Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikgv volume HI Selected Poems Unauthenticated Download Date | 8/23/15 9:12 AM Unauthenticated Download Date | 8/23/15 9:12 AM Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikgv volume hi Selected Poems translated by Paul Schmidt edited by Ronald Vroon Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 1997 Unauthenticated Download Date | 8/23/15 9:12 AM Copyright © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Julia A. Whitney Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Revised for vol. 3) Khlebnikov, Velimir, 1885-1922. Collected works of Velimir Khlebnikov Translated from the Russian. Vol. 3- edited by Ronald Vroon. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: v. 1. Letters and theoretical writings— v. 2. Prose, plays, and supersagas.—v. 3. Selected poems, i. Khlebnikov, Velimir, 1885-1922—Translations, English. 2. Khlebnikov, Velimir, 1885-1922—Correspondence. 3. Poets, Russian—20th century—Correspondence. I. Schmidt, Paul, 1934- . II. Douglas, Charlotte, 1936- III. Vroon, Ronald, 1948- IV. Title. PG3476.K485A23 1987 891.71'? 87-8399 ISBN 0-674-14045-1 (v. 1) ISBN 0-674-14046-X (v. 2) ISBN 0-674-14047-8 (v. 3, cloth) ISBN 0-674-14048-6 (v. 3, pbk.) Frontispiece: Velimir Khlebnikov, 1916 Page 274 constitutes an extension of the copyright page. Designed by Given Fmnkfeldt Unauthenticated Download Date | 8/23/15 9:12 AM Contents Frontispiece · Khlebnikov, 1916 Translator's Preface · vi Abbreviations · xi "The Poet and His Voices," by Ronald Vroon · 1 • 23 Longer Poems · 129 Notes · 237 List of Poems · 260 Russian Index of Titles · 267 English Index of Titles · 270 Credits · 274 Unauthenticated Download Date | 8/23/15 9:12 AM Translator's Preface This volume includes 192 of Velimir Khlebnikov's poems, of which eleven are "longer poems" (poemy in Russian). This figure does not include some fifty lyrics included in the various plays and supersagas, already translated in the second volume of this edition, published in 1989. It is difficult to arrive at a total number of Khlebnikov's poems. Approximately 650 texts contained in the original Russian editions of the collected and unpublished works (1928-1933 and 1940), as well as in Works (1986) and various periodicals and anthologies, can be considered separate texts, but this number includes many different versions of previously published poems. More than a third of this number are rough drafts and fragments, some no more than four lines long, but in these cases as well, many are simply variants of others. Khlebnikov had the habit of revising previously published poems, he had incon- sistent views on their readiness for publication, and even his fairest manuscripts are quite raw. Given all this, a precise canonical figure is impossible to come by. Even the very notion of "canonicity" seems questionable. The present selection is drawn from all the available texts, and is intended to provide a broad sampling of Khlebnikov's styles, themes, and subjects. Khlebnikov is known to English and American readers mostly for his early work as an experimenter with new forms, so I have tried to include here a sizable selection of those later poems—by far the majority—that are somewhat more conventional in form, and that also illuminate many episodes in the poet's life. Khlebnikov (1885-1922) ranks with Mallarme, Joyce, Pound, and Stein among the great innovators of literary modernism. He blurred the distinction between verse and prose and between one literary genre and another. His experiments helped to break the hold of traditional verse patterns in Russian—although he made extensive use of them himself. But in general he worked with irregularities, unequal line vi Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 8/23/15 9:14 AM Translator's Preface lengths, meters that varied from line to line in a single poem, variable stanza lengths, irregular rhyme patterns. He made use of patterns and tropes from folklore and from chants, incantations, and shamanistic language. He managed to create an entire poetics in the area of lan- guage that the Anglo-American tradition tends to belittle as "play"— neologisms, palindromes, riddles, puns. Khlebnikov's writing displays a perpetual willingness to allow form to form itself. He allows accidents to happen. A primary note in Khlebnikov's writing as I read it is the sense of wonder at the play of language, of sound allowed to move freely in search of its own sense, and yielding what Khlebnikov and his contemporaries called "beyon- sense" (zaum in Russian). For Khlebnikov, the shift in sound that produces a shift in meaning was a shift in the structure of the universe. That sword becomes word when a consonant vanished