Evgeny Pavlov

Department of Comparative Literature
Princeton University
evpavlov@princeton.edu

Translator’s Preface

 

“All this is familiar; still it needs to be repeated. In its very essence the decorative grid of the Chinese interior is inexhaustible. Repetitions do not exist as long as there is time. Thus non-coincidence, deviation, residue, all requiring a different approach” (“Syn/Opsis/Tax” 5). These words of the Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (iguana@comset.spb.ru) that open what may very well be considered his poetic manifesto¹ would also make an excellent epigraph to the text that follows here. It has been five years since his work was introduced to PMC readers in the 1993 Symposium on Russian Postmodernism (PMC 3:2).² The brief essay in the present issue is in many ways a repetition of what was then said by and about him. Yet the non-coincidence is apparent. Five years ago Russian postmodern poetry was too much of a conceptual curiosity to be dealt with entirely on its own terms. In 1992, after a bilingual reading by Arkadii in Charles Bernstein’s poetics seminar at SUNY-Buffalo, where he was then a visiting fellow and I a graduate student, I remember being asked how his work sounded to a Russian ear–whether its ostensible affinity with American Language poetry did not make for a certain foreignness, constructedness, a certain out-of-the-test-tube quality.³ At the time, I was unsure. His poetry was certainly most unlike anything I had ever heard or read in my native tongue. As Barrett Watten put it in his contribution to the PMC symposium, Dragomoshchenko’s poetry “rips a hole in the lyrical fabric of [Russian] tradition’s… authority” by resolutely breaking with the “overdeterminations of sound and sense that have provided the standard for Russian verse” (Watten 2). The question of influence, of tradition and innovation, of “lineages and cultural formations” (Perloff 13) thus suggested itself before any other. It was an obvious one. It remains to be explored further.

 

Today, however, new lines of questioning can also be pursued, or at least invoked. Now that “the momentum that has brought the [“Third Wave” of Russian literature] brilliantly crashing on our shore” (Perloff 13) has somewhat subsided, other approaches seem possible. One of them is to imagine what it would be like to view post-Soviet poetry as something other than a representational practice specific to a given context, and thus, as something not always already determined by, or reducible to, a habitual set of national attributes current at a given moment. This possibility is not easily recognized simply because it appears to have few immediate uses.

 

Consider the history of Dragomoshchenko’s essay “On the Superfluous.” The piece was commissioned by a small British journal as a commentary on the contemporary state of poetry in Russia. Yet the text Arkadii wrote and asked me to translate was flatly rejected as it contained no actual information about the specifics of the poetry scene. The editor was in fact puzzled and, I think, slightly insulted. He was clearly expecting a straightforward report on the latest poetic trends but instead received a dense paratactic rumination that mentioned Russia only in passing and was mostly concerned with poetry as “something superfluous” to what we generally talk about when we talk about poetry. In other words, Dragomoshchenko’s reflections offered a view of poetry and its scene that was not centered on any particular historical, political, cultural, or literary developments, links or connections other than those poetry itself projects “in its constant self-questioning.” The view of poetry presented in his essay was, to be sure, poetic. For that very reason it was deemed redundant, gratuitous, self-indulgent–superfluous, as it were.

 

Which, of course, illustrates Arkadii’s point only too well, even though one cannot but sympathize with the British editor’s frustration. Dragomoshchenko’s own frustration, however, is also understandable given the context out of which he is writing–the context on whose framing we always rely so heavily in our discussions of Russian poetry. What happened to poetry in that context is succinctly described in the first two paragraphs of “On the Superfluous.” But the framing and the framed keep changing places. Poetry, Dragomoshchenko insists, is “always something else;” it is “that state of language which in its workings constantly exceeds the actual order of truth” (“Syn/Opsis/Tax” 7). It exceeds its context as easily as it exceeds its poet.

 

Without asking the poet anything, they ask, is it possible to ask about that to which no answer is possible; not asking, they ask: does such a question exist, whose absence gives birth to the same irresistible anxiety which quite naturally excites doubt about many things, and first about the fascination of the paternalistic relations between the holder of truth and its user... And what answer might it be, this pearl, locked around its shell? ("Syn/Opsis/Tax" 7)

 

“On the Superfluous” does not provide an answer to that impossible question; it fails to describe contemporary Russian poetry or its scene. What it does describe, however, is a “four-dimensional landscape of an impeccable action” where every step is in the right direction, where “having begun in one thing,” one finishes “in another without having moved at all” (Xenia 66).

 

Translator’s Notes

 

1. “Syn/Opsis/Tax” (Konspekt-kontekst in the original) is the author’s preface to Description, his first collection of poems translated into English. It also opens his prose volume Phosphor and is included in The Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. The complete Russian-language archive of Dragomoshchenko’s works is located at www.vavilon.ru/texts/dragomo0.html.

 

2. A text-only version of the Septmember 1993 issue of Postmodern Culture, including the Symposium on Russian Postmodernism, is available at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.193/contents.193.html. The full hypertext version of this issue is available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/toc/pmcv003.html#v003.2 (Please note that only paid subscribers to PMC at Johns Hopkins’ Project MUSE have access to this site. Information on subscribing to Project MUSE is available at http://muse.jhu.edu/ordering.)

 

3. Dragomoshchenko’s long-time friendship, engagement, and collaboration with Language poets, first and foremost Lyn Hejinian, whose brilliant translations of his work brought him wide recognition in the West, partially explain why the initial American response to his poetry was so comparative. Marjorie Perloff’s contribution to the 1993 PMC symposium, for example, focuses, more than anything else, on Dragomoshchenko’s position vis-à-vis his American counterparts.

 

4. I wish to thank Amy Billone for invaluable help with editing this translation.

 

5. Konstantin Vaginov (1899-1934), a member of the Leningrad literary group OBERIU, whose work is still largely untranslated into English. The quote is from Trudy i dni Svistonova (Labors and Days of Svistonov), a metafictional novel that constructs complex allegorical figurations of Russia’s literary modernity. On some echoes of OBERIU poetics and philosophy in Dragomoshchenko’s work, see Molnar.

 

6. Protection against the undead used by the philosophy student Khoma Brut, main character of Nikolai Gogol’s Viy.

 

Works Cited

 

• Dragomoshchenko, Arkadii. Description. Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1990.
• —. “Syn/Opsis/Tax.” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 9 (June 1991): 5-10.
• —. Xenia. Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1994.
• —. Phosphor. St. Petersburg: Severo-zapad, 1994.
• Etkind, Alexander. Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia. Trans. Noah and Maria Rubins. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
• Johnson, Kent and Stephen M. Ashby, eds. The Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992.
• Molnar, Michael. “The Vagaries of Description: the Poetry of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.” Essays in Poetics 14:1 (April 1989): 76-98.
• Perloff, Marjorie. “Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?” Postmodern Culture 3:2 (January 1993).
• Watten, Barrett. “Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Ilya Kabakov.” Postmodern Culture 3:2 (January 1993).