I Am A Candle: The Poetry of Arseny Tarkovsky
by Douglas Messerli
Arseny Tarkovsky I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland: Cleveland University Poetry Center, 2015)
Although
long recognized in the Soviet Union and later Russia as a great poet continuing
in the tradition of Osip Mandelstam, Arseny Tarkovsky — father to renowned film
director Andrei — has been little known to Western readers, and almost entirely
unknown in English. The close friend to early 20th century Soviet greats such
as Marina Tsvetaeva (who sought out a romantic relationship with Tarkovsky
before committing suicide), Anna Akhmatova, and numerous others, few Americans
might have imagined that Tarkovsky, as Akhmatova described him, was perceived
by many as the one “real poet” in the Soviet Union:
[…]of
all contemporary poets Tarkovsky alone is completely
his
own self, completely independent. He possesses the most
important
feature of a poet, which I’d call the birthright.
There are numerous reasons for the oversight. Although recognized as a war hero for his actions in World War II as a correspondent for the Soviet Army publication Battle Alarm, during which time he was seriously wounded, his leg eventually sacrificed to gangrene, Tarkovsky came of age after Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov’s ideological attack on the works of Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, and, accordingly, Tarkovsky’s own 1946 book, although accepted for publication, was withdrawn. It was not until 1962 that the poet was able to publish his first volume, Before the Snow, when he was 55 years of age. Although his work did gain some fame in the West through his son’s films Mirror (1974) and Stalker (1979), which included quotations from a few of his poems, his writing is nearly impossible to convey into English, based as it is on the long Russian traditions of end rhyme and meter. Tarkovsky died in 1989, just prior to the fall of the Soviet Union.
Finally, in Philip Metres and Dimitri
Psurtsev’s I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky we
get a fair idea of what Tarkovsky’s work might sound like in Russian. If the
poetry that results sometimes seems to lack the excitement of other major
Russian poets of the day, the translators are certainly to be commended for
their brave attempts to render a completely “other” poetic tradition into a
language that makes sense to the American ear.
Indeed, one of the most important aspects
of this book is just how much it reveals the difficulties any translator faces.
The afterword by Philip Metres, presented as 25 Propositions about the process
of translating, is worth the price of the book.
Rather than presenting these concerns as
an academic exercise, Metres, often with humor and always with intelligence,
outlines some of the basic impossibilities of translating an “authentic”
poetry. The fact that Tarkovsky was a noted translator of numerous languages
into Russian who well knew of the translator’s difficulties may have provided
Metres and Psurtsev a tacit feeling of support. Metres quotes from Tarkovsky’s
poem “Translator”
For
what did I spend
My
best years on foreign words?
O,
Eastern translations,
How
you hurt my head.
“Of
course,” notes Metres, Tarknovsky “wrote nothing of the kind. He wrote…”—a
passage in Cyrillic follows. “Or,” continues the translator, “as an email once
encoded it”:
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Besides
the poet’s deep reliance on Russian root words and other tropes from Romance
languages dating back to Pushkin, Metres notes just a few of what he describes
as “Russian poetry’s acute and irreducible particularities, the most acute and irreducible
its relationship to meter”:
The
regularity of Russian conjugations and declensions, the
flexibility
of word order in sentence meaning, and the multi-
syllabic
nature of Russian words all combine to create a seem-
ingly
endless wellspring of rhymes and metrical possibilities.
In
contrast to the poetries of the West, which inhaled modernism’s
breath
of free verse and only rarely return to the formal rooms of
strict
meters, Russian poetry has, until only very recently, been
almost
entirely faithful to its high organized and lush meters. In
Tarkovsky’s
poetry alone, one can find poems not only in iambic,
but
also in trochaic, dactylic, anapestic, amphibrachic, not to
mention
folksong prosodic patterns, unrhymed metrical poems, and,
yes,
even free verse. It’s as if, in the United States, our poetry,
metrically
speaking, plays its tune within the limits of the pop form,
while
in Russian, whole symphonies continue to be produced.
To
recognize these and the many other impediments to an easy assimilation of
Tarkovsky’s work in English, is not to suggest that the translators do not,
time and again, find a way to convey the grandeur and beauty of this Russian
poet. Many of these poems begin within the confines of a simple metaphor that
quickly spirals out into another time and world. The image of a “table set for
six,” for example, in the wartime poem beginning with that image, soon moves
into a somewhat frightful nostalgic scene:
Like
twelve years ago, her hand,
still
cold to the touch.
Her
silks, blue and old-fashioned,
Still
rustle and swish.
By
the next stanza the poet takes the simple dinner-time activities of “wine
singing” and “crystal ringing” into a dark, haunted song of the past:
How
much we loved you,
How many winters ago.
Ending
the poem in what might at first seem like a snapshot memory of prior events, it
is transformed through the presence of a vague female voice (whom, we discover
in the footnotes is the now-deceased poet Marina Tsvetaeva) speaking out from
the dead:
My
father would smile at me,
my
brother, pour some wine,
Her
ringless hand in mine,
the
woman would say:
My
heels are caked with dirt,
my
plaited hair’s gone clear,
and
our voices now call out
from
under the earth.
Indeed,
given the fact that Tarkovsky wrote many of these poems during War II, death
haunts a number of his earliest works. The inevitability of death is most
evident in a poem like “[A German machinegunner will shoot me in the road,
or]”:
A
German machinegunner will shoot me in the road, or
a
detonation bomb will break my legs, or
an
SS-boy will slam a bullet in my gut—
in
any case, on this front, they’ve got me covered.
