An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets Read online

  Some of the poets included in this generous collection will be familiar to American audiences, who may have heard Bella Akhmadulina read and seen a volume of translated poems by Elena Shvarts or Olga Sedakova. The prose and drama of Liudmila Petrushevskaya may be known by many. It is all to the good that the barriers should be lowered, that Russia’s poets should seem less exotic and strange, more a part of the larger international poetry scene in which national literatures interpenetrate and are transformed by contact. Another paradox emerges here, then, as these poets surprise us when they seem suddenly familiar, even as they pursue new forms of difference. Many of these poets, including some whose names will be entirely new to almost everyone, pay attention to familiar cultural currents in the humanities and in popular culture; and so we recognize the worlds they describe: Mariya Galina’s “Ghazal” mentions Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze; Mariya Kildibekova has Osip Mandelstam, Marilyn Monroe, and Oskar Schindler in the same poem; Elena Fanailova writes of Frida Kahlo; and Aleksandra Petrova uses a Quentin Tarantino film as a point of departure. Daily life is here, too, the tumult of communal apartments and the recollection of exotic landscapes—Katia Kapovich, who lives in the United States, writes with irony of “an untidy Russian life.” We also see objects of daily life that are not marked as Russian in any way: for example, the computer to whom Inna Lisnianskaya writes an ode; the laundry and household clutter in Nina Iskrenko’s “Another Woman.” Women are treated for cancer and give birth in the poems of Vera Pavlova; cars and teeth are fixed in a poem by Olesia Nikolaeva. All is not entirely prosaic, of course. Familiar in a different way to readers of modern poetry will be the metaphysical concerns of poets like Olga Sedakova and Svetlana Kekova or, in the poems of Nikolaeva, the sense that religious experience and fear of one’s own demise can descend on the dullest catalogue of daily life.

  The 1980s and 1990s were good years for poets, despite the chaos induced by massive social change in Russia and the apparently falling status of poetry in an age of electronic communication and mass media. Many poets have found new routes to publication because of these technological and social innovations, and their experiments are often truly inspired. Among the more adventurous in their treatment of poetic form are Rea Nikonova and Larisa Berezovchuk, but the stunning leaps in diction, stylistic register, and theme by many others should not be underestimated. Some of these elements are difficult to convey in translation, but not all. The metaphors remain vivid, and lineation and arrangement on the page are formal traits that show through. Readers will see at a quick glance that these poets have many different ideas about the layout of poetic words on a page.

  Would these poets be pleased to find their work in a volume entirely dedicated to women? They have agreed to it, which says something; but many would be ambivalent. At least one, Yunna Morits, flatly refused to have her work in such a book. Herein rests yet another paradox of contemporary Russian women poets. Most do not see themselves as “women poets,” and the derogatory sting of the term poetessa remains. Their bonds to male poets of their generation or to the male poets who inspired them are often quite strong. Thus Elena Shvarts has enduring ties to Aleksandr Mironov and keen admiration for poets like Lev Rubinshtein and the late Viktor Krivulin; and if you ask about Silver Age poets she admires, she is more likely to mention Mikhail Kuzmin than Anna Akhmatova. But Shvarts maintains friendships with several poets in this volume; if I may inject a personal note, it was she who first told me to read Gali-Dana Zinger, also included here. One could tell similar stories about the ties among other women poets, but still we would want to conclude that the reason to group these poets is not because their primary allegiance is to one another, since it is not; and not because any of them should be read entirely outside the context of their male contemporaries and precursors. They should not. Rather, these women poets require separate attention because some collections of contemporary poetry still do not fully attend to their work. This is a surprising lack, because even surveys that relegate women poets to belated acknowledgment admit that they are doing significant work. What persists is a strange awkwardness about how to think about a woman who is a poet. In December 2003 I was present at an evening of Russian poetry where more than half a dozen men read and performed their work. Polina Barskova was the lone female voice. The men decided to make the evening more interesting, as they put it, by creating a competition among the poets. One of the men self-consciously selected Barskova to receive their Golden Lyre award. One could argue that she was, in fact, the most interesting poet in the room, but the supposed competition seemed more an expression of anxiety mixed with benighted male gallantry.

  Books such as this one afford a further opportunity, then: this anthology lets us ask what it means to these poets that they write, and are read, as women. The answer to that question cannot be unitary: the variety among these poets in temperament, tone, and poetic inclination is vast. Some explore a feminine identity with passion or with ironic wit, whereas others find the very idea of gender oppressive and uninteresting. Yet the question must be posed, for without it we will have a diminished appreciation of the achievements of women writing poetry in Russian today. And their achievements are considerable, living up to the legacy of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, as you will discover in the pages that follow.

  AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN WOMEN POETS

  INTRODUCTION

  DANIEL WEISSBORT

  This anthology originated in a special issue of the journal Modern Poetry in Translation (“Russian Women Poets,” editor Daniel Weissbort, issue guest editor Valentina Polukhina, MPT 20, King’s College, London, 2002). Our early intention had been no less than to survey the whole of contemporary Russian poetry, but we soon realized that this was vastly overambitious. It was decided instead to focus on women poets, not least because poetry anthologies published in Russia itself still appeared to underrepresent them. Valentina Polukhina subsequently perused work by around 800 poets; even so, she did not feel that the comprehensive task she had set herself was by any means complete. It became apparent that a team of readers might have been necessary, in which case the collection would have lost whatever unity a single sensibility gave it. In the aforementioned special issue of MPT, Weissbort’s editorial conveyed Polukhina’s caveats: primarily, that there were many other poets, even as the journal went to press, of whose existence she was becoming aware and whose absence from this collection she regretted. For this revised edition, Professor Polukhina solicited and received additional material, as well as reviewing selections already made, with a view to both improving the coverage and strengthening the collection. It has thus been possible to supplement the selection. In a period of surely unprecedented burgeoning, however, the editors still would not claim to have been fully representative.

  The notion of an anthology of women’s poetry may have become problematical. It is not surprising that some poets, such as Yunna Morits, were reluctant to be included or excluded themselves, even though they consented to be in the original journal issue. We regret this; but time was not on our side, and we were unable to engage in protracted discussions which might or might not have persuaded them to change their minds. We do not feel that we should attempt to make our case here—not least on grounds of fair play, since the scales are too heavily weighed in our favor, as editors of this collection! Nor do we propose to write about feminist literary theory; readers may be directed to the work of scholars in this field, such as Barbara Heldt’s Terrible Perfection (1987), largely devoted to Russian women’s poetry, or Catriona Kelly’s An Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing, 1777–1992 (1994). Our aim throughout has been to present selections of poets whose work seemed both noteworthy and “translatable,” work, in short, that interested us as readers of Russian poetry. As editors, we are, of course, gratified to have been able to feature writers inadequately represented, it seems to us, in home-grown anthologies—a notable exception always being the poetry website Vavilon.

  We have attempted in pa
rticular to represent poets from nonmetropolitan Russia, looking beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg and showcasing what is being produced in provincial centers like Voronezh, Saratov, and Samara as well as in the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East of Russia. It should be pointed out that a number of the poets are not ethnic Russians, even if they write in Russian. A more accurate if also more awkward title might have been “Anthology of Contemporary Women Poets Who Write in Russian.” It was, of course, beyond our means to survey this vast terrain exhaustively; indeed, it would have been nearly impossible to do so from abroad, since many of the publications that should be consulted are unobtainable outside Russia. Nevertheless, the Internet has enabled us to range quite far. In this regard we would especially like to express our gratitude to Dmitry Kuzmin and the Vavilon (Babylon) website, an indispensable source for contemporary Russian poetry. Kuzmin drew our attention to much material that we might otherwise have missed as well as putting us in touch with several poets who were able to participate in the translation process and commenting in detail on many of the translations.

  Tempting as it may be to indulge ourselves, this is perhaps not the place for a detailed account of the problems of translating Russian poetry into English; diverse views have been expressed, notably by Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, and Czeslaw Milosz (see From Russian with Love by Daniel Weissbort, published by Anvil Press in 2004, for a summary of these). The process is notoriously difficult, because of crucial generic differences in the structure of the two languages. Furthermore, the diction of contemporary Russian poetry is highly innovative and reflects contemporary idiomatic speech. Input from Dmitry Kuzmin (as noted above) and from many of the poets themselves helped to ensure that the translations remained in essential ways faithful to the source texts, although they are also intended, naturally, to function as poetic texts in English. The dilemma is memorably encapsulated by Stanley Kunitz, in the preface to his translations of Anna Akhmatova (Poems of Akhmatova, co-translated with Max Hayward [1973]): “The poet as translator lives with a paradox. His work must not read like a translation; conversely, it is not an exercise of the free imagination. One voice enjoins him: ‘Respect the text!’ The other simultaneously pleads with him: ‘Make it new!’” (p. 29).

  If our aim, then, has been inclusive, we have inevitably also had to be selective—sometimes, it seems to us, highly so, in view of the extent and variety of contemporary Russian poetry. Valentina Polukhina’s bibliography of contemporary Russian women poets, included in this anthology, will, we hope, be useful to translators and scholars in identifying additional poets.

