Matvei Yankelevich
_____________________________________________________________
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! THE RUSSIANS ARE
COMING!
Field
Notes on Russian-American Poets and the Question of Bilingual Poetry; Volume One : Philip Nikolayev,
Eugene Ostashevsky, Ilya
Bernstein, and Genya Turovskaya
Editor’s Note: This essay is the
first installment in an ongoing series of field notes on particular
Russian-American poets. Future installments written by Matvei
Yankelevich will appear in subsequent issues of
Octopus.
INTRODUCTION
The
term "Russian-American Poetry" can be
applied to such a wide array of aesthetic, generational and linguistic
varieties, not to mention differences in bilingual ability or preferred writing
language, that its use cannot be but suspect. What would appear to be a small
coterie is really a prism reflecting most theoretical debates between poetic
schools that exist in the American as well as in the Russian context. It
defines a group that is breaking out in different direction through the boundaries
of its defining term.
"Poetry
of the Russian Emigration" is usually reserved for Russian language poems
written by Russians in emigration, particularly those in
Then
there are bilingual poets, who may or may not write in both native and acquired
languages. Some of these poets are bilingual to the degree that it is unclear
which language is their native tongue, despite the obvious chronological fact.
But
what is bilingual poetry? Can it really exist? There are, of course,
multi-lingual poems—the later work of Czech poet Ivan Blatny
comes to mind—and yet, it seems that émigré poets choose to write poems in either
their native or the host language, taking one or the other more seriously. Some
switch back and forth, writing differently in the different languages. Others
translate their own work, in effect re-writing it.
The
poetry of bilingual poets is often born out of the awareness of bilingual
experience—the split, the dichotomy, and double vision. “Russian-American”
seems suited, to some degree, to describe a kind of poet that is—more or
less—consciously aware of his or her unusual place in English-language
literature.
The
current investigation is an on-going project. It's hard to imagine where and
when it will end, and whether or not its findings will uphold any preliminary
postulations. Primarily, it is concerned with Russian-Americans who are writing
poetry today, and primarily with their English-language work, the way it
relates to their varied Russian backgrounds, the time and circumstances of
their emigration, and how it fits into and is influenced by the (very
different) poetic traditions of Russian and American poetry. In this and
forthcoming installments of this investigation I will choose poets who—in print
and in performance—make us wonder about issues of accent, of
"Russianness," of bilingual experience, of representations and marketing
of identity.
* * *
The
current situation in Russian-American poetry cannot be surveyed without taking
into account the tremendous and odious celebrity of Joseph Brodsky. Brodsky
came to
The
Nobel laureate, and U.S. Poet Laureate spoke (and wrote) in English with an
indelible and unapologetic Russian accent. Though clearly rooted in the Russian
Modernist tradition (Akhmatova, Mandelstam, etc.),
and written primarily in Russian, Brodsky's poetry changed definitively in his
Western exile. The Russian word “kabak” became easily
substituted by the English “bar[2].”
His transitory life continued: in hotels, (like the Barbizon
Terrace in
The
exiled poet became a medium for Russian readers who could not leave the
Indeed,
Joseph Brodsky tried his hand at writing poems in English. Unsurprisingly, his
English poems continued the formal preoccupations of his Russian poems, but
were less innovative. His attempts at writing poetry in English garnered little
attention from critics. In fact, it would be true to say that were these poems
not written by the
Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky, but by some other Russian immigrant, or even by
an American author, they would not have garnered interest from either readers
or publishers. The maîtres of English poetry for
Brodsky were Frost and Auden, and he attempted to
imitate—as best he could—their example.
Yet
his sensitivity to English is inconsistent. For example in the sentimental poem
"A Song," Brodsky uses "I wish you were here, dear" as a
refrain—a line that no American poet would even try to pass off for poetry (not
without an ironic wink) as it would no doubt elicit in their minds the popular
Pink Floyd song, not to mention the cliché sound of the sentiment so expressed.
This lack of cultural sensitivity kept Brodsky from becoming a poet of the
English language. His rhymes in English are often either trite or awkward, and
the whole of his English language output is old fashioned and derivative of
other poets. No doubt, Brodsky was aware to some degree of the ineptitude of
his English verse, as most of his writing in English took the form of the
essay.
