On Russian Meta-Realist Poetry: A Conversation with Ilya Kutik

Russian versus American Poetry

On behalf of a friend who is studying the use of Vergil in Russian culture, I wrote with a question to Ilya Kutik, the author of a large body of poetry in Russian and of two books of essays in English, one of the founders (together with Alexei Parshchikov and Ivan Zhdanov) of the Russian poetic movement called by critics "Meta-realism." As readers of this column will already know, I have been working with Kutik for many months on translations of Russian poetry, and spending a lot of time talking about what it is that poetry does when it rhymes, and how poetry thinks, and what it is that poetry gets hold of in the world, and in our experience and spirit. Many of the particular issues we raise turn out to make visible interesting differences between poetry in English and poetry in Russian. The question this time was what he had to say generally about Russian translations of Vergil. Characteristically, he replied with such specificity and ready knowledge that my first reaction was to think how incapable I am of responding in such a fashion to any similar question. If this difference between us is not only about him and me, then perhaps it suggests, in turn, a different relationship of the poet to poetry in Russia and America. Ilya answered the question about Vergil from the point of view of the whole history of Russian poetry.

He wrote to me: "Vergil was translated many times, from the late 17th c. on-mostly his Bucolics and Georgics. In 1933, the modern version of them both was published by the most famous translator of the Greek and Latin poetry, Sergei Shervinsky (1892-1991). Vergil's Aeneid was translated (in its entirety)-in the 19th/20th-century-by Valery Briusov (1873-1924), the founder of Russian Symbolism, a most illustrious Russian poet. One can say that it is a remarkable translation, in which Briusov tried to convey even the phonetics of each of Vergil's verses in each corresponding Russian line, and to make the translation great poetry at the same time. In some places, it is the greatest poetry, but sometimes either Briusov fails or Vergil does or both: the poetry is too complex for an average reader and is very interesting only for an enthusiastic reader.

"Perhaps poetry is like this in general (and Briusov wanted to show this idea through his translation of Vergil). In Russia, there is still a debate about how to approach Briusov's translation of the Aeneid. The latest full version of the Aeneid was first published in 1971 by the late Sergei Osherov (1931-1983)-also a very famous translator of Greek and Latin poetry. It reads easily, as a good well-built narrative, is sustained very well; however there are not too many poetic wonders in it."

It's those wonders that lead me in my desire to understand, despite my not knowing a word of Russian, something about Russian Meta-the concept and the practice at the heart of the poetic school of "Meta-realism." And for this reason I have embarked on translating, with Ilya, a few poems each by several of the greatest and most difficult twentieth-century poets-Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, and Marina Tsvetaeva-and another 20 or so poems by other Russian poets, as well (including two or three by Ilya himself). We think of what we're doing as a way of trying to show, in American English, what Russian poetic thinking is like; so we are writing essays, too.

About Vergil, Ilya added: "And, I was again thinking and thinking, there are so many translations and versions of Vergil in Russian that in order to make even a short bibliography of them and comment on major things in this bibliography, plus add to it the major (recent!) articles, essays, etc., would take-at least-a week of hard work. I know (probably, unfortunately) too much about translations and their history in Russian and in Russia, plus how all this goes together with the history of poetic mentality. If, for example, we take the poem 'Mosquito' (for centuries ascribed to Vergil), then we get a whole extremely important chain of poems in Russian, from the eighteenth century (Derzhavin) to the present (Brodsky's poem 'Fly,' for example, is also a version of Vergil's 'Mosquito'). What more can I say?"

To my mind, Ilya's two main points were that indeed there was evidently much more he could say, and that what he would say would relate the history of the translation of Vergil to Russian poetic thinking in general. It is well known in English, too, that poetic translation has had enormous influence on all the developments of poetic technique, stance, and substance, from the very beginning of what we might call English poetry. The English poet and translator Dick Davis has written a compact and persuasive, even impassioned, essay on this very topic, "All My Soul is There: Verse Translation and the Rhetoric of English Poetry" (Yale Review, 90: 1, January 2002), in which I read him to say that, beyond the way a history of poetic translation has changed what English poets do and what they make poetry sound like, there have also necessarily been changes in the varieties of poetic thinking. What Ilya and I seem to be trying to do-as our project has been accumulating translations and essays and source materials for a kind of literary montage, and as our conversations have led us to topics that I, at least, could never have anticipated (above all, the relationship between poetic thinking in Russian and apophatic theology)-is to make visible what kind of poetic thinking is present (and absent) in each poem we have translated and annotated with our comments, from our two points of view, which are very different not only individually but also culturally and historically.