Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikgv volume HI Selected Poems

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Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikgv
volume HI
Selected Poems
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Collected Works of
Velimir Khlebnikgv
volume hi
Selected Poems
translated by Paul Schmidt
edited by Ronald Vroon
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 1997
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Copyright © 1997 by the President and Fellows
of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant
from the Julia A. Whitney Foundation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
(Revised for vol. 3)
Khlebnikov, Velimir, 1885-1922.
Collected works of Velimir Khlebnikov
Translated from the Russian.
Vol. 3- edited by Ronald Vroon.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
Contents: v. 1. Letters and theoretical writings—
v. 2. Prose, plays, and supersagas.—v. 3. Selected poems,
i. Khlebnikov, Velimir, 1885-1922—Translations, English.
2. Khlebnikov, Velimir, 1885-1922—Correspondence.
3. Poets, Russian—20th century—Correspondence.
I. Schmidt, Paul, 1934- .
II. Douglas, Charlotte, 1936-
III. Vroon, Ronald, 1948-
IV. Title.
PG3476.K485A23 1987 891.71'? 87-8399
ISBN 0-674-14045-1 (v. 1)
ISBN 0-674-14046-X (v. 2)
ISBN 0-674-14047-8 (v. 3, cloth)
ISBN 0-674-14048-6 (v. 3, pbk.)
Frontispiece: Velimir Khlebnikov, 1916
Page 274 constitutes an extension of the copyright page.
Designed by Given Fmnkfeldt
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Contents
Frontispiece · Khlebnikov, 1916
Translator's Preface · vi
Abbreviations · xi
"The Poet and His Voices," by Ronald Vroon · 1
• 23
Longer Poems · 129
Notes · 237
List of Poems · 260
Russian Index of Titles · 267
English Index of Titles · 270
Credits · 274
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Translator's Preface
This volume includes 192 of Velimir Khlebnikov's poems, of which
eleven are "longer poems" (poemy in Russian). This figure does not
include some fifty lyrics included in the various plays and supersagas,
already translated in the second volume of this edition, published in
1989.
It is difficult to arrive at a total number of Khlebnikov's poems.
Approximately 650 texts contained in the original Russian editions of
the collected and unpublished works (1928-1933 and 1940), as well as in
Works (1986) and various periodicals and anthologies, can be considered
separate texts, but this number includes many different versions of
previously published poems. More than a third of this number are
rough drafts and fragments, some no more than four lines long, but
in these cases as well, many are simply variants of others. Khlebnikov
had the habit of revising previously published poems, he had incon-
sistent views on their readiness for publication, and even his fairest
manuscripts are quite raw. Given all this, a precise canonical figure is
impossible to come by. Even the very notion of "canonicity" seems
questionable.
The present selection is drawn from all the available texts, and is
intended to provide a broad sampling of Khlebnikov's styles, themes,
and subjects. Khlebnikov is known to English and American readers
mostly for his early work as an experimenter with new forms, so I have
tried to include here a sizable selection of those later poems—by far
the majority—that are somewhat more conventional in form, and that
also illuminate many episodes in the poet's life.
Khlebnikov (1885-1922) ranks with Mallarme, Joyce, Pound, and
Stein among the great innovators of literary modernism. He blurred
the distinction between verse and prose and between one literary genre
and another. His experiments helped to break the hold of traditional
verse patterns in Russian—although he made extensive use of them
himself. But in general he worked with irregularities, unequal line
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Translator's Preface
lengths, meters that varied from line to line in a single poem, variable
stanza lengths, irregular rhyme patterns. He made use of patterns and
tropes from folklore and from chants, incantations, and shamanistic
language. He managed to create an entire poetics in the area of lan-
guage that the Anglo-American tradition tends to belittle as "play"—
neologisms, palindromes, riddles, puns.
Khlebnikov's writing displays a perpetual willingness to allow form
to form itself. He allows accidents to happen. A primary note in
Khlebnikov's writing as I read it is the sense of wonder at the play of
language, of sound allowed to move freely in search of its own sense,
and yielding what Khlebnikov and his contemporaries called "beyon-
sense" (zaum in Russian). For Khlebnikov, the shift in sound that
produces a shift in meaning was a shift in the structure of the universe.
That sword becomes word when a consonant vanished gave him a
vertiginous sense of the power of language to influence the natural
world. The shift of a consonant was all that distinguished inventors
from investors or explorers from exploiters—and suddenly there appears
the image of a struggle between Ν and S, between R and T. The
movement of consonants becomes a metaphor for political and eco-
nomic conflict.
This kind of writing must give any serious translator pause; it
certainly did me, and it was a while before I came to see my task as the
creation of process rather than result. Instead of merely attempting a
simulacrum of any given text, I would have to work upon American
English the same sorts of transformations that Khlebnikov works upon
Russian, and see what kinds of texts resulted. This approach helped me
to avoid fetishizing the text of the original; it had the advantage of
seeing translation as transaction, as a cultural and temporal response to
the original text. The translation thus becomes a self-sufficient text, a
product of response in its own time and place.
When a poet translates a familiar poet into American English—
Baudelaire, for instance—he enters immediately into a literary dialogue
with translators who have preceded him. He is able—probably he is
required—to offer us his Baudelaire: the French poem refined through
his particular sensibility and style. But when the work of a poet is
offered for the first time to an audience almost totally unfamiliar with
it, as is the case with Khlebnikov, the translator is less free. Rather than
assimilate the writer to himself, he must assimilate himself to the writer.
