“A Few Words About My Wife,” from “Me” by Vladimir Myakovsky

2.
A Few Words About My Wife

I have married the moon and she combs the water,
the beaches of uncharted seas.
She’s my lunar lady, she has long red hair
and she drives a herd of horses
through a screaming streak of stars!
She gets married every evening in a greasy garage
and she kisses all the pictures
on the newspaper stands.
Her pretty boy winks, he wraps
the Milky Way around her,
he gets glitter on his fingers
and stars all over his hands.
And what about me?
The yoke of your eyebrows brings buckets of water
from the cool cool wells of your eyes,
it douses my desire and the lake-silk shimmers
on the singing amber cello of your thighs.
I sink into boulevards! I drown
in desire for deserts of sand.
Don’t you recognize your baby?
It’s my poor little poem, she wears fishnet stockings
and she drinks in a bar
as empty as this barren land.

—from “Me” by Vladimir Mayakovsky, in The Stray Dog Cabaret, translated by Paul Schmidt

mydaguerreotypeboyfriend:

Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russian poet and author, in his early twenties.

We’re just taking a wild guess here, but Mayakovsky probably isn’t going to call you. Here are plenty of gentlemen who will. 

Happy V-Day, from MDB. 

Sorokin takes Stanford

Russia’s literary enfant terrible made his Stanford debut at an afternoon reception on Tuesday followed by a reading Wednesday night. He will be in residence at Stanford until mid-November.

‘We know it’s a coup because of the number of people who have tried to jump on the bandwagon,’ said Monika Greenleaf, associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures and of comparative literature, introducing the writer on Tuesday. She told the small crowd that some fans had flown from as far away as Chicago, and other institutions tried to book him for side junkets. ‘They asked us, “How on earth did you do this?”’

More at The Book Haven at Stanford, including this quip in defense of Sorokin’s writing against charges of pornography:

“pornography is something that provokes indecency, yet reading Sorokin’s works can eliminate one’s taste for lovemaking for a lifetime.”

Vasily Grossman deep cuts  →

Sarah J. Young has an excellent roundup of writings by and about Vasily Grossman, including many for Russian readers, and loads we hadn’t seen before.

The trailer for the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, “a novel so dangerous it was arrested.” The adaptation is voiced by Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant. 

It appears that the program is available to download as a podcast for 30 days after airing.

booksandbrews:

One of the The Foundation Pit’s central images - that of digging a vast foundation pit for a building that will never be built - foreshadows one of the most surreal episodes in the cultural history of Stalinism: “The dominant in the structure of the future Moscow was to be the Palace of Soviets and a decree authorizing its construction was issued in February 1932.  The largest church in Moscow - The Church of Christ the Savior near the Kremlin - had been pulled down shortly before, and it was on this site that the stepped tower, 415 metres high and crowned by a 100-metre statue of Lenin was to be erected.  Taller than the recently constructed Empire State Building, it was to house the supreme organs of Soviet power and the apartments of the Leader … . An entire large institute worked on the project for many years, until the beginning of the 1950s.  A vast foundation pit was dug on the site of the church, and the press never tired of describing the future grandeur of a construction which was to contain 17,500 square metres of oil painting, 12,000 of frescoes, 4,000 of mosaics, 20,000 of bas-reliefs, 12 group sculptures up to 12 metres high, 170 sculptures up to 6 metres high, and so on.  Both the architecture as a whole and the symbolism of the decor were intended to express the power of the Country of Victorious Socialism.  Nothing of the Palace of Soviets … was ever constructed.” (Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art, pg. 274-75)

Robert Chandler & Olga Meerson have done a thorough job with their collection of comprehensive notes that help make this dense and absurd masterpiece come to life. 

Vladimir Sorokin: Taking Eloquence and Wringing Its Neck

Nicole Rudnick at the Paris Review blog interviewed Jamey Gambrell about translating Vladimir Sorokin. Here is a bit of that interview:

Some in Russia have campaigned against the violence and obscenity in his work. The government even tried to prosecute him for it. Did that aspect of his writing bother you?

Not all of his books are quite like that, but the majority are. If I hadn’t already known him, in a general social context among artists, I might not have agreed to it, but he’s so unlike his books. He’s a very soft-spoken and mild-mannered individual. Otherwise, it would have been scary to translate them. Even something like “A Month in Dachau”—after a while it was a matter of what to do with the language, because the language was torture, too. It’s like Verlaine said about what he wanted to do with the French language: “Take eloquence and wring its neck”—break the language, which is particularly pertinent in French, because French is so pretty. Tsvetaeva wrote about some of Rilke’s last poems that French is the most ungrateful of languages for a poet, meaning that the language—its sounds, its nature—overwhelms in poetry. It’s a force, in and of itself, that the poet probably has little traction against. I really think she was right; it’s very overwhelming.

Russian, on the other hand, isn’t. Like English, it’s very difficult to find something that distorts or changes. It’s very difficult to shock in English with language. Not that that was Sorokin’s intention, just to shock. If you look at him in a sense as an abstract painter, where the paint on the canvas is what the painting is about—how the paint is applied, how the strokes are used—there’s no message in a way. Painting is about painting. Words on a page are about words on a page. I think that dehumanizing, really extreme violence that takes place in some of the novels is partly an attempt to do the same thing. At a certain point the brotherhood of the twenty-three thousand stop being able to read letters on a page; it just becomes black ink moving around, and words don’t have any meaning. They also can’t see faces; there’s no individuality. So I think, in an American context, you might call him a modernist, plain and simple.

Russian Translator Marian Schwartz

Marian Schwartz, who translated our edition of Yuri Olesha’s Envy, will be in discussion with Russian Booker–Prize winner Olga Slavnikova in New York next week.

Date and Time: Wednesday, 25 May 2011, at 6:45pm
Jerry Orbach Theater
1627 Broadway, New York, 3rd floor
(entrance on the south side of West 50th Street)