Thursday, November 20, 2008

i see red




a few nights a go i stop at the newsbeat on the way home from work to see what journals and mags there are to be seen. i pick up the newest circumference and thumbing thru the pages i read a poem by the late russian poet boris ryzhii. i've barely read any ryzhii but i remember this entry on the poet which must've been some years ago and remembered the name. plus the one fragment posted at poetry international isn't much but something about it struck me. of course i searched the web for ryzhii's work but at that time there wasn't much of it translated into english.

there still isn't much of it translated into english. but what i have read either falls flat or rises a bit into an interesting text. i suppose it's the art of translation because a writer i adore, osip mandelstam, also has been abused by bad translations. but when mandalstam is served well the results can be deeply satisfying.

well, this wasn't the first time i bought a journal just on the strength of a single poem. i recall another time buying another journal because the poem i read, by nick moudry, just fucking blew me away and i had to have it. anyway, the translator of ryzhii's poems james stotts posted a brief bio and some more translations on his blog here. stotts is completely new to me both as a poet-blogger and translator. reading his entries i discover that his love of russian poetry runs deep. his own poems sway to a minimalist music and a young poet who also has a jones for the late joseph brodsky - as i have, every gnarled, crabbed bit of brodsky - writing elegies to the russian poet [see stotts' entry here] and you got my attention.

but back to ryzhii. he committed suicide at the age of 26 in 2001 and spent his entire young life in the urals. check out his wiki article. other than that i know very little of the young russian poet. i do hope stotts translates more ryzhii and that someone will publish a collection of his work. oh, according to poetry international ryzhii's last name means 'red'.

1 Comments:

At 7:17 AM, Blogger J.H. Stotts said...

richard,

'ryzhii' actually is 'red-head' pretty exclusively (i guess it is a very different color, v samom delye) so very bit different than krasnii, the standard russian word for red that has its own rich set of connotations. i know, because my wife's nickname for me is ryzhik-bestyzhik.

i'm glad you looked at my blog, and got a copy of the new circumference.
the publishing situation for ryzhii is unfortunate, most of what gets out of russia these days is the avant-garde schlock and comes to america through a few experimental emigre poets and publishing houses with connections in moscow and st. petersburg. ryzhii's formal tendencies are anathema to that circle of poets, and ryzhii has no one to really promote him and do the translations on his behalf. i actually was in st. petersburg a couple years ago and was sharing ideas and translations with aleksandr skidan, a prominent avant-garde schlockist and critic, and he tried to discourage me from my admiration of ryzhii (we both agreed that ryzhii was 'pathetic,' though i meant it in the best sense, and skidan probably meant in the worst). we got along better when we were talking about mandelstam.
anyway, there is a little good news, because there is a new dutch documentary making the festival circuits in europe right now and garnering a lot of attention. i don't believe in trying to translate whole books of any one poet, there are bound to be too many failures, so i won't be writing one any time soon, but i'm confident that somebody will be doing a pretty comprehensive translation of ryzhii. it's only a matter of time; he's had too great an impact on 21st century russian poetry/poets to be ignored by the west for long.
i've tried to keep a lot of my translations on the down low, just because they're being considered for publication by a couple places, and when they see things on a blog or whatever, they have a tendency to consider it as already published. more and more journals are making formal policies against blog publication so they can keep exclusive first time rights.

for what it's worth. and i hope you don't mind if i add your blog for e-combing.

james stotts

 

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