Arkadii
Dragomoshchenko (b. Germany / USSR / Russia)
1946-2012
Born
in Potsdam, Germany, Arkadii Trofimovich Dragomoshchenko spent his youth in the
Ukraine of the Soviet Union. He was a student at the Russian Philological
Department in Kiev, and later worked as a reporter for AP News in Kiev while
attending the Institute of Theatre, Music, and Cinematography.
In 1969 he moved to St. Petersburg where
he has lived since. There is was first employed as a night watchman, then as a
street sweeper, and later as a stoker at the former Leningrad State University
Psychological Department while working on his eight book-length collections of
poetry and two full-length plays. He was a founding member of the famed
Club-81.
In 1978 he received the Andrey Bely
Independent Literary Prize, and other prizes followed, the Electronic Text
Award (for work from Phosphor), and the International Literary Prize of 2009.
His first book was Nebo Sootvetstvii
(Sky of Correspondence), published in 1990. The same year a collection in
English, Description, translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova was
published by Sun and Moon Press in the USA. Xenia followed in 1994,
published the same year in English, again by Sun and Moon Press. Other books of
poetry, followed, Pod Podozreniem (Under Suspicion), and his
selected poetry, Opisanie in 2000.
Dragomoshchenko also has published several
books of fiction and prose, including Phosphor, Kitajskoe Solnce,
translated into English as Chinese Sun (Ugly Duckling Press), and Bezrazlichia
(Indifferences), a book of collected prose. Dalkey Archive Press published
a selection of Dragomoshchenko's prose as Dust in 2009.
He translated the work of Lyn Hejinian,
John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Michael Palmer, Eliot Weinberger,
Barrett Watten and others in Russian, and served as co-editor for The Anthology
of Contemporary American Poetry in Russian Translation, as well as for The
Anthology of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry.
Critic Marjorie Perloff wrote of the
poet's work: "For Dragomoshchenko, language is not the always already used
and appropriated, the pre-formed and prefixed that American poets feel they
must wrestle with. On the contrary, Dragomoshchenko insists that "language
cannot be appropriated because it is perpetually incomplete" ...and, in an
aphorism reminiscent of Rimbaud's "Je est un autre," "poetry is
always somewhere else."
Dragomoshchenko's work has been collected
into several anthologies and he has lectured in the Department of Philosophy at
the St. Petersburg State University and been a visiting Professor at the
University of California, San Diego, SUNY Buffalo, and the Smolny Institute of
Liberal Arts and Science, an affiliate of Bard College.
His collected prose works Ustranenie
Neizvestnogo
were published in 2013,
Dragomoschenko died in 2012.
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Nebo
Sootvetstvii
(Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel Press, 1990); Xenia (St. Petersburg: Borei
& Mitin Journal Press, 1994); Pod Podozreniem (St. Petersburg:
Borey-Art Press, 1997); Opisanie (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnaia Akademia
Press, 2000); Na Beregakh Iskliuchennoj Reki (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe
Obozrenie Press, 2006); Shoaling Things (with Jan Lauwereyns) (Ghent,
Belgium: Druksel, 2011); Tavtologia [collected poetry] (Moscow: Novoe
Literaturnoe Obozrenie Press, 2011).
POETRY
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH
Description, trans. by Lyn
Hejinian and Elena Balashova (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1990); Xenia,
trans. by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon
Press,1994)
For
an audio reading and video discussions with the poet, click below:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Dragomoshchenko.php
To
Alexei M. Parshchikov
Sunday,
May 10, 2009
I
don’t believe that it ended like that, don’t believe it at all, no.
Over
there, nothing ever ends, over there, there’s an ocean of air.
Over
there, if you want to be with her forever, there’s nothing terrible about it,
Because
the terrible doesn’t exist, there is only poverty, and there is nothing
Terrible
about that, there is nothing more terrible than what’s terrible,
Like
love, which is beneath all beggars, beneath everyone, everything,
But
happiness lies elsewhere, not in being a madman, but in seeming
To
be one, and in being, at the same time a madman, who will say,
When
the occasion is right, that there’s nothing in the world that’s sweeter
than
being an idiot.
We’ll
end there, because everyone who is looking at us
Has
low-set eyes, they are magnificent in the plaster of poses and speech.
