experiments. Meaning I don’t see them as natural extensions of the sentence. Though you’ll find maybe some syntactical play, the attention is given to form. Not that I’m Jordan—I’m no Jordan, but it’s akin to asking Jordan the relationship between his dunks and his work on his jumper or his defense. He was, when he developed his jumper and defensive prowess, only trying to broaden his skills… 

AMP: So what’s next, in terms of formal play? Is there a kind of poem you’re working on, that you haven’t been able to write?

TH: Great question. I’m mostly/usually concerned with the last poem and the next poem. The last poem was accompanied with drawings. The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape. The poems of late have been pretty long. The poem before the last poem was over 1200 words. So I’ve been trying to work my way back to compression via sonnets lately. But I don’t know. I don’t mind not knowing.

AMP: I’m going to highlight a phrase from your latest excellent response, and take the conversation in a slightly different direction. 

You write, “The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape.” Do you think this is true—that phrases, or scraps, or oddments, are “waiting to find a shape”? Maybe the shape is yours, and you have certain shapes internalized that wait for the scraps you collect by writing? Or… maybe there are shapes waiting to find scraps… in the culture? Care to comment?

TH: Yes, I mean scraps waiting to find a shape. As in what I suspect happens in quilt making. I’m just gathering bright bits of thoughts and conversations, imagery in my notebook. Waiting to stitch/thread something compelling together. Usually the brightest bit becomes the poem’s heart, its engine.

AMP: You mention your notebook. Could you talk a bit about how your process might elucidate the quest for “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in the syntax? How do you handle, literally, the writing, so as to facilitate in the composition process the ambitions you identified earlier?

TH: I have to talk about basketball again here. I can’t say I’m handling the writing so much as continuously practicing with it. I am trying to broaden my facility with it. I am practicing form, of course, but I am also practicing thinking and feeling. It’s all practice. That’s what Thelonius Monk says. For me, poetry is all practice. Occasionally practice pauses for a game—which is to say, some of my poems get published— but my habit is practice. I’m practicing to sustain my strengths while strengthening my weaknesses. I like a long sentence, for example. So I have to push myself towards new challenges with long sentences. One of my challenges/experiments in How to Be Drawn was to push myself into longer poems. These days I’m trying to work my way back to the sonnet. It all takes practice. One can fail in practice. One can experiment and scrimmage. There is intimacy and measure. Practice is a laboratory, a workhouse, a habit. For me, poetry is the practice of language. —June-September, 2016