The Bilingual Muse Northwestern University Press Studies in Russian Literature and Theory
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The Bilingual Muse Northwestern University Press Studies in Russian Literature and Theory Series Editors Caryl Emerson Gary Saul Morson William Mills Todd III Andrew Wachtel Justin Weir The Bilingual Muse Self- Translation among Russian Poets Adrian Wanner Northwestern University Press / Evanston, Illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu This title is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC). Read the license at https://creativecommons .org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at openmonographs.org. DOI: 10.21985/n2-8cfb-pa17 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Wanner, Adrian, 1960– author. Title: The bilingual muse : self translation among Russian poets / Adrian Wanner. Other titles: Studies in Russian literature and theory. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2020. | Series: Northwestern University Press Studies in Russian literature and theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019042529 | ISBN 9780810141230 (paperback) | ISBN9780810141247 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810141254 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Russian poetry— 19th century— History and criticism. | Russian poetry— 20th century— History and criticism. | Self- translation. | Russian poetry— Translations— History and criticism. | Multilingualism and literature. Classification: LCC PG2985 .W36 2020 | DDC 891.7109— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042529 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction “The Trick of Doubling Oneself” 1 Chapter One Elizaveta Kul’man: The Most Polyglot of Russian Poets 19 Chapter Two Wassily Kandinsky’s Trilingual Poetry 44 Chapter Three Marina Tsvetaeva’s Self- Translation into French 76 Chapter Four Vladimir Nabokov’s Dilemma of Self- Translation 112 Chapter Five Joseph Brodsky in English 135 Chapter Six Self- Translation among Contemporary Russian- American Poets 154 Conclusion 171 Notes 177 Bibliography 211 Index 227 Acknowledgments The impulse for writing this book came from an invitation to give a key- note at a conference in Uppsala in June 2014. The theme of the conference, which was organized by Julie Hansen and Susanna Witt, was translation and translingualism in Russian contexts. Searching for a topic, I settled on self- translation among Russian- American poets. This subject had the advantage of engaging the two conference themes of translation and translingualism. I had worked on translation and translingualism before, but never in combi- nation with each other, and an additional advantage of this choice was that it allowed me to indulge my love for poetry. Over the years that followed, the project continued to grow and eventually morphed into a more comprehen- sive study of Russian poets of the past 200 years who translated their own works not only into English, but also into German, French, and Italian, the languages I grew up with in Switzerland. In hindsight, the Uppsala conference has acquired the status of an al- most legendary event. Many of the participants have become regular pre- senters in the translation panels that have sprung up at the conventions of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. A related phenomenon, which has begun to overlap with the former group, are the panel streams on translingualism at the meetings of the American Com- parative Literature Association organized by Steven Kellman and Natasha Lvovich, who also hosted, together with Ilan Stavans, a symposium entitled “Writing in the Stepmother Tongue” at Amherst College in October 2015. All of these events gave me inspiration for my project. During a sabbatical leave in 2016– 17, I presented aspects of this book at conferences and sym- posia in New York, Oslo, Uppsala, Tartu, and Utrecht. A workshop on the Russian Literary Diaspora organized by Maria Rubins at University College London in May 2018 provided a welcome opportunity for additional helpful feedback. I am grateful to my numerous colleagues for inspirational conversa- tions. In particular, I thank Julie Hansen, Natasha Lvovich, Maria Rubins, vii Acknowledgments and David Bethea, who read earlier versions of portions of this book and provided useful comments. I am also indebted to Miriam Finkelstein, who invited me to a stimulating symposium on multilingual Slavic poetry at the University of Innsbruck in June 2017. I thank Kevin Platt, Pamela David- son, Zakhar Ishov, and Eugenia Kelbert for helpful suggestions. Hilde Hoogenboom, many decades ago, introduced me to the work of Elizaveta Kul’man while we were both graduate students at Columbia University, and Ilya Vinitsky engaged with me in a spirited exchange of e- mails devoted to Kul’man in the summer of 2018. Natalia Bochkareva, Alexandra Berlina, and Anna Lushenkova Foscolo provided assistance with locating hard- to- find materials, and Rainer Stillers in Berlin kindly allowed me to benefit from his expertise in Italian poetry. Earlier versions of chapters 4 and 6 have appeared in Slavic and East European Journal (“Poems and Problems: Vladimir Nabokov’s Dilemma of Poetic Self- Translation,” Slavic and East European Journal 61, no. 1 [2017]: 70– 91) and in Translation Studies (“The Poetics of Displacement: Self- Translation among Contemporary Russian- American Poets,” Translation Studies 11, no. 2 [2018]: 122– 38). I thank Irene Masing Delic, the former editor of Slavic and East European Journal, and the two anonymous review- ers for their careful and detailed engagement with my article. I am also in- debted to the two readers of Translation Studies and the two peer evaluators of Northwestern University Press for their constructive feedback. The poem “October Tune,” which appears on page 148, is from Col- lected Poems in English by Joseph Brodsky, copyright © 2000 by the Estate of Joseph Brodsky; reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and by Carcanet Press Limited. I thank Andrey Gritsman and Katia Kapovich for their kind permission to cite their self- translated poems in Russian and English. I owe a special gratitude to Andrey for inviting me to speak at a bilingual evening of Russian- American poetry in New York in January 2018 and for visiting my translation seminar at Penn State in April 2018, giving the students the unique opportu- nity to discuss works of self- translated bilingual poetry with their author. My Penn State colleague Patrick McGrady, the Charles V. Hallman Curator at the Palmer Museum of Art, has shared with me his insights about Kandinsky, while Irina Mikaelian, Yelena Zotova, and Alexandra Shapiro have provided me with helpful comments about the finer points of their native Russian lan- guage. The debt I owe my most faithful reader, Cathy Wanner, for her moral support and everything else, is beyond words. viii The Bilingual Muse Introduction “The Trick of Doubling Oneself” WHAT HAPPENS WHEN poets translate their own work into a foreign language? Can such a thing even be done with any success? If poetry, according to Robert Frost’s much- quoted dictum, is what is lost in translation,1 the attempt to rewrite one’s own poems in another language seems doubly doomed to failure. The intimate connection of poetry to the sound, rhythm, and morphology of its linguistic medium makes the trans- lation of poems an elusive enterprise. Moreover, the aesthetic viability of poetic creation outside the mother tongue has been met with widespread skepticism since the romantic period. A poetic self- translator, then, seeks to accomplish simultaneously two feats that are generally considered extremely challenging, if not impossible— translating poetic texts, and writing poetry in a foreign language. Not everybody would agree, of course, that these are insurmount- able hurdles or even serious impediments to poetic self- translation. The assumptions underlying the putative hardship of translingual creativity are conditioned by cultural and psychological factors. Popular opinion notwith- standing, poetic self- translation is actually a less marginal activity than what one may think. Contrary to what has been claimed, the phenomenon cannot be reduced to just “a few very rare exceptions.”2 As Rainier Grutman has pointed out, no fewer than eight Nobel Prize laureates in literature, roughly one out of every thirteen, have been self- translators. Five of them— Frédéric Mistral, Rabindranath Tagore, Karl Gjellerup, Czesław Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky— were poets.3 This fact has not received much attention because the “monolingual paradigm,” to use a term coined by Yasemin Yildiz, still predominates in literary criticism. According to this paradigm, “individu- als and social formations are imagined to possess one ‘true’ language only, their ‘mother tongue,’ and through this possession to be organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture, and nation.”4 In such a view, poetic writing outside the mother tongue and self- translation into a non- native language appear as eccentric anomalies that fall through the cracks of a taxonomy