Endarkenment Read online
ENDARKENMENT
Wesleyan Poetry
ENDARKENMENT
ARKADII DRAGOMOSHCHENKO
SLELECTED POEMS
Edited by
Eugene Ostashevsky
Translated by
Lyn Hejinian,
Genya Turovskaya,
Eugene Ostashevsky,
Bela Shayevich,
Jacob Edmond, and
Elena Balashova
Foreword by
Lyn Hejinian
Wesleyan University Press | Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press | Middletown CT 06459 | www.wesleyan.edu/wespress | © 2014 Estate of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko | Foreword © Lyn Hejinian | “Dragomoshchenko’s Russian” © Eugene Ostashevsky | All rights reserved | Manufactured in the United States of America | Designed by Eric M. Brooks | Typeset in Skolar by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. | Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. | Earlier versions of these translations have appeared in American Reader, The Germ, Gulf Coast, Ice Floe, Jacket2, Little Star, A Public Space, and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Description (Sun & Moon, 1990).
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dragomoshchenko, A. (Arkadii), author. | [Poems. Selections. English] | Endarkenment: selected poems / Arkadii Dragomoshchenko; edited by Eugene Ostashevsky; translated by Lyn Hejinian, Genya Turovskaya, Eugene Ostashevsky, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, and Elena Balashova; foreword by Lyn Hejinian. | pages; cm.—(Wesleyan poetry series) | Includes bibliographical references. | ISBN 978-0-8195-7392-6 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8195-7393-3 (ebook) | I. Ostashevsky, Eugene, editor of compilation, translator. II. Hejinian, Lyn, translator, writer of added commentary. III. Turovskaya, Genya, translator. IV. Shayevich, Bela, translator. V. Balashova, Elena, translator. VI. Edmond, Jacob, translator. VII. Title. VIII. Series: Wesleyan poetry.
PG3479.6.R28A2 2014 | 891.71′44—dc23 | 2013028428
5 4 3 2 1
Cover illustration: Self-portrait by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.
CONTENTS
Foreword
BY LYN HEJINIAN
“I don’t believe that it ended like that …” (to Alexey M. Parshchikov) | 3
«Я не верю, что так закончилось … » (Алексею М. Парщикову) | 2
TRANS. GENYA TUROVSKAYA
“Is the fault really yours?” (to Trofim K. Dragomoshchenko) | 5
«Разве твоя в том вина?» (Трофиму К. Драгомощенко) | 4
TRANS. GENYA TUROVSKAYA
1
From On the Shores of the Expelled River
Из книги «На берегах исключенной реки»
“Let us halt” | 11
«Повременим …» | 10
TRANS. BELA SHAYEVICH AND EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
To a Statesman | 13
Политику | 12
TRANS. GENYA TUROVSKAYA
Dreams Photographers Appear To | 19
Сны, которые видят фотографов | 18
TRANS. BELA SHAYEVICH
The Weakening of an Indication | 21
Ослабление признака | 20
TRANS. GENYA TUROVSKAYA
“Not dream, but the flowering …” | 25
«Не сон, а цветение … » | 24
TRANS. GENYA TUROVSKAYA
Six Hours to Waking If You Don’t Sleep | 27
За шесть часов до пробуждения | 26
TRANS. LYN HEJINIAN
For Many Reasons | 29
По многим причинам | 28
TRANS. EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
Counting | 33
Счет | 32
TRANS. EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
An Evening | 35
Вечер | 34
TRANS. EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
“And it’s not like I can run off somewhere …” | 37
«A мне и не убежать никуда … » | 36
TRANS. EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
“We shouldn’t especially trust poets …” (to Akseli Kajanto) | 39
«He следует особенно доверять поэтам … » (Akseli Kajanto) | 38
TRANS. EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
2
From Under Suspicion
Из книги «Под подозрением»
“Lion-headed, bronze-winged …” | 43
«Львиноголовые, бронзовокрылые … » | 42
TRANS. GENYA TUROVSKAYA
“Fury shadowed their faces …” | 47
«Неистовство осеняло их лица … » | 46
TRANS. GENYA TUROVSKAYA
Paper Dreams | 53
Бумажные сны | 52
TRANS. GENYA TUROVSKAYA
“They dreamt of nothing …” | 61
«Им ничего не снилось … » | 60
TRANS. BELA SHAYEVICH
“The tree’s wintry empire …” | 65
«Зимняя империя дерева … » | 64
TRANS. BELA SHAYEVICH
Reflections in a Golden Eye | 69
Отражения в золотом глазу | 68
TRANS. GENYA TUROVSKAYA
“Everything was in decline …” | 87
«Все приходило в упадок … » | 86
TRANS. JACOB EDMOND
“… there they go, writing poems” | 97
« … вот они пишут стихи» | 96
TRANS. GENYA TUROVSKAYA
3
From The Corresponding Sky
Из книги «Небо соответствий»
“In my declining years I said to the slave …” | 103
«На старости лет я сказал рабу … » | 102
TRANS. ELENA BALASHOVA AND LYN HEJINIAN
Nasturtium as Reality | 107
Настурция как реальность | 106
TRANS. ELENA BALASHOVA AND LYN HEJINIAN
Arkadii Trofimovich Dragomoshchenko: A Brief Biography and Bibliography | 143
BY EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
Dragomoshchenko’s Russian | 145
BY EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
Notes | 157
PHOTO: ROSA KHATSKELEVICH
FOREWORD