Even a great Russian poet like Brodsky, with
all his knowledge of English poetry and proficiency in writing English prose
and criticism, could not become a Russian-American poet. Nor, perhaps, would he
have wanted to—he was content with being a foreigner. The Russian side of his
mind outweighed the American. Though he mastered it, English remained foreign
to him, like an appendage grafted onto the body, unwieldy and limited in its
functions.
* * *
PHILIP
Philip
Nikolayev is a bilingual (at least) poet living in
[…] s I become
fluent
many language
fountainpen in fact of language
& God
I always mean God
since I
com
from my
ethnic background in
& I
make ye my own English
& I
make ye mine type of English
& then
some
b&its moon tuna
East
European cuisine i.e.
vodka for
breakfast on empty stomach
what does
your furniture mean to my soul
my Slav
root bag problems
& two
or three regurgitated stereotype
forget it
also to
forget
bondage of
grammar
which
constrain true think
I no prob make myself underst&al
ladies
& gentlemen
so now
open
wh@ you see your left
2 fly bits
of the friendly skies
recline
your chair
magic
opener of pilots drift
upward in
the atmosphere of language yow
I'm taking
you couple hundred lexemes higher
into
stratosphere of we language[3]
In
Nikolayev's Monkey
Time, it is typical for a terse metaphysical poem made up of neat quatrains
in short, tight, metrical lines, rhymed in a simple ABAB schema, to be followed by a cacophonic poem made up of chaotic
lists of words—or only parts of words—proper names, vulgar expressions, slang,
snippets of advertising, trademarked products and other refuse of a
contemporary cultural mash. The metaphysical poem, taking "It Never Leaves[4]"
for example, may be reminiscent of Tyutchev,
Dickinson, or Laura Riding. The list poem is more like the poetry of contemporary
lyric poet David Trinidad, or the Language poetry of Bruce Andrews, or a
Burroughs/Gysin cut-up. The immense incongruity of
these two kinds of poems existing side by side in a single collection should
seem natural, or positions itself as self-evident, in the context of postmodern
writing, with which
Yrs, eminently postmodern
and deadly, Philip Nikolayev[5]
In a message to the Buffalo Poetics Listserv,
dated
I don't see myself as a Russian poet
because I don't write anything literary in Russian, nor do I particularly
identify with any sort of "Russian sensibility" (whatever that
means), although people are already beginning to pigeonhole me into that (to my
slight annoyance) […] Although [I] love Russian poetry, am on friendly terms
with many Russian poets, and am "steeped" (love that word) in Russian
culture […] I don't really consider myself a part of any sort of Russian émigré
"community" or "identity," although I have no objection to
them either. The whole business of national identity/mentality
is quite foreign to me. I couldn't care less for such things.
However,
The
thought that one might now write "world poetry," especially in
English, stands on a slippery slope toward imperial hubris. Unfortunately, one
of the holdovers of Russian intelligentsia
thinking, in line with Brodsky's worldview, is that poetry might attain to a
universal poetic language that transcends the confines of the specific (in this
case, Russian) language, its peculiar history, sound, and struggle. (When Velemir Khlebnikov made such a
claim for poetry, he had in mind a sound poetry un-attributable to a single
language.) During a panel on Russian Diaspora Writing at the 2005 AWP
conference in Vancouver, the acclaimed young poet Ilya
Kaminsky made similar gestures toward the falsehood
of labels such as "Russian-American," yet his English poems are
published in a collection titled "Dancing in Odessa" (Tupelo Press,
2004). It is my opinion that identity may not matter for all immigrant
poetries, yet it cannot be ruled out or brushed over in cases where that
identity is paramount to the understanding of the poetry or poets in question,
and perhaps even to the very rhythms and images and influences which propel its
writing.
The
notion of identity, which
It
is understandable that a Russian-American poet might wish to be rid of the
stigma and stereotypes of the Russian immigration. However, it is difficult to
escape the fact that Russian-American identity and, especially, bilingualism
serve as points of departure, as content, providing the background for
insurgence or conformity.
