Russian Writers Lead Protest Walk + Daniel Sada's Almost Never

Boris Akunin (© RIA Novosti. Ilia Pitalev)

"[Writers are] engineers of the human soul."

I'd never read this quote before, and having done so today, hesitated to reprint it, despite its truth, mainly because of who uttered it and how he acted on its ramifications. I'm talking about Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator whose ruthlessness has no peers in the modern history of that country. The tally of Stalin's victims is vast beyond accounting, perhaps, but the names of writers he persecuted and murdered is less hazy to many, and any student of literary history could find parallels throughout the annals of literature. But I'm not posting about authoritarians' and totalitarians' persecution of writers so much as clumsily searching for a way to highlight an important event that took place the other day in in Moscow: a peaceful march  of opposition and resistance to the May 7, 2012 reelection of Russian president Vladimir Putin, led by a dozen of Russia's most famous writers, which drew over 10,000 participants. Among the march's organizers were poet and conceptual art pioneer Lev Rubinstein (1946-), journalist Sergei Parkhomenko, and disability rights activist, economist and journalist Irina Yasina (1964-), and other leaders included internationally renowned detective fictionist and translator Boris Akunin (1956-) and poet, journalist, and essayist Dmitrii Bykov (1967-).

The route proceeded from a statue of Russia's poetic icon, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), exiled, as New York Times reporter Ellen Barry notes, by Czar Alexander I, to one of Alexander S. Griboyedov (1795-1829), whose ludic send-ups of the Czarist-era bluebloods were proscribed until after his death. At the park housing Griboyedov's bust, in the Chistye Prudy neighborhood, anti-Putin activists have set up an Occupy-style encampment, which has so far not been attacked, though Putin has vowed to do so. Only a week before, a demonstration against Putin's reelection and inauguration near the Kremlin culminated in a brutal assault by the police forces, with 700 people arrested, some for allegedly doing nothing more than wearing white protest ribbons, and the state forces have remained on the prowl for any signs of antigovernment protest.  Moreover, opposition figureheads Alexei Navalny (1976-) and Sergei Udaltsov (1977-) were jailed for 15 days on May 10, 2012, for "disobeying police orders" as they met with supporters in Moscow, and, according to the Times, "Russia’s Parliament is considering a draft law that would increase fines for causing unrest at demonstrations to 1.5 million rubles, or about $50,000, and introduce a penalty of up to 240 hours of compulsory labor."

As a result, opposition activists decided to rethink their tactics, engaging in more artful "dilemma protests," such as flash gatherings, nonviolent resistance, ludic small-group activities, and site occupations, not unlike those of the Occupy Movements across the US and the rest of the globe.  The organizers of this march decided four days ago to see if the very act of walking together, on a "test stroll," without a permit, through Moscow's streets would provoke a police response involving "being blocked, beaten, poisoned with gas, detained, arrested or at least subjected to stupid molestation with questions." It did not, thankfully, and one point the phalanx of protesters, many clutching the books of the march's leaders, spanned over a mile. Afterwards, marchers got autograph and an opportunity to chat with the writers and each other, then dispersed.  As of today, the Chistye Prudy encampment remains , but for how long it's hard to say. A much larger March of Millions is planned for June 12, 2012 in Moscow. Perhaps writers across the globe should consider June 12 solidarity marches, on behalf not only of the Russian people, democracy, freedom of speech and protest, but against authoritarian and totalitarian forces, including corporate ones, worldwide.

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Today Reggie H. sent along Marie Arana's May 10, 2012  Washington Post review of an exciting new publication by Graywolf Press, the first novel by late Mexican genius Daniel Sada (1953-2011) to be translated into English, Almost Never (2012, originally published as Casi nunca by Anagrama in 2008). The translator is Katherine Silver, co-director of the highly regarded Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC), which several translators I deeply admire have attended. Rachel Nolan gave Almost Never rhapsodized over the novel in the April 20, 2012 New York Times. Sada passed away late last year after many years of battle with kidney disease, but in his brief writing life he was not only prolific, but made his name as one of the more important and inventive prose writers not just in Mexico but in the Spanish language, winning numerous national literary prizes and the adulation of peers across the Hispanophone world. The late Robert Bolaño (1953-2003) in particular sang Sada's praises many times, while Nolan, in her laudatory article, wrote this: "If you read only three novelists on Mexico — and you should read many more, but that’s your affair — choose Juan Rulfo, Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Sada." That is very high praise, especially considering how many exceptional contemporary let alone past Mexican fiction writers there are.