Close-set
eyes, long plaster sleeves,
The
hands are slow, disappear from sight. They are light at the passing of blood
and
After
a retort. Who taught them the art of direct speech? In which there isn’t a
single
Word
about how the conifer needles clung to the shoulders, when they didn’t exist
In
the first place, and won’t, because what will exist are Parshchikov’s
dirigibles,
His
flock, my diopters, addresses, telephones, and no oil at all.
—Translated
from Russian by Genya Turovskaya
To
a Statesman
When
you, Statesman, speak dreams across the notebook,
because
the rest menaces night with blue graphite,
and
crumbs don’t captivate, nor cast-off clothes, nor doors,
nor
veins along the calf, nor eyes, nor glass in Aegean linens –
For
you Stymphalian nightingales magnanimously whistle,
and
someone thinks just before sleep that once, long ago
you
played circular football, smashed your knee to pieces,
the
rain washed over your heads and no one was anointed, slated…
But
how much childhood grief was in the clay
that
clung to us like ivy, Statesman,
how
much tender pain in the loose gravel, the crunch; later
we
raced to the stream through the Sunday crowd and the crowd
didn’t
know
that
we had lost that game, but then again, maybe we won it –
protocols
turn to dust in concrete castles;
I
don’t remember why evening spread itself over the table, when
she
pulled off her jeans and in return asked for a book
the
name of which I can’t remember…and the pines at night?
O
Statesman,
Don’t
forget how you pulled tadpoles out of the rain barrel.
There
algae swayed – Phrygian, pentatonic trifles,
and
you caught sight of yourself and tried to launch a yacht in the cistern,
its
depth over your head (you would have choked on water)
and
the breadth no higher than the waist,
so
that the little boat seemed to be made of bread,
And
later empty years passed, lean as the rafters of a fire.
Was
it not the obvious end that drove you not into the raspberry brambles
but
the dry leaves, to the scythe’s swing through the clover. Were you crying
when
you understood that the voices didn’t reach you. That is,
they
did reach you – called you to supper, to come home – but they passed,
as
it were, through you,
so
you decided that would be it, you would get up
put
on a jacket, read a story about heroes, but the mint leaves
muttered
that there is lots of sorrow, that there is no one there,
mother
is there, from where the raspberry, the dry hedges,
the
gold beetles call from, but there’d be no answer because
the
seasons are different,
and
you have been a grownup for a long time, Statesman, – you conceive laws,
forgetting
that you failed to grasp the rules of simple mathematics;
the
same as in school when for the first time you sensed the smell of the girl
you
shared your desk with,
when
empires crumble like chalk on the coal blackboard, and you didn’t get
your
hands on the dress and if someone did, then it was no one.
Where
you didn’t exactly lose, there just isn’t enough time,
you
grew tired, that is, when you arrived everyone had already gone
except
for the spindle-tree, the white raspberry, painted-over windows.
This
is from where, as we leave, you appear full of bewilderment,
or
retribution, – it would have been easy to talk about football:
we
flopped miserably. The sky is excessive. Money doesn’t yield to patience.
Out
of us someone extracts – name, declination. Some have access
to
only one dream, others to two: there is no difference -
they
see the same thing: an attic, summer heat, sluggish hands
brushing
a cobweb from the palm of the wind.
—Translated
from Russian by Genya Turovskaya
To
Trofim K. Dragomoshchenko
Is
the fault really yours? Mine? They say it is verging on spring,
and
you are as old as you’ve always been,
and
– moreover – no longer appear in my dreams.
That
last time you were saying …But what?
What
truly matters? To speak: is that not enough? or too much?
Not
a single horizon can be as distinct
as
the one charted by the stone’s fall.
That
rivers go, gathering the arterial force of space?
Grammar
doesn’t abide muteness, shards of water,
the
incision of a fish, the whooping of birds from beyond the hill at sunrise?
Underwater
scales, of course, and fins, shade, bare feet.
And
some others – like cells in a long arithmetic book.
Soon
faces will blacken from the sun. It is truly so.
And
perhaps that’s good – it’s easier in summer, in summer
there
is no need to look over one’s shoulder and even the shadows of non-being
search
out coolness in the bonfires of a house, melting into the walls on the stories
torn
apart by the roots of the nut tree, the nasturtium, the mattiola.