…and Mom is
taking those tranquilizers because of me, I'm being a pedagogical disaster, you
are the only adult I can really talk to, but Mom is against English because she
feels it alienates me from her, and she is right, and I stupidly ask her, can't
you just learn it yourself so you can understand, and she just cries…
Like
this autobiographical poem, the blurbs on the back of Monkey Time contradict Nikolayev's
assertion of non-identity, most likely to the authors "annoyance,"
insisting that Nikolayev's Russian—if not
Russian-American—or, at least, foreign identity inform the book's innovative
verse.
English is
constantly being destabilized by an awareness of Russian, Hindi, Bangla… (W.N. Herbert)
His ears
are wide open, international… (Robert Kelly)
His is a poetics
in cahoots with a self-created idiomatic Russian-American English that, like Nabokov's, adds to the possibilities of the word, of the
line, of the overall form of expression in the text. (John Kinsella)
One
wonders, were it not for the obviously Russian sound of his name, if Nikolayev would be portrayed as something other than a
Russian or Russian-American poet, since the languages interspersed in these
English poems include French, Latin, Hindi, computer programming languages,
American street-speech, as well as and as
much as Russian. But Russian writers of English, with few exceptions, can't
help being compared to Nabokov, Brodsky and the like,
otherwise their aesthetics and attitudes are seen as outgrowths of Russian
Futurism, or other peculiarly Russian movements. Should the blame fall on the
critics who rely on the poet's connection to
Whatever the case, there seems to be
something about the Russian literary tradition that won't let go of its
progeny, and won't let them forget where they come from, even if the author
should travel thousands of miles to get away from his cloying parent. Of
course, Russianness in American poetry, as I will try to show, is not the same
across the board. Each poet
approaches the problem of his or her Russian-American predicament in a
different manner, with varying intents. There are traditionalist
Russian-American poets and avant-garde Russian-American poets, of as many
colors and shades as perhaps there are in the overall American poetic culture.
* * *
EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY: NO LANGUAGE BUT MANY
Eugene
Ostashevsky, born in 1968, was 11 when he arrived in
Surprisingly, Ostashevsky
bears some resemblance to Brodsky. Not that he falls under Brodsky’s
influence—in fact, on one of the many fronts attacked by his writing, Ostashevsky seems to strike against the Brodskian
tendency in Russian poetry. But there are curious motifs that are common to the
two poets of diametrically opposed generations.
Metaphors
involving mathematical figures abound in Ostashevsky’s
work (often as an acknowledged echo of OBERIU poetry), as they do in Brodsky’s.
Of the horsemen in “Group Portrait with Massacre[9],”
Ostashevsky writes “Our number was circular; if you
squared it / It would end in itself, even for the visually impaired.” Later in
the poem, he discusses tic-tac-toe in the context of “binary arithmetic” and
combinatory math: “It’s like flipping 9
pennies / And 9 is 32, my maties….” The name of one
of the horsemen is “17,” a prime number.
Ostashevsky's "DJ Spinoza Fights the Begriffon"
contains a battle between two comic-philosophical entities, one of whom is
described as follows:
The Begriffon looks like
x²
_ y² ‗ 1
a² b²
Whereas,
DJ Spinoza's fighting style is described as "more geometrico."
Brodsky
argues against
The
poems of Ostashevsky's that could be called love
poems favor crassness over delicacy, as do many of Brodsky’s. The effect of “To
a Woman Who as a Young Lady was a Frequent Heroine of my Verses[13],”
which contains couplets such as “Your body flopped around like a sturgeon, /
though 5 minutes before you were a virgin,” rides on the poet’s frankness about
sexual desire and emotional lack. Ostashevsky’s
“…like sister & brother / we loved others fiercer than we loved one
another,” and “…before we bed / I count the gray hairs on your head,” remind me
of Brodsky’s intentionally abrasive manner of speaking of sex, or addressing
his past lovers, and the way that crudeness lends energy and meaning to a genre
that is for the most part ridden with cliché. The image of the sexual act as
“legs placed on shoulders,” for example, occurs unapologetically several times
in Brodsky's poems—half-metaphorically in the well-known poem beginning “I have
often repeated that fate is a game…[14]”
and quite literally in the third part of “Lithuanian Divertisement[15].”