The translator must perform the part of the poet in somewhat the same
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Translator's Preface
way that an actor prepares, through a similar language act, to create a
character on the stage.
When I began translating, some forty years ago, I was much
enamored of "theories of translation," and of various methodologies.
I have since come to believe that for the act of translation—the trans-
lation of poems, anyway—there really is no useful theory, and "meth-
ods" are only occasionally helpful. Every poem here poses unique
problems, and each is translated in a way that offers a solution to those
problems. Each translation is a record of a fresh encounter between
two languages, two worlds. Inspiration as well plays a large part, and
the muse of translation is as willful as the muse of poetry.
Some of the translations in this volume are very free—variations,
if you will, on the theme of the original. "We chant and enchant," for
instance, expands Khlebnikov's ten lines to nineteen. But in general I
have translated line for line. Some translations—"Venus and the Sha-
man," for example—follow the metrical and rhyme patterns of the
original as closely as possible, when these seemed to me to be the basic
determinants of the poem in question. For some poems—such as
"Harsh hush bends bow" and "The Tangled Wood"—I have made a
conscious attempt to use the alliterations and syntactic patternings of
our older Anglo-Saxon tradition, since these seem to me somehow to
reflect Khlebnikov's attempt to reach the ur-forms of poetry, "to find—
without breaking the circle of roots—the magic touchstone of all Slavic
words, the magic that transforms one into another ..." The cadences
of our own Walt Whitman, Khlebnikov's "old Walt," find occasional
echoes here. And of course Khlebnikov's invention of neologisms posed
delightful challenges. The plural of mouse is mice? Then surely, some-
where in the backwoods of language, the plural of house is hice.
All this is of course very subjective. My final standard for each of
the translations in this volume is that it be a poem in American English.
The single most important source for the texts translated here is
Tvoreniia (Works, 1986) textually the most accurate volume published
to date. For poems not contained in this volume, I turned to the
original Sobranie proizvedenii (Collected Works, 1928-1933) and the
supplementary Neizdannye proizvedeniia (Unpublished Works, 1940).
These collections also served as the principal source for annotations.
Tvoreniia in particular contains a wealth of background material illu-
minating difficult and obscure passages in Khlebnikov's oeuvre.
This volume also contains Khlebnikov's own variants of many of
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Translator's Preface
the poems from the supersagas "War in a Mousetrap" and "Asia Un-
bound," translated in volume II of the Harvard Collected Works (Prose,
Plays, and Supersagas, 1989). The source texts were drawn from the
miscellanies and collections in which Khlebnikov's works originally
appeared. Ronald Vroon also chose a number of works, including the
long narrative poem "Chairman of the Cheka," which have appeared
only in periodicals. Some of these pieces could not have been published
in Russia prior to the momentous political changes of the past decade.
Though their place in the Khlebnikov canon has yet to be determined,
they are of extraordinary interest for the light they shed on the poet's
attitude toward the Revolution and Civil War.
The date and source for the original Russian text are indicated at
the end of each translation. Transliteration throughout follows the U.S.
Library of Congress system slightly simplified. In the text we have used
the normal spelling for proper names where English common usage
has been established—the Russian -skit ending for example, has been
rendered -sky. Places in the text marked "[Illegible]" are so marked in
the Soviet editions. The reader should be aware that the translations of
texts previously published in The King of Time have been revised,
sometimes significantly.
A concise biography of Khlebnikov can be found in volume I of
this edition (Letters and Theoretical Writings, 1987). Those who wish to
explore the critical literature in greater depth should consult the bib-
liography appended to volume III of Velimir Khlebnikov, Sobranie
sochenenii (Munich: W. Fink, 1968-1972) and the bibliographies in three
recent studies of Khlebnikov's works: Raymond Cooke, Velimir Khleb-
nikov: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
Viktor Petrovich Grigoriev, Slovotvorchestvo i smezhnye problemy iazyka
poeta (Word Creation and Other Problems Relating to the Poet's
Language; Moscow: Nauka, 1987); and Ronald Vroon, Velimir Xlebni-
kov's Shorter Poems: A Key to the Coinages (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan, Michigan Slavic Studies, 1983).
This is the final volume of Khlebnikov's Collected Works in English,
a project that was conceived and consistently supported by the Dia Art
Foundation, New York. Ronald Vroon and I would like to express our
special thanks to Heiner and Philippa Friedrich and to the directors of
Dia for their vision and commitment. Our work on this volume was
also supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Our deepest gratitude is due Thomas P. Whitney: at a difficult moment
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in the completion of this sixteen-year project, a grant from the Julia A.
Whitney Foundation ensured the publication of this volume.
In Russia we received important and sympathetic help from Alek-
sandr Parnis, Valentina Morderer, Mai Miturich, and the late Vasily
Katanian.
Special thanks go to Henryk Baran, Charlotte Douglas, Nikolai
Khardziev, Vladimir Markov, Stephen Rudy, and Katherine Theodore.
We are also grateful for general assistance from the administration and
staff of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow. And
we are especially grateful to Maud Wilcox, for her faith in this project
when she was editor-in-chief of Harvard University Press.
Finally we wish to thank Maria Ascher for editorial help with this
volume; and Joyce Backman, the original editor of the series, for her
patience, her stamina, her sense of humor, and her friendship during
all the years of working together.
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