Translator, Meet Philologist
Readers worldwide are likely to be familiar with the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky—either as Russian Futurism’s answer to Italian Futurism’s F.T. Marinetti or as the writer of this lovely lyric, found on his April 14, 1930 suicide note:
So to say -
“the incident dissolved”
the love boat
smashed against reality.
I’m through with life
and [we] should absolve
mutual hurts, grudges and anxieties.
But many readers may not be familiar with arguably Mayakovsky’s greatest poem, Про Это (lit. “About This” or “About It”), primarily because it has not managed to be translated well into English. There have been two main translations from which to learn, one appearing in a Selected Works in Three Volumes published by the Soviet government in 1985, the other as part of the gorgeous critical biography and annotated correspondence between Mayakovsky and his lover, Lilya Brik, Love Is the Heart of Everything, edited by Bengt Jangfeldt.
That’s why a new version of “Pro Eto” by Larisa Gureyeva and George Hyde, from Arc Translations, (published at the end of 2007 or early 2009, by alternating accounts), one that includes reproductions of the photomontages created by Alexander Rodchenko for the original 1922 publication, promised to hold so much for readers interested in not only the greatest artistic achievements of cubofuturism, but also one of the great unknown lyric poems of the twentieth century.
The title is brilliantly done: they choose to render it “That’s What,” a defiant expression that almost begs an exclamation point. It’s the kind of creative overwriting that the poem warrants. And by and large this teamed translation far surpasses what’s been done in English before. There is an ease to the language, a pull between extended lines and clipped lines, a directness, that is everpresent in the Russian. Kudos here for the tone: the tongue-in-cheek humor (“The kids wouldn’t believe it / that this way / and there. / An earthquake? / In winter? / At the post office?!”) seamless through sorties into Mayakovsky’s neologistic lyricism (“Nohow can I get my equipoise back / Like an osier / recognisable / by its papery hands / I am all too visible here.”)
But when all is said and done, this poem warrants a translation altogether astonishing, and that’s not quite what we’ve got here. Because more than just an expression of emotion or a lyric cry to–where, the heavens? society? the beloved?–this poem is a technical and formal achievement of the highest order.
I would challenge a translator, any translator, to attend to the body of criticism surrounding the Mayakovsky poem to grant the poem’s translation the sophistication it requires. Specifically, look to the philological study Verse Form and Meaning in the Poetry of Vladimir Maiakovskii by Robin Aizlewood, one of those tour de force analytical volumes that offers a wealth of insight for readers and potential translators of Mayakovsky’s work.
Granted, it’s dry, technical and exhaustive. But what a wealth of materials just waiting to be used! Aizlewood obsessively maps the meter and rhythm of every line of every Mayakovsky poem in order to trace Mayakovsky’s uses and exploitations of traditional Russian meters, as well as thematic links that follow the contours of these metrical patterns.
“Pro Eto,” for example, uses three main patterns that map onto various sections of the poem. Heroic ballad meter runs throughout, introducing the first-person speaker (a biographical Mayakovsky himself) as a kind of hero, or anti-hero, kicking against the pricks of NEP and increasingly bourgeois revolutionaries. Accentual verse is used for dialogue, starkly contrasting colloquial speech to the lofty narrative style by metrical ruptures. And then, during the poem’s final adoration, a depressingly cheery denouement in which Mayakovsky vows to immortalize his Lilya Brik with a poem that can inspire the future masses happily ensconced in communist society, the poet uses a freer ode meter. But all rhymed!
This level of technicality in composition belies some of the portraits we get of Mayakovsky as a firebrand revolutionary whose poetry is an outpouring of fervent emotion. That “Pro Eto” might be a technical achievement on the level of Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi pregha” should then be something at the fore of a translation, used to round out the true but not quite full picture we have of the poet up to now. Dear translator, look to Aizlewood.
I’ve always thought “the love boat” an accidentally infelicitous translation. Even “love’s boat” is better. I can’t read that phrase without mentally inserting “exciting & new” after it.
What thinkst of the recent collection Night Wraps the Sky?
I haven’t spent much time with the volume, but much of what I’ve read falls in my view into the category of a portrait of Mayakovsky the human dynamo. As I suggest, there’s a lot to it that’s true. Most of the short lyrics are little rocket blasts, and translations by a poet like Ron Padgett (if I remember correctly, I don’t have the volume at home–his poems made an impression) are beautifully executed, lively and powerful. This narrative long-form lyric is different in kind.
And yes, accidental infelicity is really the translator’s bane. Especially when you’re dealing with a poet who charges up casual speech like M, a connotation misfire can really gut the whole body of the poem.
Good timing: I have been debating purchasing this edition of “Pro-Eto,” but I am a bit hesitant to shell out the thirty dollars sight-unseen. I appreciate your observations and thank you for bringing Aizlewood and Jangfeldt to my attention. I take your estimation of the translation to mean: not stellar, but, given the difficulties of the translator’s task at hand, not bad. As I have no intention of picking up Russian and can’t reasonably expect another translation any time soon, not bad will probably suffice. But how is the volume itself? The reproductions, the binding…?
Almereyda’s volume (viz. “Night Wraps the Sky”) makes for a reasonably nice commodity, but content-wise it is largely derivative featuring, as it does, little snip-its from other volumes like a few lines, literally, from Perloff’s “The Futurist Moment” or Shklovsky’s book.
As for the translations, they include some original offerings by Katya Apekina, Val Vinokur, and Matvei Yankelevich, but also reprints of Hayward and Reavey, Daniels, and others. Though I know nothing of Russian, comparison with other translations suggests a rather permissive license. Thus, in Blake’s edition “The Bedbug and Selected Poetry,” Hayward and Reavey’s rendering of “At the Top of My Voice” has:
“It’s no habit of mine / to caress / the ear / with words; / a maiden’s ear / curly-ringed / will not crimson / when flicked with smut. / In parade deploying / the armies of my pages, / I shall inspect / the regiments in line. / Heavy as lead, / my verses at attention stand, / ready for death / and for immortal fame. / The poems are rigid, / pressing muzzle / to muzzle their gaping / pointed titles. / The favorite / of all the armed forces, / the cavalry of witticisms, / ready / to launch a wild hallooing charge, / reins its chargers still, / raising / the pointed lances of the rhymes.”
In contrast, in Almereyda’s volume, Padgett’s self-described “adaptation” (“Screaming my Head Off”) has:
“My poems do not powder / the ears / or nibble the earlobes / of some pretty young girl. / Shit no! My poems / jump out like mad gladiators. / ‘Kill!’ / they cry. / Hand to hand / and head to head! / And the words fly out / like bullets / exploding / In your brain.”
Fun – but is it Mayakovsky?
Re: new material in Night Wraps
My Hat co-editor Chris Edgar contributes an essay on Mayakowsky’s love affair with and in America. In a fairly territorial piece in the Boston Review, Perloff asked after Chris’s credentials — a reproachable rhetorical move, frankly, given that it’s a matter of public record that yes, Chris did graduate work in Russian at Columbia. The juicy item in Chris’s piece concerns Mayakowsky’s American love child. Otherwise, there’s not too much in the book that readers of Woroszylski’s Life or Shklovsky’s Circle won’t already know.
(Speaking of reproachable rhetoric in the BR, I wondered in a draft of a recent piece of mine there why Almereyda made a festschrift and not a biopic — luckily for everybody this whole section of the piece was cut.)
That Shklovsky’s Circle is out of print is a source of great bafflement to me. I could read that book every year, and would certainly give it as a Christmas present to anyone I know contemplating a life in poetry. Here’s hoping Dalkey plans a reissue.