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-w~····· .("""") '- .,) ~;:_.. DESCRIPTION 'l I DESCRIPTION ARKADII DRAGOMOSCHENKO Translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova Introduction by Michael Molnar '" 0 0 ~ c.: 1 • s • , c • Sun & Moon Classics: 9 © Arkadii Dragomoschenko, 1990 Published through agreement with VMP, the Soviet Writer's Union. Some of these poems have been published in The Soviet Union in the book Nebo Sootvetstvii. Translation © Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova, 1990 Introduction© Michael Molnar, 1990 Cover: Wave, Lave, Lace, Pescadero Beach, California, 1987 by John Pfahl. Reprinted with permission from the artist. Design: Katie Messborn Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Dragomoschenko, A. (Arkadii) Description I Arkadii Dragomoschenko: translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova : Introduction by Michael Molnar. - 1st. ed. p. cm.-(Sun & Moon classics: #9) Translated from the Russian. ISBN 1-55713-075-2 ; $11.95 I. Hejihian, Lyn. II. Balashova, Elena. III. Title. IV. Series. PG3479.6.R28047 1990 891.71'44--dc20 89-85476 CIP FIRST EDITION s 4 3 2 Sun & Moon Classics: 9 Sun & Moon Press 6148 Wilshire Boulevard Gertrude Stein Plaza Los Angeles, California 90048 ARKADII DRAGOMOSCHENKO Born in 1946 in Potsdam, Germany, Arkadii Dragomoschenko spent his youth in the Ukraine of the Soviet Union. He was a student at the Russian Philological Department in Kiev, and later worked as a reporter for AP News in Kiev while attending the Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography. In 1970 he moved to Leningrad where he was first employed as a night watchman, then as a street sweeper, and later as a stoker at the Leningrad State University Psychological Department while working on his eight book-length collections of poetry and two full length plays. He was a founding member of the famed Club-81. Joining her husband, jazz saxophonist Larry Ochs, on a tour of the Soviet Union in 1983, American poetLyn Hejinian was introduced to Dragomoschenko, who was described by the Soviet samisdat publishers and readers as the great contemporary poet of Leningrad. A friendship developed between the two poets, and over the years, through dozens of letters and, later, course work, both struggled to learn each other's language, resulting in Hejinian's role as translator and introducer of Americans to the new Soviet poetry, and in Dragomoschenko's playing host to numerous American writers, publishers, and scholars. In 1988 Dragomoschenko toured the United States, and again in 1989 he read and performed in New York City. To date, one book of poetry has been published in the Soviet Union, Nebo Sootvetsyvii. With works of fellow poets and artists such as Aleksei Parschikov, Ivan Zhdanov, Alexander Eremenko, llya Kutik, Nina Iskrenko, Andrei Karpov, Ivan Chuikov, and others, the writing of Dragomoschenko represents a major new development of Soviet art at once completely original yet aware of the international art of the present and past. For Dragomoschenko language is not a mere expression of the poet and his imagination, but is an "activity of society." "Poetry comes in the act of anticipating the fact of possibility" which "begins as an unknowing" and proceeds as a transformation of reality. I --1 l { i B i I i i l I I I \ I I . I i' 1 l i l i \ / I· \ [ i INTRODUCTION ... ... though in translation Arkadii Dragomoschenko's poems actually need less explanation than their Russian originals. If the landscape is unfamiliar at first sight, the poet's own Preface provides a set of intellectual map references and to a large extent the poems themselves embody their own commentary. It is in fact the reader with some knowledge of Russian literature who may be most puzzled by this poetry, since it is unlike anything else being written in the Soviet Union today. This poetry does not fit the image that exists of a Russian literature founded upon individual consciousness and social responsibility. It has other commitments and the main one is mentioned by the poet at the end of his preface "responsibility" in an absolutely literal sense as both conscience and response. My aim in this introduction is to reclaim these poems for a Russian literature into which they have not yet been accepted. The humanist tradition which excludes them has reached the end of its effective life, but there is another, older vein which these poems bring to the surface, and one that goes back beyond the Enlightenment to the very beginning of the literature. * * * Where to begin? Everything cracks and shakes. The air quivers with similes. No one word is better than any other, The earth is humming with metaphor ... (Mandelstam, "The Horseshoe Finder," 1923) This ''beginning" occurs in the middle of the poem and at the end of an era and the question it raises is ontological. The world is saturated with imagery and signification: there is no 7 room left for the old poetic self which "only connects." It has been crowded out and the poem finishes with the words " ... and there is not enough of me left for myself." The moment