Even
there, where we’ve already been, where we needn’t return.
The
world is merciful. That is why water rises as a wave, then ebb tide.
There
is no need to return to the cumbersome body, to press against
the
sleeping mummies of cigarettes, to stand as mica, among the figures of wine,
of
telluric books, staring bewildered into the zenith.
No
need to return
no
need, during insomnia, to flee, as the child after parting
entangles
the heart with madness. It’s unreasonable,
they
tell him, “what are you doing!” – they tell him – and it
is
precisely the body, its smallpox inoculations, knots of fracture,
sunset
of operatic wounds, its tattoos of inversion, some of them seeds,
when
nothing remains that is not with her, but vague letters,
the
scalpel’s exquisite glaciers, other things.
By
all accounts, in the same heap of bodies, when the time comes,
judging
by everything, you’ll no longer appear in dreams.
It
is not a question of the moon, of spring, of the time of the throat. Dreams
decay,
fall
to pieces, and their gold
flakes
into flocks of flying fish, going blind over the scales of the abyss.
Because
– that’s it! I almost forgot – not to see
you
in military whites among the vitriolic crystals of lilacs.
I
parted them with my hands, gulping air, I ran
(This
is from where that which will later appear as millennium comes).
Not
much time remained to see you there, leaning
on
the warm hood of the jeep. What could I have said
then?
How could I have understood that which I don’t understand today?
How
cleanly and slantingly it wafts of gasoline,
and
women’s white dresses at the moment of take off.
Of
course, water, small pitchers, hot brass cases,
myopia.
But even without auxiliary lenses I see
how
between you and me the sky widens and widens,
rising
higher than the Himalayas.
—Translated
from Russian by Genya Turovskaya
(From
Weather Report)
Not
dream, but the flowering of an invisible trace – what simpler –
In
that place where, in the pupil’s depth, lake ascends over lake,
without
diminishing in the participial turns – the sum of forms
Carried
beyond the limits of the thing, like a fissure beyond the limits of space.
Weather
is the sole event that time passes into.
Evening’s
bridle. Loops of resinous foliage, the cries of children in the delta.
The
story began without resistance, as a rumor, a conch shell in the fingers.
Blood,
seeping into stone, imprisoned in fragments of quartz,
again
grants the root its lengthening greed in this hillscape:
We
look from a distance: the trees are the same, differentiated by the leaf’s
contours,
the
stages of dying.
Names
come later, resembling diaries, lagoons, lanterns, chalk.
Later
still, in common speech, “now” encounters the word “now”
And
can find no answer in a single silence or deliberate pause,
Not
in a single reverberation of the unresisting and ephemeral – but
nevertheless
real –story
Whose
time has become weather, the object’s expansion.
Anyway,
I have not yet decided where best to meet your eyes.
At
the zenith? There the hiatus breeds a blinding hope.
Or
in the lowlands, where you are indistinguishable from the fog.
And
later still, the sole of the foot will not be touched by the trope of noiseless
gravel.
—Translated
from Russian by Genya Turovskaya
Inscription
Everything
was in decline.
Even
the talk about everything being in decline.
Space
was doubling, fences were rotting,
Jars
hummed in the wind;
the
melancholy of porcelain insulators, frozen splinters; the migrations of chalk;
breathing
at times would tighten the chest even beyond the city
or
a spark would fly between the temples.
Sometimes
it seemed that there was, all in all, a bird above the ground.
But
how quickly the body was dissipating in names!
The
perspective should have changed.
And
it changed.
Lights
swam across the eye-socket.
How
fleetingly we escaped reading.
O
great movements of time in money!
But,
in the socket, which had unfastened clothes of feathers,
reduced
to nothing, there beat as before
that
which was knowable.
Some
said that that building
(like
all allegories) was exceptionally crude,
at
the same time, others spoke about the tyranny of the father and about the
stella,
which
had lifted up the inscription of difference...
Like
the speech of an idiot, the other’s face gropes on.
Still
others, escaping into themselves, growing quiet,
began
to whisper passionately
something
about films, about which
all
those that came should have remembered.
The
talk was of the first war of Postmodernism,
About
the fact that Aquarius will undoubtedly console our hearts,
but
in the immense boundary of intentions space shrunk
to
slip past the heart.
Horror?
No. Indisputably, it was something else.