A more subtle example would be the motif of the pants and the light switch in
Brodsky’s poem “Love[16].”
Brodsky’s
erudite poetry is replete with references to classical literature and
philosophy while incorporating street language and cursing into his delicately
crafted verses. Ostashevsky, who holds a Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature from Stanford, and whose studies were heavy in
philosophy with a dissertation on the concept of "zero" in
Renaissance culture, peppers his creations with Latin phrases, yet is
unfettered in his use of the “lower” lexicon, often adopting for poetic usage
the a-grammatical syntax, swear words, and contractions common in rap lyrics
and urban ghetto-speak. This taking on of different lexical personas is a
central aspect of Ostashevsky’s poetics, and is
rooted in his bilingualism, which Ostashevsky
describes as having “no native tongue[17]."
Quite
opposite of Brodsky's heavy name-dropping, the various academic references and
philosophers’ and writers’ names which pop up in Ostashevsky’s
poems undergo a constant attack of laughter and parody. Often this comic
subversion of the canon occurs through a kind of murder by rhyme: “doing
circles around
On Esquiline hill
Death
paused on my windowsill
She was
not as the other
a stately
lass she had no class
in fact
she had nothing even resembling tits and ass
so I must
fix my pronoun It was
a common
death, a winged skeleton
Down stuck
to its bones as if they were gelatin[18]
This
technique is also much used in hip-hop lyrics, where the verbal artist will
speed up when speaking a many-syllable line in order to match it with its
rhyming partner of much shorter length.
Indeed,
when performing his own work, Ostashevsky often takes
on the persona of a somewhat deranged immigrant rapper, swaying back and forth
sometimes in a manner reminiscent simultaneously of davening
Jews and hip-hop videos. To this mix he adds a holy-fool intensity, the stagger
of either a drunk or a fanatic speaking in tongues, meanwhile stretching his
voice to its limits. In performance, Ostashevsky will
often employ this speeding up and slowing down, creating dramatic tempo
dynamics and metric variation. Or else, Ostashevsky
will keep the metrics stoically stable but will mangle English word order to
get a rhyme in:
In smashed
copses
They burn
corpses
No scent worse
is[19]
While showing off an erudite knowledge of
intellectual history (in poems about Boethius, Sextius Propertius, number
theory, etc.) Ostashevsky plays irreverently with the
names he drops. Spinoza becomes a DJ and a kind of comic-book hero, who duels
with the Begriffon (a combination of Heidegerian concept and fantasy monster)[20].
In "The Second Part of This Poem," the Begriffon
tries to convince DJ Spinoza as to language's flacidity:
Listen DJ
Spinoza I had enough of your logocentrism
Words are
justifications only
Only
physical power
adjudicates
the quizzical hour
Only the
fist
differentiates
between resist and desist
Did you
ever see giraffes
hold a
symposium?
The
consciousness of animals is pure time
untrammeled
by the vagaries of Sic probo
Let us
meet man to man
in the
style of the whooping crane
or the
praying mantis
Let us
dismiss words
in toto
as the
unionized janitors of reality!
DJ Spinoza
replies
Listen
you, чудо-юдо заморский Begriffon
I don’t
care for your praying mantis
your whooping crane
eagle or monkey
Ostashevsky breezily fuses Russian
and Latin into English verse. The inter-language rhymes add to the linguistic
comedy of the poem. The multi-lingual moments of his poetry heighten the
feeling of foreignness that Ostashevsky flings in our
face, rather than subdue it.
The
Begriffon, who we find out is a stand-in for the
author, is dressed as follows:
The front
of his T-shirt says
i am ambivalent
The back
of his T-shirt says
i am not ambivalent
Ostashevsky often plays with duality,
utilizing puns, word play, contradictory statements, verbal ambiguity, as well
as double personas. For example, in a poem called "Language," Ostashevsky writes:
You say,
Know reads
No
That’s all you know
That’s all you do not know
The
homonyms of "know" and "no" are one of the more obvious
ambiguities of spoken English, one that emigres find
baffling. The title of his forthcoming collection, Iterature (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005), is itself
a play on words which mixes up oral speech and writing. Ostashevsky
is hinting at the classical cohesion of literature and oral culture, playing
with the postmodern Derridian debates on the subject
of theories of linguistic primacy.
