I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky

by Arseny Tarkovsky

Overview

Poetry. Film. Translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev. "Tarkovsky now joins the ranks of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Brodksky. Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev's translations—succinct and allusive, stingingly direct and yet sweeping, mournful and celebratory—are marvels."—PEN/Heim citation

"How does one translate the work of Russian classic, Arseny Tarkovsky? Imagine trying to translate Yeats: high style rhetoric, intense emotion, local tonalities of language, complicated historical background, the old equation of poet vs. state, the tone of a tender love lyric, all meshed into one, all exquisite in its execution—and all so impossible to render again. And yet, one tries. In the case of Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev, one tries brilliantly, with gusto, with passion, with attentiveness that is akin to that of a prayer, with the ear of real poets. The result? The gravity and directness of Tarkovsky's tone is brought into English without fail, it is here, honest and pained, piercing and even shy at times, like a deer that looks straight at you before it runs. Tarkovsky's ambition was to seek us—those who live after him—through earth, through time. He does so in this brilliant translation."—Ilya Kaminsky

"Arseny Tarkovsky was ten years old at the time of the Russian Revolution and died six months before the opening of the Berlin Wall. He spent his career as a poet creating elegant and starkly interior transfigurations of simple happiness and pure grief, triumphs of the individual self against the brutal realities of daily life in wartime and Communist Russia. Through this meticulous translation of his work, readers will encounter a metaphysical complex poetry, at once searing and brooding, very much in dialogue with such great Soviet poets as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova. Tarkovsky writes of a country where 'we lived, once upon a time, as if in a grave, drank no tea' but still succeeded in making 'bread from weeds,' where the 'blue sky is dim' but nonetheless manages to be the 'wet-nurse of dragonflies and birds.'"—Michael Dumanis

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780996316705
Publisher:	Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Publication date:	05/15/2015
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky was born in the Ukrainian city of Elisavetgrad (now Kirovohrad) in 1907 and moved to Moscow in 1923, working as a newspaper journalist and publishing his first poems. By the late 1930s, he had become a noted translator of Turkmen, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, and other Asian poets. During the Second World War, he served as a war correspondent for the Soviet Army publication Battle Alarm from 1942 to 1944, receiving the Order of the Red Star for valor. Tarkovsky's first volume of his own poems, Before the Snow, emerged in 1962, when the poet was 55, and rapidly sold out. His fame widened when his son, the internationally-acclaimed filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, included some of his father's poems in his films. He died in 1989, just before the Soviet Union fell.

Philip Metres is the author or translator of a number of books and chapbooks including SAND OPERA (Alice James Books, 2015), COMPLEAT CATALOGUE OF COMEDIC NOVELTIES: POETIC TEXTS OF LEV RUBINSTEIN (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), A Concordance of Leaves (Diode Press, 2013), abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine Press, 2011), TO SEE THE EARTH (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront Since 1941 (University of Iowa Press, 2007). His work has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, five Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Anne Halley Prize, the PEN/Heim Translation grant, a Russian Institute for Literary Translation grant, and the Creative Workforce Fellowship. He is a professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

Dimitri Psurtsev, a Russian poet and translator of British and American authors, is a professor at Moscow State Linguistic University and lives outside Moscow with his wife Natalia and daughter Anna. His two books of poetry, Ex Roma Tertia and Tengiz Notepad, were published in 2001 by Yelena Pakhomova Press and translations of his poems were published by the Hudson Review in 2009 and 2011. In 2014 Dimitri received, along with Philip Metres, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for I BURNED AT THE FEAST: SELECTED POEMS OF ARSENY TARKOVSKY.

Table of Contents

Introduction Philip Metres Dimitri Psurtsev xiii

I Butterfly in the Hospital Orchard (1926-1945)

Candle 3

If I were the arrogant man I once was 5

Ignatievo Forest 7

Hail on Petit-Bourgeois Street 9

Portrait 11

June 25, 1939 13

The table is set for six 15

Cricket 17

Yesterday morning I began waiting for you 21

From "Chistopol Notebook"

II Under the yoke of bad luck 23

IV Refugee 25

V I'm piling up lines of firewood altars 27

VII In anger you punish unbearably, Lord 29

VIII You ran, choking, until you fell 31

X I call, but Marina does not reply. She sleeps today 33

Beautiful Day 35

Here, a house once stood. Inside, some old man 37

A German machinegunner will shoot me in the road, or 39

The gun battery was over there, behind that hill 41

A blind man was riding an unheated train 43

Don't stand here 45

Western Sky 47

The Hunt 49

Butterfly in the Hospital Orchard 51

Valya's Willow 53

Saturday, June 21st, 1941 55

Field Hospital 59

II The Earthly Feast (1945-1965)

The Book of Grass 65

The Word 67

I learned the grass as I began to write 69

Things 71

I bid farewell to everything I was 75

You evening light, gray 79

From the Window 81

May Vincent van Gogh forgive me 83

Poets 85

The Olive Trees 87

Infant-Life 89

Pigeons 91

Passing By 93

Earthly 95

Wind 97

Song Under the Bullet 99

To Poems 101

The Steppe 103

Eurydice 107

First Times Together 111

I've come to hate them, these words, words, words 115

The Poet (Osip Mandelstam) 117

Reality and Speech 121

Manuscript 123

III Gather My Wax When Morning Arrives (1965-1977)

Life, Life 127

The Night Before the First of June 131

O, if only I could rise, regain my memory and consciousness 133

By the book of stone I learn a tongue outside of time 135

And now summer has left 137

From nowhere at all 139

Their commas exact and sensible 141

To the Memory of A. A. Akhmatova 143

Wet-nurse of dragonflies and birds 153

After the War 155

The Sugakleya disappears into the reeds 165

I've dreamed all this, and this I'm dreaming 167

Snow in March 169

That thunder still rings in the ears 171

I'm no plaintiff, I will not sue 173

From its dark sleep the body wakes 175

Once Upon a Time 177

My sight, which was my power, now blurs 181

Afterword: "Erotic Soyuz" by Philip Metres 183

Notes 197