About
what does the imagination weave its dust strands
and
come undone along stitches towards morning,
and
all the same in them one could guess at
the
features of earlier times, — stories about people
whose
traces were becoming lost in the past.
But
what could be done with all this? Pictures?
Sound
recordings? A muttering of screens?
Icebergs
of libraries in a stalactitic dusk of waters?
The
roar of gutters in the era of downpour springs?
A
Heraclitian pupil of coffee? — dreams,
whose
banks have been losing their spring over the years
and
have been showered with whitewash,
when
at the edge of dawn hands clutched at them...
Appropriate?
Avoid
it? Become a noun? And not lose it?
Or,
better, melt like foliage?
These
words still remained
as
if they had been pulled out roots and all,
—
the increments in a phrase that establish the rhythm,
independent
of where they come from or
where
they vanish, they that have never belonged to us.
One
could even feel dizzy at times.
Worshippers
of the triple jump,
ornithology,
the dacha seasons,
connoisseurs
of the art of late communism,
wild
strawberries, philosophy, home singing,
incapable
of understanding anything impartially
neither
in words, nor in sounds, nor in stones and weather
—
phosphorescing moles of illuminations
(the
bodies, meanwhile, were being worn to perfection
by
a careless repetition of nights,
or
rather, as if by the death of others) — they were transforming,
while
not wanting to notice it, into something else.
One
wonders into what?
Into
coal? Dust? Offprints? Admissions? Clay? Into an echo
wandering
along lines of communication.
The
moon, meanwhile, has not become anything
even
at a time of flowering. — “That is trust.”
Probably,
just as contemplation of reflections
brings
a number into the world at the requisite time,
so
a contemplation of time turns them into reflections, specks of light, finally,
an ocean
that
reason cannot grasp.
It
was also in some way like “to escape”
or
“to begin,” or “to dissolve into the foliage”
(for
example: “I want to melt in you”...
How
many times has it been said? Fuck loads).
Like
ice under skates,
time
was slipping into a freezing roll.
Also,
if you remember, it was a different time of year.
The
midnight of midday. A deserted bus-stop.
Yellow
walls, an inky shadow on the outskirts (then
it
was the outskirts, now one cannot recognize those places),
which
seems to have gone blind
from
the impossibility of being only itself,
like
the moon or rubbish storms,
of
which there are more and more.
We
often fell silent mid-word that autumn.
A
spectral series of things, of which
not
one was able to become a thing,
but
only a rut of meaning that
one
will never have to untangle in the breath’s dew.
One
could hear outside the window
an
ash-tree swaying mutely and savagely in the ravine of a rupture of sky.
The
destruction touched everything.
Of
course, you can always find comfort
in
recollections of the time
when
no one knew about the collapse, about the inevitable,
and
farther on there is the snow mercury of a page.
The
collapse was simply a reward
that
concealed a hope that
we
would never set out from the place,
having
frozen like in a children’s game.
An
airport, the blow of a blue wall,
ocean
beaches in the boiling of flies...
Further
on there is the light on faded bricks
when
everything is set into a candle’s even flame,
like
the wax of insects, reality dissipates itself,
preserving
forms and possibility.
A
leg raised in running.
A
mouth ajar. What does laughter relate to?
What
reflections wound unmoving faces?
From
what springs is the water that washes
the
philosophical pores of the bones?
...There
was still such a comic-strip as:
“life
is eternal, and, swinging,
a
long shot is flying.”
A
gesture.
Tiles
that shoot upwards from the roofs.
Tension
and — you breath out:
you
sign for me(sign it in my name): dragomoshchenko;
the
boredom is excessive;
the
thread endless, like dust.
One
dreams of a continuation on a magnetic arc,
like
the wind roaring in a bottomless ring.
—Translated
from Russian by Genya Turovskaya
Paper
Dreams
Black
paper dreams of its own
inaudible
rustle;
its
own reflection in white.
Heat
drowsily watches heat
through
the panes of passion.
Metamorphoses
of water.
Carrying
reflections
down
to the bone’s marrow,
the
mirrors of droplets dry up,
Black
paper dreams
of
black: its dream constrained
by
the nature of non-color.
Through
the membrane –
the
single-mindedness of repetition,
through
the body – the needle flies,
bereft
of thread, of decay.
Shadow
lies upon brick walls.