Ostashevsky often
throws around bad or obvious rhymes, or slips into children's nursery rhyme.
This projection of children's verse onto "serious" literature is much
akin with the OBERIU writers of the 1920s and 30s—an important influence on Ostshevsky's work—who transferred their inventions in
children's literature to their philosophical poetry. In "Zoe's War," Ostashevsky
knowingly makes poor rhymes stacked in a random series for the sake of
infantilizing his poetic voice: "Here's an elephant / He is really fat //
Here's a hippopotamus / Show your bottom to us." In the same poem:
"On the ground mice hurry / They're in a hurry // In the air birds fly /
They cry, Bye bye."
For the sake of such "bad" or funny
rhymes, Ostashevsky might bend—or break—the rules of
English grammar, making himself sound like an immigrant, the immigrant we
expect him to be. In the poem, "I Found My Thrill," the narrator
describes the scene of his death as follows:
Please God
O God pretty pretty please
you who
does not exist
make this
Death my Death
don’t make
me a witness to another’s death
I would
rather fall on the floor in my elbow a saber
than
figure out life from the agony of my neighbor
Right as I
finished just saying No
there
appeared a very big Crow
In its
beak there was a serrated row
and as it
was going to bite me in t.w.o.
I again
cried, No!
Take my
neighbor, take her for here or to go,
Table on
that body I once did know
very
intimately, until it grow
into the
main ingredient of Sloppy Joe™
Pull out
her bluish intestines real slow
chop her
up into Caesar so
cheeze fly through the air like crimson snow[21]
The
barrage of rhymes centered around "No" demands that Ostashevsky go against grammatical constraints with the
phrase "until it grow." The long "o" is a splendid choice,
as the poem sarcastically references Edgar Allen Poe, specifically his poem
about the raven, which here is transformed in to "a very big Crow"
(the letter "C" capitalized in the Romantic fashion). The poem also
references Nancy Reagan's anti-drug campaign and American fast food alongside
classical death-symbolism. The language is anything but—even antagonistic
to—the classical mode we might expect form a poem that begins on one of the
Ostashevsky
uses certain techniques in his English writing that come directly from Russian
poets whom he has studied closely and translated with great zeal. Most
influential, perhaps, has been Alexander Vvedensky,
an author of the OBERIU group of the 1920s and 30s. Vvedensky's
rhymes are not only aural effects, they in fact move the poem by generating the
text. For Vvedensky, the necessity of rhyming was not
conformism to traditional verse forms, which were still prevalent in Russian
Modernist poetry. Rather, rhyme gave Vvedensky a tool
with which to poke fun at the expectations placed on poetry, and to parody
traditional verse. By giving us the rhyme as the glue that held the poem
together, Vvedensky was able to veer away from
typical poetic subject matter, from regular syntax, and logical continuity. In Vvedensky's poems, the first of two lines is the progenitor
of the second by way of the end-rhyme. So the second line, having been thus
spawned, is often connected to the first by end-rhyme only. One does not follow
the other logically, or in image-based continuity. With this technique of the
self-generating text, Vvedensky was able to move his
poetry beyond logically connected sentences toward an a-logical poetics. Vvedensky understood this project as a "critique of
reason more powerful than that of Kant."
We
have already seen the effect this method exerts on Ostashevsky's
poetry in the form of obviously forced rhymes which trivialize or poke fun at
the connections—made by metaphor or otherwise—between one line and the next,
like "doing circles around Stuy Park or /
studied NAUSEA by Jean-Paul Sartre[22]."
Such poetry-making uncovers (or deconstructs) the process of versification and
directs the reader's laughter at the poet's revealed ineptitude, pointing to
his Emperor's clothes, as it were. In this way, Ostashevsky
makes a gesture like that of a man pointing to his own foolishness—and thus
kicks the sublime rank of the Poet down a notch or two from his pedestal. (The
old-fashioned Russian intelligentsia would
frown, and Brodsky would disapprove.) We find examples of this kind of
rhyme-play all over Ostashevsky's work:
At the
time I was assailed by insects
as well as
outsects
My
defenses were implausible
My
scratching
would have
entertained a turntablist