Without
my name, or glory, or even boots—
with
frozen eyes, I’ll gaze at the snow, blood-colored.
The
poem is made even more sardonic by the translator’s explanation that during the
early days of World War II, when Russian “valenki” boots were in short supply,
dead soldiers were often stripped of their footwear, one story telling of
hundreds of frozen legs that were sawed off by Russian troops so that they
might remove the boots which had frozen to the dead men’s feet.
And even in such later poems as the
multi-part elegy to Anna Akhmatova, from 1967, Tarkovsky writes about death in
a manner that expresses deep grief while yet accepting its inevitability. That
poem ends in painful tolling out of the words “all night,” reiterating the
endlessness of death when faced by the living:
All
night we promised
you
immortality, all night
we
longed for you
to
take us from the house of grief—
all
night, all night, all night,
as
it was in the beginning.
Given
the suffering Tarkovsky endured during his lifetime, it is rather amazing that,
despite these dark expressions of grief, so many of his poems look to nature
for regeneration and new possibility. Sometimes that rebirth, as in section IV
of his poem “After the War,” represents the violence between the forces of life
and death the poet has personally experienced:
Like
a tree splashing the earth
above
itself, having collapsed from a steep
undermined
by water, roots in the air,
the
rapids plucking its branches—
so
my double on the other rapids
travels
from future to past.
From
another height, I trail myself
with
my eyes, clutch my chest. Who gave me
trembling
branches, a sturdy trunk
yet
weak, helpless roots?
Death
is vile, but life is worse,
and
there’s no binding its tyranny.
Are
you leaving, Lazarus? Well, go away!
Nothing
holds us together. Sleep,
Vivacious
one, fold your hands
on
your chest and sleep.
But,
more often, the horrors of his life are transformed into scenes of renewal and
beauty through the natural world. One need only read his remarkable “Field
Hospital,” which recounts Tarkovsky’s leg injury of 1944. About to have his leg
amputated, the poet begins the poem with an out-of-body vision of himself, one
might say “etherized upon a table”:
The
table was turned to light. I lay
my
head down like meat on a scale,
my
soul throbbing on a thread.
I
could see myself from above:
I
would have been balanced
by a
stout market weight.
Soon
after, as his leg is cut away, time seems to stop:
On
that day,
the
clock stopped, souls of trains
no
longer flew along lampless levies,
upon
the gray fins of stream;
neither
crow weddings nor snowstorms
nor
thaws penetrated this limbo
where
I lay in disgrace, naked,
in
my own blood, outside the future’s
magnetic
pull.
Yet
the poem continues with an almost miraculous “coming-to” (predicted in the
repetition of “and also”) as the poet calls from his inner self the language of
an almost biblical past, bringing him back to life and to a vision, once again,
of the beauty of the natural world:
My
lips were covered with sores, and also
I
was fed by a spoon, and also
I
could not remember my name,
but
the language of King David came
alive
on my tongue.
And
then
even
the snow disappeared,
and
early spring, rising on tiptoes,
draped
her green scarf over the trees.
Even
at the front in 1942, Tarkovsky, through the glory of nature and his memory of
the past, was able in the unforgettable poem “Beautiful Day” (which in Russian
means “White Day”) to recover an almost radiant joy. The poem is among those
quoted in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror:
Beneath
the jasmine a stone
marks
a buried treasure.
On
the path, my father stands.
A
beautiful, beautiful day.
The
gray poplar blooms,
centifola
blooms,
and
milky grass,
and
behind it, roses climb.
I
have never been
more
happy than then.
I
have never been more
happy
than then.
To
return is impossible
and
to talk about it, forbidden—
how
it was filled with bliss,
that
heavenly garden.
I
don’t know how that poem works in Russian, but in English the third stanza,
with its simple statements of joy, each altered with their enjambments and
attenuations, express some feelings about the world which remain unspoken if
read merely as one long sentence. The narrator begins with an incomplete phrase
that suggests a sense of his non-existence (“I have never been”) before
continuing on in the second line with his expression of joy. The third line
extends that feeling, “I have never been more,” suggesting that happiness is
just a portion of the fullness of his feeling, before the stanza continues with
the (now limited) happiness that closes stanza.
Accordingly, even in expressing his great
joy, he seems already aware, as it puts it in the last stanza, that such joy is
somehow beyond himself, is something to which he can never return. The
happiness comes from somewhere outside of his being, and, once experienced,
beyond even his memory of it. It is, in fact, a “white” world, a void that is
at once pure and cleansing, yet nonetheless a forbidden territory to the
surviving adult.
Tarkovsky’s world, we quickly realize, is
not simply fragile, but lost, a postlapsarian universe, a place perhaps haunted
by an Edenic past, yet permeated with the smell of death, the burning of flesh.
As he puts it in “My sight, which was my power, now blurs”:
I am
a candle. I burned at the feast.
Gather
my wax when morning arrives
so
that this page will remind you
how
to be proud and how to weep,
how
to give away the last third
of
happiness, and how to die with ease—
and
beneath a temporary roof
to
burn posthumously, like a word.
Los
Angeles, September 5, 2015
Reprinted
from Hyperallergic (October 18, 2015)
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