Translators From Russia

"Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution"

"One question conditions the dynamics and balance of color in the composition of a painting: whence the source of light?"

"The eighteenth century was an age of secularization, that is, it recognized human thought and activity as worldly ventures. Hatred for the priesthood, the hieratic cult, and the liturgy was deep in its blood. Although not an age devoted predominantly to social struggle, it was a period when society was painfully aware of caste. The determinism inherited from the Middle Ages hung menacingly over philosophy and enlightenment, and over its political experiments right down to the tiers état. The caste of priests, the caste of warriors, the caste of landowners-those were the concepts through which "enlightened minds" operated. These castes should not be confused with classes: the above-mentioned elements were all considered necessary to the sacred architectonics of any society. The immense, accumulated energy of social conflict sought an outlet. All the aggressive demands of the age, all the strength of its principled indignation, fell upon the caste of priests."

"The French Revolution ended when the spirit of Classical vengeance abandoned it. The Revolution had reduced the priesthood to ashes, destroyed social determinism, and brought the secularization of Europe to its ultimate conclusion. It was then washed up on the shore of the nineteenth century as an already unfathomable thing, not as a Gorgon's head, but as a fascicle of seaweed. Out of the union of mind and the furies a mongrel was born, equally alien to the high rationalism of the Encyclopedia and to the Classical raging of the revolutionary storm-Romanticism. Nevertheless, as it developed, the nineteenth century moved much further away from its predecessor than Romanticism. The nineteenth century was the conduit of Buddhist influence in European culture."

"The essence of nineteenth century cognitive activity is projection."

"a taste for historical reincarnation and total understanding is not constant; it is a transient taste. And our century has begun under the sign of great intolerance, exclusiveness, and conscious noncomprehension of other worlds."

"When the mass terror erupted in 1936, however, Birobidzhan would be the stage of frightful liquidations, a real pogrom against Jewish communists, the pioneers of this 'centre of Jewish culture. From one day to the next, Professor Liberberg, president of the republic's executive committee, disappeared; a few months later, a newspaper revealed that he had been 'unmasked' as a 'cowardly counterrevolutionary and Trotskyist, a bourgeois nationalist'; in 1937 and 1938, his successors experienced the same fate. In all the regions where a Jewish population was concentrated, thousands of activists of the Jewish sections, party militants, journalists of the Yiddish press and other writers were arrested; among many others, such major figures as Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam vanished in the maelstrom."

"The story of Mandelstam's final years, thanks to his widow... is now widely known. He was arrested in 1934 for having composed a poem in which he made grim fun of Stalin, the 'Kremlin Mountaineer', and his relish for torture and execution... Someone informed on him and he was immediately clapped into prison, where he underwent intensive interrogation and psychological and physical torment. Friends intervened in so far as they dared or were able—his protector Bukharin was to be among Stalin's purge later in the decade—and by some miracle the intervention worked. The poet was not shot, as... expected... but exiled, first to a small town in the Urals (where, half insane from the prison experience, he attempted to kill himself...)... His wife was at his side from the moment he was put on the train into exile... The term of exile expired in May, 1937, and the Mandelstams returned to Moscow only to find that they had lost the right to 'living-space... Homeless and unable to find work, the following twelve month[s] is a nightmare of wandering and terror: the wave of second arrests... was under way. Mandelstam's condition worsened. He had two heart attacks. Finally in May 1938, they received Mandelstam's sentence 'for counter-revolutionary activities'... five years of hard labor (he had been seized at a rural sanatorium where he was recuperating). Held for a while in prison, he was put... on one of the prisoner trains [to] remote eastern regions. He seems to have been quite insane at times, though there were lucid intervals. ...[H]e wrote a last letter in October, 1938... saying that he was being held at a transit camp pending shipment to a permanent one. Alexander Mandelstam received notice that his brother had died—of 'heart failure'—on 27 December 1938."

"when I wrote a book called The Dew Breaker, a book about a choukèt lawoze, or a Duvalier-era torturer, a book that is partly set in the period following the Numa and Drouin executions, I used an epigraph from a poem by Osip Mandelstam, who famously said, "Only in Russia is poetry respected-it gets people killed." The quotation I used is: "Maybe this is the beginning of madness.../Forgive me for what I am saying./Read it... quietly, quietly.""

"I think the first discovery I made for myself which I didn't necessarily share with my family or my friends, but came upon myself, was Russian literature. I've always felt very much enthralled to writers like Dostoevsky, especially, and Chekhov. In later years, modern Russian poets like Pasternak and Mandelstam and Akhmatova have meant a great deal to me. Poetry more than prose."

