Four Poems

Abstract

Four Poems Vladislav Khodasevich Translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale Arguably "next in line" after the Russian "Big Four" A (Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, and Akhmatova), the poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) has been, by comparison, neglected. The recent Selected Poems, translated by Peter Daniels, while receiving attention in The Guardian, has garnered not a single mention in the American press. As is often the case, I found the strength of these translations, by a British poet, to be their formal elegance, if at times, I think, too regular for the American ear. My purpose, then, is to remedy some imprecision in the translations available of his "prosy sections." I believe that the Russian originals of these blank-verse poems constitute the strongest possible argument for a mastery that undermines Robert Frost's argument against "playing with the net down." To the contrary, just as with a reading of the originals, my experience of translating these was particularly rich in the pleasures of practicing the tools of the poetic craft. I will go so far as to claim for them the title of a towering achievement, and not only for the formal contribution they make to the development of Russian verse (arguable only because to this day free verse retains in Russian an aura of illegitimacy, and Khodasevich himself has had few, if any, self-proclaimed followers). The crowning achievement of every major Russian poet, it seems to me, has been a dramatic identification of one's highly personal fate with that of Russia entire. That is, as a document, the work succeeds in capturing its historical moment in time. [End Page 233] Just so, what we have before us (speaking thematically), is Khodasevich's own testimony to the shattered certainties of the old world, its shell-shocked survivors stumbling about literally and existentially naked in the ruins of their formerly high culture, in the wake of the Russian Revolution (the poems date to 1918–1919). A poet whose only professed influence was Pushkin, Khodasevich here suddenly "abandons form" (though not really), as though poetic words have failed him, and temporarily adopts a looser, spoken line. One must recall that Russian poetry hasn't its own Whitman or Pound, so that the latter's prescriptions are alien to Russian culture and verse ("To use the language of common speech"; "express . . . individuality of a poet . . . better in free verse"; "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not the metronome.") Khodasevich almost abandons form, but never quite. Always present in these is a tension between prose and verse rhythm, and the lines of "free verse," constantly pulsing between tetramer and hexameter, resolve always into blank verse. What I have found in working to reproduce these effects in English is that the directly spoken plain word and phrase require one to weigh more and not less closely each and every word, for its shadings of texture, connotation, and association. In addition to the usual complement of the tools of the poet's trade—added attention to assonance and consonance (alliteration)—there is also the more delicate sense of a well-shaped and balanced phrase, with its subtle shadings of tone, even permitting one an occasional syntactic inversion that is strictly verboten in contemporary English, to indicate elevation and emphasis, the heightened contrast between direct description and the occasional embellishment of metaphor and symbol, these occasional echoes and repetition of certain notes, to drive home "the theme." It would be intriguing to hypothesize, just one example, whether it was partially Khodasevich's own work as a translator of Polish poetry (Khodasevich's father was Polish and, incidentally, Mandelstam was [End Page 234] Polish-born) that provided him with a model. While much remains to be said to attempt to explain what makes Khodasevich both stand out and not fit in with the main body of Russian poetry, it is his synthesis of the classic and the modern, the intense personalism of his lyrical ego, the directness of his voice and address often verging on simplicity that mark his primary individuality as a poet. The naked vulnerability of such words raises the bar by exposing the relative perfection and imperfection of every...