On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language

Abstract

* This essay originally appeared as O poezii i zaumnom yazyke, in Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogoyazyka, I (Petrograd, 1916), pp. 1-15 and, in the new orthography, in Poetika: Sbornikipo teorii poeticheskogoyazyka, I (Petrograd, 1916), pp. 13-26. The versions differ only in orthography and a few details of punctuation. [From this point, asterisks mark Shklovsky's own footnotes, as they did in the original. The numbered footnotes have been provided by the translators.] 1. Zaum' = za + um, za = beyond, across, through, trans-; um = mind, intelligence (noun). Vladimir Markov in his The Longer Poems of Velimir Khlebnikov (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1962), p. 202, suggests the translations transmental, transense, and metalogical. Translogical and metalogical have been rejected because the mind (um) does not necessarily function logically. Transmental would appear to be the most literal translation, but trans-sense has echoes of transcend and matches expressions like nonsense and common sense. For a more detailed discussion of zaum', see E. K. Beaujour, Zaum, Dada/Surrealism (Lubbock, Texas), No. 2, 1972, pp. 13-18; and D. Mickiewicz, Semantic Functions in Zaum', Russian Literature XV (1984), pp. 363-464. 2. Mikhail Yur'evich Lermontov (1814-1841), Romantic poet; second stanza of the poem Ne ver' sebe (1839). 3. Afanasy Fet (Shenshin) (1820-1892), lyric poet; last lines of the poem Kak moshki zaryoyu (1844).