It is with excitement and trepidation that I would like to announce that my retranslation of Vladislav Khodasevichs seminal prose poem The Ape (1919) has been accepted for publication in The Kenyon Review Online, kenyonreview.org/. Trepidation, because, as you can imagine, I have been seeking publication in KR a very long time and because it is the first of many. What I mean is: I have translated all of Ks prose poems and would like to offer part of my commentary, and the beginning of the poem, here. The Ape The heat was unbearable. The forests were burning. Time passed languorously. At the neighbors dacha A cock was crowing. I went outside the gate. There, leaning upon the fence, an itinerant Serb Rail-thin and black, was snoozing on the bench. A heavy silver cross hung suspended On his half-exposed chest. Drops of sweat Rolled down it. Above him, on the fence, Dressed in a red skirt, sat a monkey.... Arguably “next in line” after the Russian “Big Four” (Mandelstam, Tvetaeva, Pasternak, and Akhmatova), the poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939) has been, by comparison, neglected. The recent Selected Poems, in the translation of poet Peter Daniels, while receiving attention in The Guardian, has garnered not a single mention in the American press so far. As often the case, I found the strength of these translations by a British poet to be their formal elegance. I see my purpose then as to remedy some imprecisions and short-comings in musicality in the available translations of his more “prosy sections”.... The crowning achievement of every major Russian poet, it seems to me, has been a dramatic identification of one’s highly personal fate with that of Russia entire. That is, as a document, this work succeeds in capturing its historical moment in time. Speaking thematically, what we have before us is Khodasevich’s own testimony to the shattered certainties of the old world, its shell-shocked survivors stumbling about literally and existentially naked in the ruins of their formerly high culture, in the wake of the Russian Revolution (the poems date to 1918-1919). A poet whose only professed influence was Pushkin, Khodasevich here suddenly “abandons form” (though not really), as though poetic words have failed him, and temporarily adopts a looser, spoken line. One must recall that Russian poetry hasn’t its own Whitman or Pound, so that the latter’s prescriptions are alien to Russian culture and verse (“To use the language of common speech”; “express … individuality of a poet …. better in free verse”; “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not the metronome”.) Almost abandons form but never quite. Ever present in these is a tension between prose and verse rhythm, and the lines, constantly pulsing between tetramer and hexameter, resolve always into a blank verse. What I have found in working to reproduce these effects in English is that the directly spoken plain word and phrase requires one to weigh more and not less closely each and every word, for its shadings of texture, connotation, and association.... While much remains to be said to attempt to explain what makes Khodasevich both stand out and not fit in with the main body of Russian poetry, it is his directness of address often verging on simplicity that marks his primary individuality as a poet. The naked vulnerability of such words raises the bar by exposing the relative perfection and imperfection of every word, achieving a kind of cameo-like high contrast that makes these poems nearly unique in the Russian canon.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:46:40 +0000
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