i am a candle
by Douglas Messerli
Arseny Tarkovsky, I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of
Arseny Tarkovsky, translated by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev
(Cleveland: Cleveland State 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Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, and, accordingly, Tarkovsky’s own 1946 book, although accepted for publication, was withdrawn.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,
himself, was a noted translator of numerous languages into Russian who well
knew of the translator’s difficulties, may at least have provided Metres and
Psurtsev tacit feeling of support. Metres quotes from Tarkovsy’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, much like the world presented in his son’s
film Stalker, 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 4, 2015
Reprinted, in different form, from Hyperallegric Weekend (October 18,
2015).
