dublinka

Poet and translator, Anatoly Kudriavitsky recently launched a new book called A Night in the Nabokov Hotel; a bilingual translation of 20 Russian poets, many of whom he new personally. Now if like me you agree that the Russians as a nation are unsurpassed in their poetry, then you're probably quite excited by the possibility of reading this anthology. The poems I heard on the night were fantastic but unfortunately the book sold out at the reading before yours truly could manage to get his hands on one. Nevertheless I did get my hands on Shadow of Time, an earlier collection by the author. It contains the poem Pseudoaluminium and the Big Plans, which also appears in A Night in the Nabokov Hotel. The poem has been lauded in Russia as an outstanding anti-war poem, although on the night, Kurdiavitsky quipped that he hadn't realised it was one. It opens with the line:

The bigger the house,
the smaller the occupants of the house.

and ends with the lines

They hope it contains much
pseudoaluminium,
the raw material of super-high-speed bombers
and portrait frames.

In doing so the poem reminds us of the link between war and economy. Of the complicity of society and even perhaps aesthetics, in the production of terror and neocolonial enterprise. The picture frame is empty. There is, nothing to put in it. Despite its brilliance, its owners are without face, without soul even. Elsewhere in the poem he speaks of skyscrapers. He is speaking overtly of international bankers and the technocrats who crank the wheels of oppression, but implicitly of the greater occidental middle class. The poem further states that even though the devil (or war) gradually loses its prestige, the process of exploitation continues. Not just in the big plans, but in the little plans. In the extraction of the raw material for picture frames. The victims are without face. Obliterated. They will not make the portrait frames.

Kurdiavitsky also made one further interesting comment at the reading. He spoke of the difficulty of translation. And even though a man of many tongues, he wondered whether his translation of the poem, into his mother languageRussian from the English, quite conveyed what he meant. It is an interesting comment. Because in a sense, it removes the debate of the difficulties and complexities of the merits of a given translation from the mind of the poet who has produced the work. Even though the mind of the poet holds the concepts and ideas of the poem, it can not readily switch them into and between languages. He acts as an intermediary between languages. And he, like a translator, is not necessarily assured of the correctness of his translation. It's a startling admission. It tells us something about the tyranny of language over the human mind. And it tells us something of that accessible subterranean world that lies beneath expression.