The great Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko passed away on September 12, 2012. Born on February 3, 1946, in Potsdam, Germany, he spent his childhood in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, which he experienced as a site at which numerous languages and cultures intersected and co-existed. At the time of his childhood, in addition to Ukrainian and Russian, one could hear Moldovan, Polish, Romany, and Yiddish on the streets of the city, and his awareness from early childhood of the language’s habit of producing simultaneously convergent and divergent meanings must be understood as a fundamental source of his poetry. Similarly fundamental was his memory of holes in the fence enclosing his grandmother’s small garden. These were the apertures through which he made his first conscious observations of the world, irregular circles of sensation. They were portals, but they became over time, emblematic, too, of the aporias that puncture consciousness and that neither knowledge nor speculation can ever fill. The polyglot city and the holes in the fence proved to be dual points of departure for Arkadii’s poetics; they also appeared in one of his first letters to me.
; “My youth went by in the Ukraine,” he wrote, “in a small town in the southwest. Let’s write: there was a garden. There were holes in a fence. The grandmother had a God. There were holes in my memory, which later began to correspond to holes in fences, through which I used to run away, though their significance, I think now, is quite abstract. Let’s write: there was a book. And now I am wiping away my tears, and taking off a wet hat, gluing on an ink beard, and warming my hands over a fireplace. The rain was loud. I want to think of this town. From the 16th century on, this town was a real melting pot, simmering, over the flames, all sorts of things, cultures, languages, religions. Everything: Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Greek, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, and.… And again I hear this town’s dancing, intractable tongue.”1
Arkadii was exquisitely attuned to language, with its syllables and silences, its restless, ephemeral patterns—“the formulae of dragonflies.” His writings weave through the windy mists and sunstruck hazes of language, catching a flutter of movement at an etymological intersection, spotting a flicker of past desire in the echo of a word. In conversation his ideas came rapidly, even insistently, but he was a meditative writer, drawn into absences as well as intersections. He was obsessed with time, but not, as so many poets are, because he mourned its evanescence or transience. Instead, time as he came to know it, was expansive—moments don’t flee; they swell, spread out. He inhabited time, lingered in its circles, dreamed its language. His powers of scrutiny were microscopic and mystical; his magnitude of thought was macroscopic and sought the cosmos. He was a poet of the Far East and of the Far West; he was a philosopher of distance in whose thinking persistent attention was given to proximity.
He heard what most of us forget on waking, he caught the echo in the spaces between things, caught the faint aroma of some intention, some initial gesture, saw the shimmer raised by the intersecting of things, noted effects whose causes had gone astray or were still far in the future.
Occasion, coincidence, and chance caught his interest, because of the pull they exert on things. With Arkadii’s death, his writings, which were about the ephemeral and unlikely, chance encounters and shifting perception, quick changes of topic and the pursuit of echoes, have turned into philosophical science. He was a poet in the tradition of Lucretius, following atoms of sensation into the crinkled atmospherics of thought.
Now, in the wake of Arkadii’s unexpected death, key elements of his poetry seem to have intensified. His work always included elements of melancholy, his relation to the things of which he wrote always included a degree of irony and reserve, the intimacy with which time and things faced each other in his writing was always prolonged to the threshold of infinity. But now one can’t help but feel that, in writing this way, he was writing reality, not speculation. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he was writing permanence, that strange temporal field of the endless paradox in which plenitude and absence coincide.
“Now speech has lost its speed, it lags as the nights lag, becoming briefer and nevertheless longer. Time marvelously stills, involving one in its dance, allowing itself to stay in place in innumerable gradations. Hitherto unseen, but always having been, simple understanding doesn’t go away: the world whirling in a beautiful absence of will, in which glimmers an unintelligible belief in everything, to the point of idiotic tears, when one sets out for milk in the morning and stops at every step.”2
LYN HEJINIAN
ENDARKENMENT
to Alexey M. Parshchikov (Sunday, May 10, 2009)
I don’t believe that it ended like that, don’t believe it at all, no.