  Very briefly, the contemporary phase in the burgeoning of Russian poetry fully got underway in the late 80s, with Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. Suddenly, it seemed, all of world literature, including the work of important Russian poets living abroad, became accessible. In particular, Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky’s influence was assimilated, enriching the scope of poetic language. Not only that: the new accessibility of poets of the Silver Age (Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak) further exerted, as it were, a delayed influence, no longer artificially limited by state interference. Banned writings by émigrés or exiles (e.g., Tsvetaeva, Nabokov) became easily available only in the past two decades. All this material seemed much newer than the dates suggest, as Russia’s literary history, it might be said, resumed its course. The effect of the influx of this material into what was already a postmodernist environment is still difficult to assess. Traditional verse forms have remained current in Russia, to a far greater extent than, say, in America or in the United Kingdom. As can be imagined, this has exacerbated the problem of translation from Russian into English, when the effect of traditional rhyme and meter maybe misleading. The coexistence of such traditionalism and postmodernist trends in Russia has further complicated or enriched the scene, these contrasts inevitably being somewhat attenuated in translation. What is clear is that perestroika, in the widest sense, had no less dramatic an effect on the cultural life of the country than the Khrushchevite “Thaw” of the late 50s and early 60s. At that time, the prospect of a disintegration of Soviet power, for instance with the Hungarian uprising in 1956, led to a reimposition of controls by the Party and the stagnation of the Leonid Brezhnev years. Many of Russia’s best poets were eventually forced abroad, most notably Brodsky in 1972 and later Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Lev Loseff, and Yury Kublanovsky as well as many others.

  A number of anthologies have attempted to represent recent literary developments in the former Soviet Union. (The Internet has hugely increased the availability of writing, from Moscow to Vladivostok, which has inevitably complicated the task of the anthologist.) The interesting recent anthology Crossing Centuries (2000), for instance, focuses on conceptualism, polystylistics, the elimination or demise of the so-called lyrical hero, retreat from ego-based poetry, and the apparent apoliticism of post-Thaw poetry. The emphasis on language as such, however, harking back to the avant-gardism of the early twentieth century, renders translation into other languages problematical. We have tried here to be perhaps somewhat more eclectic. Poet and critic Dmitry Polishchuk writes in Nezavisimaya gazeta (1 June 2001): “The 25–35-year-old generation is now experiencing an efflorescence—a new type of poetic vision, with a distinct poetic language, a new kind of baroque; with novel structures, combining the far-fetched, the heterogeneous, the incompatible, in a poetics of contrast” (p. 4). This seems particularly true of contemporary women’s writing, which transcends postmodernist, postcolonialist, or even feminist tendencies.

  It was our aim from the start to concentrate on recent work, on writers who achieved prominence or at least visibility in and after the mid 80s when Gorbachev and his team took over. Our focus, therefore, has been on what is now—already!—the middle generation, writers who have lived through the changes as adults. But we have also sought to represent the most recent generations. Even so, our limited generational focus would not have allowed us fairly to represent Russian women’s poetry at this time. We have therefore further extended the range to include a few prominent poets of older generations, such as Inna Lisnianskaya, Bella Akhmadulina, and, abroad, Natalya Gorbanevskaya. We have extended the collection as well to include Russian-language poets in former Soviet republics, like Ukraine and Georgia. Finally, we have included a few poets living outside Russia (e.g., in the United States, England, Italy, and Israel), although not as many as we might have wished, since our primary focus remained on the developments in Russia.

  It is our hope that this anthology will help to diversify the rather simplistic—and on the whole disheartening—current view of post-Soviet reality. Poetry has always been of particular significance in Russia; even though book sales there are now greatly reduced from the huge print-runs of the Soviet period—more or less equivalent to what might be expected in Western European countries—the influence of poetry is still formidable.

  To the poets go our special thanks. Advice was forthcoming from those both in Russia and abroad. Nearly all we approached responded with extraordinary generosity and enthusiasm, in many cases (as indicated above) collaborating in the translation, patiently and scrupulously answering questions put to them by their translators. It should be added that e-mail immeasurably facilitated this interaction. Thanks are also due to the many scholars, critics, and editors in Russia and abroad who freely shared their expertise. Last but certainly not least, we thank the translators who have contributed to this collection and who quite frequently made suggestions that led us to add to the original list. Translators are in the first place readers, on the most intimate terms with the literature they translate. It has been a heartwarming experience to work with so many generous individuals. Whatever deficiencies remain are of course the responsibility of the editors.

  A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

  The Library of Congress transliteration system has been used throughout with some modifications. The apostrophe (’) has been omitted except where its absence may alter the meaning: for example, pust (
empty) and pust’ (let it be) or byt (everyday life) and byt’ (to be). After soft and hard signs as well as after vowels and at the beginning of a word y not i is used for transliteration of ya/ia, yu/iu (e.g., antologiya, but Znamia; Yunost, but liubov). In the same positions the letters e and yo are transliterated without y (e.g., Evgeny Evtushenko, Elena, Soldatenkov, with an exception made for Semyon). Some exceptions are made for nouns ending in a soft sign and e or i (such as Poberezhye, Primorye, podmasterye) since without the y they become unrecognizable. In view of the fact that some personal names are given in the most common form (e.g., Brodsky), we decided to transliterate all surnames ending with -skii as -sky (e.g., Kublanovsky, Voznesensky, and Gorky). All surnames ending -aeva and -eeva are transliterated without a y (e.g., Nikolaeva, Matveeva, and Tsvetaeva). At the end of personal names ii with a short i is transliterated as y (e.g., Dmitry, Yury, and Nikolay).