gave him a vertiginous sense of the power of language to influence the natural world. The shift of a consonant was all that distinguished inventors from investors or explorers from exploiters—and suddenly there appears the image of a struggle between Ν and S, between R and T. The movement of consonants becomes a metaphor for political and eco- nomic conflict. This kind of writing must give any serious translator pause; it certainly did me, and it was a while before I came to see my task as the creation of process rather than result. Instead of merely attempting a simulacrum of any given text, I would have to work upon American English the same sorts of transformations that Khlebnikov works upon Russian, and see what kinds of texts resulted. This approach helped me to avoid fetishizing the text of the original; it had the advantage of seeing translation as transaction, as a cultural and temporal response to the original text. The translation thus becomes a self-sufficient text, a product of response in its own time and place. When a poet translates a familiar poet into American English— Baudelaire, for instance—he enters immediately into a literary dialogue with translators who have preceded him. He is able—probably he is required—to offer us his Baudelaire: the French poem refined through his particular sensibility and style. But when the work of a poet is offered for the first time to an audience almost totally unfamiliar with it, as is the case with Khlebnikov, the translator is less free. Rather than assimilate the writer to himself, he must assimilate himself to the writer. The translator must perform the part of the poet in somewhat the same vii Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 8/23/15 9:14 AM Translator's Preface way that an actor prepares, through a similar language act, to create a character on the stage. When I began translating, some forty years ago, I was much enamored of "theories of translation," and of various methodologies. I have since come to believe that for the act of translation—the trans- lation of poems, anyway—there really is no useful theory, and "meth- ods" are only occasionally helpful. Every poem here poses unique problems, and each is translated in a way that offers a solution to those problems. Each translation is a record of a fresh encounter between two languages, two worlds. Inspiration as well plays a large part, and the muse of translation is as willful as the muse of poetry. Some of the translations in this volume are very free—variations, if you will, on the theme of the original. "We chant and enchant," for instance, expands Khlebnikov's ten lines to nineteen. But in general I have translated line for line. Some translations—"Venus and the Sha- man," for example—follow the metrical and rhyme patterns of the original as closely as possible, when these seemed to me to be the basic determinants of the poem in question. For some poems—such as "Harsh hush bends bow" and "The Tangled Wood"—I have made a conscious attempt to use the alliterations and syntactic patternings of our older Anglo-Saxon tradition, since these seem to me somehow to reflect Khlebnikov's attempt to reach the ur-forms of poetry, "to find— without breaking the circle of roots—the magic touchstone of all Slavic words, the magic that transforms one into another ..." The cadences of our own Walt Whitman, Khlebnikov's "old Walt," find occasional echoes here. And of course Khlebnikov's invention of neologisms posed delightful challenges. The plural of mouse is mice? Then surely, some- where in the backwoods of language, the plural of house is hice. All this is of course very subjective. My final standard for each of the translations in this volume is that it be a poem in American English. The single most important source for the texts translated here is Tvoreniia (Works, 1986) textually the most accurate volume published to date. For poems not contained in this volume, I turned to the original Sobranie proizvedenii (Collected Works, 1928-1933) and the supplementary Neizdannye proizvedeniia (Unpublished Works, 1940). These collections also served as the principal source for annotations. Tvoreniia in particular contains a wealth of background material illu- minating difficult and obscure passages in Khlebnikov's oeuvre. This volume also contains Khlebnikov's own variants of many of viii Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 8/23/15 9:14 AM Translator's Preface the poems from the supersagas "War in a Mousetrap" and "Asia Un- bound," translated in volume II of the Harvard Collected Works (Prose, Plays, and Supersagas, 1989). The source texts were drawn from the miscellanies and collections in which Khlebnikov's works originally appeared.