Over there, nothing ever ends, over there, there’s an ocean of air.
Over there, if you want to be with her forever, there’s nothing terrible
about it,
Because the terrible doesn’t exist, there is only poverty, and there is nothing
Terrible about that, there is nothing more terrible than what’s terrible,
Like love, which is beneath all beggars, beneath everyone, everything,
But happiness lies elsewhere, not in being a madman, but in seeming
To be one, and in being at the same time a madman who will say,
When the occasion is right, that there’s nothing in the world that’s sweeter
than being an idiot.
We’ll end there, because everyone who is looking at us
Has low-set eyes, they are magnificent in the plaster of poses and speech.
Close-set eyes, long plaster sleeves,
The hands are slow, disappear from sight. They are light at the passing
of blood and
After a retort. Who taught them the art of direct speech? In which
there isn’t a single
Word about how the conifer needles clung to the shoulders,
when they didn’t exist
In the first place, and won’t, because what will exist
are Parshchikov’s dirigibles,
His flock, my diopters, addresses, telephones, and no oil at all.
[G.T.]
Алексею М. Парщикову воскресенье, 10 мая 2009 г.
Я не верю, что так закончилось, вообще не верю, нет.
Там никогда ничего не заканчивается, там—море воздуха.
Там, если ты хочешь быть с ней навсегда, ничего страшного,
Поскольку страшного нет вообще, есть одна нищета, а в ней
Ничего страшного нет, ничего страшней нет того, что страшно,
Как и любовь, которая ниже всех нищих, всех ниже всего,
Но счастье в другом, не в том, чтобы быть безумным, но
Чтобы казаться, но быть в это же время безумным, который
При случае скажет, что нет ничего слаще на свете быть идиотом.
На этом закончим, потому что у всех тех, кто смотрит на нас
Низко посаженные глаза, они великолепны в гипсе поз и речи.
Близко посаженные глаза, длинные гипсовые рукава,
Руки медленны, исчезают из взгляда. Легки на уходе крови и
После реплики. Кто учил их мастерству прямой речи? В которой
Ни слова о том, как хвоя прикипала к плечам, когда их не было
Изначально, и не будет, поскольку будут дирижабли Парщикова
Его стада и мои диоптрии, адреса, телефоны, и никакой нефти.
to Trofim K. Dragomoshchenko
Is the fault really yours? Mine? They say it’s verging on spring,
and you are as old as you’ve always been,
and—moreover—no longer appear in my dreams.
That last time you were saying … But what?
What truly matters? To speak: is that not enough? or too much?
Not a single horizon can be as distinct
as the one charted by the stone’s fall.
That rivers run, gathering the arterial force of space?
Grammar doesn’t abide muteness, shards of water,
the incision of a fish, the whooping of birds from beyond the hill at sunrise?
Underwater scales, of course, and fins, shade, bare feet.
And some others—like cells in a long arithmetic book.
Soon faces will blacken from the sun. It is truly so.
And perhaps that’s good—it’s easier in summer, in summer
there is no
need to look over one’s shoulder and even the shadows
of non-being
search out coolness in the bonfires of a house, melting into the walls
on the stories
torn apart by the roots of the nut tree, the nasturtium, the matthiola.
Even there, where we’ve already been, where we needn’t return.
The world is merciful. That’s why water rises as a wave, then the tide ebbs.
There is no need to return to the cumbersome body, to press against
the sleeping mummies of cigarettes, to stand as mica,
among the figures of wine,
of telluric books, staring bewildered into the zenith.
No need to return,
no need, during insomnia, to flee, as the child after parting
entangles the heart with madness. You’re unreasonable,
they tell him, “what are you doing!”—they tell him—and it
is just like the body, its smallpox inoculations, knots of fracture,
sunset of operatic wounds, its tattoos of inversion, some of them seeds,
when nothing remains that is not with her, but vague letters,
the scalpel’s exquisite glaciers, other things.
By all accounts, in the same heap of bodies, when the time comes,
judging by everything, you’ll no longer appear in dreams.
It is not a question of the moon, of spring, of the time of the throat.
Dreams decay, fall to pieces, and their gold
flakes into flocks of flying fish, going blind over the scales of the abyss.
Because—that’s it! I almost forgot—not to see
you in military whites among the vitriolic crystals of lilacs.
I parted them with my hands, gulping air, I ran
(This is from where what will appear a millennium later).
Not much time remained to see you there, leaning
on the warm hood of the jeep. What could I have said
then? How could I have understood what I don’t understand today?
How cleanly and slantingly it wafts of gasoline,
and women’s white dresses at the sidelines.