"he was totally unconcerned about winning a place for himself in the world of letters. He was much too busy. What with books, people, conversation, the events of the day, and even the lowly business of running to the shop for bread or kerosene, his time was fully occupied...For all my light-headedness, even I was astonished at his improvidence. And the times were not propitious."

"I never ceased to believe in M.'s and Akhmatova's poetry. In our depersonalized world where everything human was silenced, only the poet preserved his "self" and a voice which can still be heard even now."

"I found it funny that he never wrote at a table like everybody else, but always put his paper on a chair and squatted in front of it on his haunches."

"there is a hauntedness to Mandelstam’s imagery that I wanted to capture."

"love can be manifested in a situation in which a man may love his country and suffer for it-such as a poet like Mandelstam. Even if that person perishes, the tyrant can't touch him. And therefore, what had to be touched by those people behind the glass is that idea. And that's stronger, it is ultimately stronger than the victims who are lying around."

"Every book should be an incentive to studying the language. Every book should provide at least some contact with the original, for example, a parallel text and a glossary. At present we are struggling to take the translation business away from the caste leader, for whom the mass reader is a fiction, an "easy mark" ignorant of foreign languages."

"Why can't we shake things up, why can't these good translators be utilized in collective undertakings?"

"As the circulation of translated literature increases, we can observe the growth of interest in language study among the Komsomol masses, among the working youth, and in the colleges. Just how young people undertake the study of foreign languages is of interest: they approach language learning with the triumphant spirit of a conqueror invading previously forbidden territory. Knowledge of languages is a mighty weapon in the hands of the ruling class. With the aid of this weapon the composition of the entire cultural present is counterfeited and world literature is falsified until it reaches the condition demanded by people of position."

"Speed, the pace of the present, cannot be measured by subways or skyscrapers, but only by the cheerful grass thrusting itself forth from under city stones."

"Cultural values ornament the State, endowing it with color, form, and, if you will, even gender. Inscriptions on State buildings, tombs, and gateways insure the State against the ravages of time."

"We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us, Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard."

"Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"

"The October Revolution could not but influence my work since it took away my "biography," my sense of individual significance. I am grateful to it, however, for once and for all putting an end to my spiritual security and to a cultural life supported by unearned cultural income... I feel indebted to the Revolution, but I offer it gifts for which it still has no need. The question about what a writer should be is completely incomprehensible to me: to answer it would be tantamount to inventing a writer, that is, to writing his works for him."

"How can a heart expression find? How should another know your mind? Will he discern what quickens you? A thought once uttered is untrue."

"After tumbling down the mountain, a stone lies in a valley. How did it fall away? Right now, no-one knows. Did it tear from the heights on its own? Or was it cast down by the will of another? Aeons have flowed by, yet no-one knows the reason why."

"I love May's first storms: chuckling, sporting spring grumbles in mock anger; young thunder claps."

"Separation has this lofty meaning: if love lasts years, if but a day it takes, love's just a dream and we're a moment dreaming, and whether early, whether late the waking, the time must finally arrive when we awake."

"Who would grasp Russia with the mind? For her no yardstick was created: Her soul is of a special kind, By faith alone appreciated."

"The importance of Akhmatova's works in the Russian poetic tradition can scarcely be exaggerated. These works also hold a place of honor in the history of artistic engagement of moral responsibility."

"Anna Andreevna Akhmatova used poetry to give voice to the struggles and deepest yearnings of the Russian people, for whom she remains the greatest of literary heroines. She has lately come to symbolize for the world even beyond Russia the power of art to survive and transcend the terrors of our century."

"Akhmatova never ceased to be astonished at the resurrection of poetry once trampled underfoot, wiped out, it had seemed, once and for all. "We never realized that poetry has such a long life," she was always saying, and "poetry isn't what we thought it was when we were young"...I never ceased to believe in M.'s and Akhmatova's poetry. In our depersonalized world where everything human was silenced, only the poet preserved his "self" and a voice which can still be heard even now."

"Akhmatova introduced all the enormous complexity and wealth of the nineteenth century novel into the Russian lyric. If not for Tolstoi's Anna Karenina, Turgenev's Nest of Gentlefolk (Dvorianskoe gnezdo), all of Dostoevsky and even some [[Leskov, there would be no Akhmatova. Akhmatova's genesis lies entirely in the realm of Russian prose, not in poetry. She developed her poignant and unique poetic form with a backward glance at psychological prose."

