Poetry

I am now engaged on a project to translate poems by Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) from Russian.
Read an article and four published poems.

For four weeks in November–December 2009, I was able to take up a fellowship at Hawthornden Castle near Edinburgh, through the kindness of Graham Fawcett of the Poetry School, and the Stephen Spender Foundation which asked him to nominate somebody engaged in poetry translation. I wanted to spend my time there reviving my Russian 'A' level (from 1984) and took various anthologies and books about Russian poetry.

I was introduced to Khodasevich by Michael Wachtel’s book The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and its Meanings (Cambridge, 1998) and in particular the poem “Daktili”, about his father. I have translated it as “The Dactyls”, and it has been published by Poetry Review. You can read four other poems and my commentary on them in the May-June 2010 issue of PN Review, and another ten in the Russian/English journal Cardinal Points - see http://www.stosvet.net/12/daniels/index2.html.

Vladislav Khodasevich was born in Russia but with a mixed Polish and Jewish background. He was seven years younger than Blok, and this gave him some distance from the symbolist poetry of Blok, while his non-Russian background gave him a sideways view on Russia. His poems express deep feelings with an ironic outlook, and his style for doing this seems strikingly modernist.

He left Russia in 1922, eventually settling in Paris with his then partner Nina Berberova. The ingrown and largely philistine émigré world was a dead end for writers unless they started working in a language other than Russian, like Nabokov, who considered Khodasevich the best Russian poet of the 20th century. He died of liver cancer just before the war: otherwise he would have inevitably been taken to Auschwitz like his baptised Jewish wife Olga. He was of course ignored in the Soviet Union. In the last twenty years Russians have rediscovered him, and he very much deserves to be known in the West.

This poem, “Not My Mother…”, has been published in Cardinal Points, and I must acknowledge excellent advice with it from editors Irina Mashinski and Robert Chandler. It isn’t Khodasevich’s most perfect poem but says a great deal about how he stood in regard to Russia, and Russian poetry. In an unspoken comparison with Pushkin and his nurse Arina Rodionovna, whose fairy tales contributed to young Aleksandr’s poetic education, for Khodasevich and his nurse it was a case of survival against the odds. Russian poets are unembarrassed about poetic vocation, but he has to selfconsciously claim it like this, with Pushkin over his shoulder, and an awareness that he is not himself Russian but that Elena Kuzina has made this possible.

“Not My Mother…” Vladislav Khodasevich Not my mother, but a Tula peasant, Eléna Kúzina, fed me her breast. She warmed my swaddling-clothes above the stove, and with her cross at night my dreams were blessed. She knew no fairy tales and never sang: but always kept as treats for me instead inside her treasured white enamel tin a peppermint horse or fruity gingerbread. She never taught me how to say my prayers, but gave up everything she had for me: even her own bitter motherhood, all that was dear to her, unconditionally. Only the time I tumbled from the window, but stood up alive (that day for ever mine!), with half a kopek for the miracle her candle graced Iberian Mary’s shrine. And you, Russia, “great resounding power”: taking her nipples for my lips to pull, I suckled the excruciating right to love you, and to curse at you as well. My honest, joyful task of making psalms, in which I serve each moment all day long, your wonder-making genius teaches me, and my profession is your magic tongue. And I may stand before your feeble sons priding myself at times that I can guard this language, handed down from age to age, with a more jealous love for every word… The years fly by. The future has no use, the past has burnt itself into my soul. And yet the secret joy is still alive, for me there is one refuge from it all: where with the still imperishable love even a maggot-eaten heart can keep, beside the trampled coronation crowd my nurse, Elena Kuzina, asleep. ©   Peter Daniels Published 2010 in Cardinal Points.

In my translation I sacrificed references to “Vyazemsky gingerbread” (speciality of the town of Vyazma), and Khodynka where a crowd panicked when gifts were distributed to celebrate the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896 with more than a thousand deaths. This was to avoid footnotes, but now I’m giving you the information anyway.