An Interview with Clare Cavanagh

Abstract

Evanston, Illinois 18 July 2000 W. MARTIN: There are rumors that you are also a poet. Is this true? And do you consider translation to be a creative practice? CLARE CAVANAGH: Yes, and I'm not a poet. I'm a former poet. I feel like translating is the right place for me, rather than my own poetry. I think it is a creative enterprise in a different way than being a poet is. way I think of it is more like being an actor or a musician, where somebody else composed the lines for you, the music for you. You feel like you've got the one interpretation, but of course, if it's a work of art at all worth looking at it's worth looking at more than once, in the same way a great work of music can have five different interpretations that can be quite at odds with each other. But I still pretend that I'm doing the definitive one, you know. But that's what I think it's like. WM: You've written one book on Eastern European poetry and you're currently working on another about poetry and politics. Could you talk a little about that? CC: Sure. My first book was on Osip Mandelstam,' it was exclusively on Russian poetry, which is technically my field, but I've gone off on a deviation that's taken over my life. second book' reflects more of where I actually am in terms of my day-to-day work. It's sort-of half-Russian, half-Polish, and half-Anglo-American- it's got too many halves. It's a series of case studies on the relationship between the Romantic tradition of the poetic bard and twentieth century Eastern European politics, specifically with the totalitarian, or the Soviet, landscape, and what that does to the tradition of the poetic bard. So the first half deals with Russia from around 1905, what some historians consider the beginning of the Russian revolution, the failed uprising of 1905, and I start with Blok and Yeats, who are working on how the poet-prophet places himself in relation to national upheaval in interestingly comparable ways, even though politically they're at opposite ends of the spectrum. And then I have a chapter on Whitman and Mayakovsky. There was a huge cult of Whitman in Eastern Europe, and Mayakovsky clearly saw himself in competition with Whitman and was trying to create himself as a kind of bard. And then a chapter called The Death of the Book a la russe that's challenging post-Structuralist and post-Derridean ideas about writing based on an Eastern European model in which writing itself became an endangered model, or an impossible model, for the poet. Derridean idea of orality is based on a Western, bourgeois model in which you have means of printing on hand all the time and nobody is shutting down the presses on a regular basis, let alone shooting you for running the press, or putting you in jail. In Stalinist Russia the cult of the oral poem, the spoken poem, became this dominant model, where people like Mandelstam and Akhmatova were composing poems that either were not written down at all or written down and destroyed. Mandelstam was sent to a camp for a poem he never wrote down; he wrote it down for the first time under interrogation. He recited it to a group of friends, and it got to Stalin that way. So he was demonstrating the power of the oral voice in a country in which speech was regulated beyond all comprehension. And then Akhmatova wrote her Requiem as part of her genre of Poems for the Ashtray -poems that she would write, memorize, have a group of friends commit to memory, and then bum. So, what I'm trying to do is challenge a lot of Western notions of poetry, language, politics, and so forth, because none of them fit the Eastern European model. I have another chapter on Pound, Mandelstam, and Khlebnikov, on ideas of the poet as legislator and the poet as master-builder. And then I switch over to Poland after the importation of Soviet rule, late forties, early fifties. I have a chapter on the cult of Mayakovsky in Poland-which poets took up willingly, they didn't have crammed down their throats, right after World War II. …