of consciousness marked by this poem recognizes thematic exhaustion and the end of language as self-expression. It might have founded a new poetics, but the time was wrong. In Russian poetry of the 1930s and '40s social and personal voices became polarized but both were founded on a virtually unquestioned faith in their own origin. The first true response to Mandelstam's tentative undermining of the foundations came from outside. Paul Celan translated "The Horseshoe Finder" and dedicated his Niemandsrose (1959) to the memory of Osip Mandelstam. But within Russian literature that hesitant self-orienting voice was hardly heard again until Drago moschenko began a more systematic topography of becom ing-through-language. What Mandelstam experienced as the edge of coherence, Dragomoschenko is using to found a new order, "Gradually opening a mode of existence to simple landscape' language" ("Observation of a Fallen Leaf as the "Ultimate Basis" of Landscape"). His "descriptions" precede any being, they describe the act of describing: a movement towards landscape/language that exists only as moments of transformation: "I'll stay as long as description transforming the tree into experience here ... " * * * The "Observation of a Fallen Leaf" is preceded by an epigraph from Chuang Tzu:" ... although what prompts this is unknown." In a way that answers the question of metaphysical grounding, but not of literary background. "Tradition" is a suspect explanation: it reduces constellations to a narrative line. 8 And in general the confidence of narration is antagonistic to the circlings of consciousness in Dragomoschenko's work. Nevertheless, in "The Islands of Sirens" he toys with "The mercy of pseudonarration" and it is at this very point that he invokes The Lay of Igor's Campaign-the real "beginning" of Russian literature. A problematic beginning, however, and not only because the authenticity of the text was for a long time a matter of dispute, but also because the anonymous author begins the Lay with the question of how to begin: Would it not be fitting, brother, for us to begin in the manner of the ancient lays the grievous tale of the campaign of Igor, of Igor the son of Svyatoslav? But rather let this song begin in accord with the events of our own time, and not with the design of Boyan. (The Lay of Igor's Campaign, c. 1185) It is clear that an established oral heritage already existed in "Boyan," one of the bards of a previous age. The answer the writer chose was to reflect the age self-consciously, using tradition as an echo chamber, and Boyan is woven into the epic as the narrative's mediator between fact and expression: If you had sung these campaigns, flitting, 0 nightingale, through the tree of thought,flying in your mind beneath the clouds, weaving together the glories of both halves of this time ... An eclipse of the sun divides the Lay formally into two halves, according to Propp's analysis which Dragomoschenko rephrases:"Sun eclipsed by Song-sign turning, it began its descent into another realm." But another eclipse also divides it along a different axis. This is the occultation of the already spoken or written by the 9 present action. One narrative voice sweeps across another: a plane of source imagery is eclipsed by reality. This is epitomized in the "negative metaphor," the archetypal trope of the byliny (medieval oral poetry): "But, brothers, it was not ten falcons that Boyan would let loose upon a flock of swans-but he would lay his magic fingers upon the living strings ... " In the humanist idiom a real world observed by the poet is transformed through consciousness into metaphor that transcends its origins. But the epic world of the Lay and the byliny begins as negated imagery, and this dialectic is its poetic impulse. This is one of the neglected directions Arkadii Dragomoschenko has chosen to follow: his images contain no reality, they are triangulation points along a route. * * * Another loophole epic and folk traditions have to offer a modern poet is not any specific technique or intonation but simply a space to breathe and allow language and sense to meander at will. A "classical" tradition still dominates Russian poetry. In its focused form, as in the Acmeism of Akhmatova or early Mandelstam, it stood for heroically distanced emotion and a European cultural intertext: a debased form has reduced its signs to ruthless metricality and relentless rhyming. Russian is richer in rhymes than English and its word order more flexible, and consequently rhyme is more compatible with reason; the western antipathy to strict versification has had little effect on contemporary Russian poetry. It is also possible that the quirkiness of Pasternak and Tsvetaeva rescued Russian rhyming from total stultification. Even so an antiquated formal concept of "the poetic" still stifles the roots of poetry. (In the "March Elegy" a derisive homage to "the poetic" is produced by transposing a sequence set up by the most notorious commonplace of 18th century Francophile versifying, the "rose" /"snows" (rozy/morozy) rhyme, into 10
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