"Akhmatova was neither a woman poet in the narrow militant feminist sense in which the term is understood today, nor just a poet of Russia alone.... Her poetic involvements went beyond the domesticated lyricism of conventional feminine poetry and embraced larger questions of political and social inequity. Though essentially a poet of "the keening muse", as Joseph Brodsky described her, Akhmatova rose above personal sorrows (too numerous to relate here) to create a disciplined yet many-layered work of haunting reverberation. … Akhmatova's is a "poetry of witness" that defends the individual against all forms of coercion. Such poetry does not go into "holes of oblivion" as Hannah Arendt would put it, but nags our guilt of connivance with tyrants like Hitler or Stalin. It invokes religious symbolism to reinforce the language of extremity and to compensate for the fragmentation of social vision caused by the turmoil of the times. … The poetry of witness draws upon what Akhmatova calls "the invisible ink" of others to strengthen its claims to authenticity, not as a substitute for ones tattered memories but as a reminder that others have gone down the same path as oneself."

"One of the great Russian poets and a national heroine, Anna Akhmatova (née Gorenko) is not venerated outside Russia as a major poetic voice of the twentieth century. She seemed born to endure the great tragedy in her life and indeed was one of Stalin's most long-suffering literary victims. Her tremendous will to survive, in her self-appointed role as witness of the Great Terror, testifies to huge inner reserves of moral strength that sustained her through years of extreme poverty and isolation, to ultimately become a latter-day nemesis of the dark days of Stalinism. … Her individualism survived the early days of foment in Soviet literature, when literary experimentation was for a short while tolerated, but her work was soon looked upon as insufficiently socialist in its concerns and was suppressed as "bourgeois" after the publication of her collection Anno Domini MCMXXI in 1922. It was the appearance of this work that prompted the eminent Soviet literary critic Boris Eichenbaum to famously deride Akhmatova as "half nun, half harlot" (an epithet later reprised by Andrey Zhdanov in the campaign against Akhmatova in the 1940s)."

"I remembered a poem about queues by Anna Akhmatova-who unlike many of her peers, had survived the Gulag. Well, sort of: "In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everybody had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): "Can you describe this?" And I answered: "Yes, I can." Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face." Akhmatova, her first husband Nikolay Gumilyov, Osip Mandelstam, and three other poets were part of Acmeism, a poets' guild. In 1921, Gumilyov was shot by a firing squad for counterrevolutionary activity. Mandelstam was arrested in 1934 for writing an ode to Stalin that showed signs of satire and was not convincing enough in its praise.""

"You will come in any case — so why not now? How long I wait and wait. The bad times fall. I have put out the light and opened the door for you, because you are simple and magical. Assume, then, any form that suits your wish, take aim, and blast at me with poisoned shot, or strangle me like an efficient mugger, or else infect me — typhus be my lot —"

"O let the organ, many-voiced, sing boldly, O let it roar like spring's first thunderstorm! My half-closed eyes over your young bride's shoulder Will meet your eyes just once and then no more."

"I go forth to seek — To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak."

"You thought I was that type: That you could forget me, And that I'd plead and weep And throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare..."

"Damn you! I will not grant your cursed soul Vicarious tears or a single glance. And I swear to you by the garden of the angels, I swear by the miracle-working icon, And by the fire and smoke of our nights: I will never come back to you."

"I don't know if you're alive or dead. Can you on earth be sought, Or only when the sunsets fade Be mourned serenely in my thought?"

"No-one was more cherished, no-one tortured Me more, not Even the one who betrayed me to torture, Not even the one who caressed me and forgot."

"Why is this century worse than those others? Maybe, because, in sadness and alarm, It only touched the blackest of the ulcers, But couldn't heal it in its span of time."

"All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead."

"You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire."

"That day in Moscow, it will all come true, when, for the last time, I take my leave, And hasten to the heights that I have longed for, Leaving my shadow still to be with you."

"A multi-colored crowd streaked about, and suddenly all was totally changed. It wasn't the usual city racket. It came from a strange land."

"Natural thunder heralds the wetness of fresh water high clouds to quench the thirst of fields gone dry and parched, a messenger of blessed rain, but this was as dry as hell must be. My distraught perception refused to believe it, because of the insane suddenness with which it sounded, swelled and hit, and how casually it came to murder my child."

"Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song — This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays."

"Now no one will listen to songs. The prophesied days have begun. Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its wonder, Don't break my heart, don't ring out."