The
gematria of melting
of
exclusions.
The
letter dreams of the same
paper’s
rustling,
in
which hearing distinguishes
the
contours of a poet,
who
dreams of Hasids
burning
out as a page of song
on
the stones of the ocean,
reducing
touch to gesture.
The
dream dreams a dream of consonants,
the
page –
where
black assumes
the
limits of incision –
dreams
of the borders of the letter, mica, light.
I
love to touch with my lips
the
tattoo at the stem of your shoulder,
(the
calendrical whirl of the Aztecs),
so
that word may open to word.
To
buy wine,
again
there isn’t enough money,
images
of sand and wind.
Each
dream, exposing
the
honeycombs of visions,
engages
thread into motion:
fingers
slipping downward
Guetat
Liviani, Frederique
are
spinning a cobweb
–
the tenderness of violence –
the
ethereal fabric of recognition
in
intensity and indication.
However
quiet
your
voice may be.
However
much it fills coincidences
with
hesitant executions.
The
fingers dream of the keyholes
emitted
by stones,
which
see in their dreams
the
azure salts of the sun,
the
blade’s whistle, water’s branch,
which
see in their dreams
skin,
celestial bodies, teeth,
the
tattoo of indistinct speech
on
the standards of breathing –
such
are
the
touch of tongue to tongue,
of
saliva to tongue;
such
are the outspread arms and legs
of
a man and a woman, –
the
golden mean on the book’s cover, –
which
dreams of pages
over
which the night saunters,
and
the night is dreamt by speech,
like
the throat of heavy light
and
the sign’s endless ribbon
which
engirds those who are
slowly
bringing their hands together
as
if the fingers feel for something else in the arc.
A
desert,
imprisoned
in touch.
Wine
sees in its dreams
all
of the forementioned things,
which
cross into diminution
along
the steps of un-thinging,
(an
unhurried narration),
and
I, examining the wine
that
lives in glassy limits,
like
the threads
of
fusion and touch,
falling
from the fingers
toward
the puppets of flight
in
the gardens of noontime tortures.
The
sign – is the quietest razor of darkness
Wine
has no “right”
no
“left”. Death
has
no name – it is only a list,
the
spilling over of the two-way mirror,
where
the equal sign is rubbed away
to
the differentiation
between
man and woman
—Translated
from Russian by Genya Turovskaya
Possible
Symptoms
To
see this stone and not experience indecision
To
see these stones and not to look away
To
see these stones and comprehend the stoneness of stone
To
see these stone stones at dawn and at sunset
But
not to think of walls, no, not to think of dust, or else, deathlessness
To
see these stones at night and think of the reverie of wasps in liquid solutions
Accepting
as evident that, at the thought of them, stones
add
to their essence neither shadow, nor reflected light, nor conquest.
To
see these same stones in thunder, see them as you see the pupils of Heraclites
in
which the agamy of stones resembles shards.
To
examine the nature of resemblance, without resorting to symmetry.
To
turn away and see how stones hover – night for their wings,
This
is why they are higher than seraphim, hurtling as stones toward the earth
Burning
in the air, as hair burning from a bridge -
Toward
the earth that in one fell moment
Will
lay down as a stone on the brick wall of the unnecessary name
For
how much longer will signifiers smolder, coal of hoarfrost, at the parameter?
For
as long as the stones that are dreamt by the act of falling.
Earlier,
toward spring, faceted clusters of wasps rose to a boil in dreams
Earlier,
in spring, sand would awaken, spread as a spiral in the wind
Thousand
eyed, like snow or God – the hawk of airborne hordes
advancing
toward the perpetual countries of an alphabet of a single letter.
Only
as a grimace along the margin, in the tension of mercury, as a blind rose
Flash-captured
crystal, like a sea-annexed island
Or
possibly as subterranean grasses over streaming footfall
Entering
into the possession of doubling, the acrid oxide of rupture.
What
is it? How is it translated? What is the measure of the past?
Where
does it come from? What is it’s motive?
Yes,
I do not hear: such is the pendulum’s string.
Reverberation
of vision.
The
narrow sail of the sand.
—Translated
from Russian by Genya Turovskaya
____
Copyright
(c)2009 Arkadii Dragomoshcheko; English language translation (c) by
Genya
Turovskaya.
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