As I replied to Reggie, I'd been told of Sada but it wasn't until I saw his email that I recalled two prior encounters with his name: one, a 2006 Bomb interview, conducted by Mexican novelist José Manuel Prieto and translated by one of the best contemporary translators of Mexican poetry, poet and book artist Jen Hofer, and this 2011 epicedium, in The Paris Review, by author, journalist and critic Francisco Goldman. In the Prieto interview, Sada ranges widely in discussing his work, describing his reasoning behind his use of Spanish prosody in writing verse-novels (about which I'll say more below), and what he learned from Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) one of Mexico's canonical literary figures and the author of Pedro Páramo (1955), with whom he took a writing class. Of his lessons from Rulfo, he says:

He once recommended that I shouldn’t persist in intellectualizing everything I was experiencing, because that would end up getting in the way of my perception. Reading is perpetual nourishment, never a vehicle for vanity. Intellectuals, in general, are braggarts, perhaps because they do not possess a true interior landscape. Artists are more silent; they are observers and have, naturally, a great capacity for astonishment. Artists are continual absorbers, and it is perhaps only much later that they pick and choose. These are all Rulfian concepts, and were spoken, I will confess, very close to my ear, as if they were secrets that can only be told in low tones.

 Goldman talks about Sada's influence on and aid to Bolaño, who set many of his novels in Mexico, where he spent his adolescence, but which he never returned to after his move to Spain in his early 20s, while also describing Sada's work and its significance, and their confabulations over the years.  One of my favorite passages in Goldman's memoriam comes when he translates a reminiscence by Sada's friend and editor at Tusquets Mexico:

He wasn’t interested in luxury or power, though his prose is a true luxury. Nobody could write the way he could. In life, he only ever boasted about one thing: his way of writing. To the students who took his writing workshops, he gave one of the simplest but most valuable pieces of advice: in literature there are no excuses. You have to organize your life to be able to write at least a half a page every day. After a week, you’ll have enough words to finish a story, after a month enough for a novella, after a year enough for a novel or a collection of stories … Some of his first novels were written under great economic duress, but they are among his best: Una de dos, Albedrío. t took him six years to write his most ambitious novel, amid personal upheaval and much moving around, but he never lost his energy or concentration …  

Daniel Sada (Pascual Borzelli Iglesias © New York Times)

About Sada's innovation: I cannot pretend to have read his work, but from what I can tell, he distinguished himself not just by overall narrative adroitness, tending towards the baroque (as with Cuba's unsurpassable José Lezama Lima (1910-1976)), but through his use of traditional Spanish prosody as the foundation for his novels.  As he told Prieto:

It is in no way a desire to be flashy or overly elaborate that leads me to use octosyllables, hendecasyllables, alexandrines, decasyllables or heptasyllables. I have a deep knowledge, from childhood, of the most elemental constructions of these metric forms, so characteristic of Spanish. In my primary school in Sacramento, Coahuila, Panchita Cabrera, a rural schoolteacher who was an ardent fan of the Spanish Golden Age (a type that no longer exists) taught us these phonetic techniques with one goal in mind: that we might fine-tune our ears in order to appreciate the expressive delicacy and virulence of our language. In fact, to be honest, it’s more difficult for me to write free prose, because I don’t have any technical (phonetic) resources on hand that might provide some support.

"Octosyllables, hedecasyllables, alexandrines..." I couldn't make that up. As a result it makes his work quite difficult to translate into English, which uses a very different stressed prosodic system. (Among American writers of the last 50 or so years, I immediately thought of Vikram Seth (1959-), who wrote his astonishing novel Golden Gate in "Onegin stanzas," as well as of Anne Carson (1950-), Peter Taylor (1917-1994), and Thanhha Lai (1965-), each of whom wrote works of fiction in verse, but none in conventional meter or even blank verse.) On top of this, he apparently also was a master of puns and other forms of wordplay, as well as rhetorical devices and figures, and a good deal of this is lost--as it must be--in English.  Rereading the Prieto interview, I thought of Spanish-language wordsmiths like Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005) and Julián Ríos (1941-) both of whom, however, also knew (and in Ríos's case, still does) English, and wrote Spanish prose, playful and elaborate, that could still be rendered into English. Cabrera Infante even possessed the remarkably rare capacity not just to write in English but to pun in it as well, and to write puns that could signify in many cases in both languages. But Sada's languages were all drawn from the registers of Mexico, and so Silver's labor, and that of subsequent translators, will require a golden-drummed ear. I'm eager to peek at Sada in the original, though I imagine my Spanish will be too rudimentary to grasp his richness, but I also want to read Silver's translation and compare it, to learn what she was able to successfully bring over, or, invent as needed.

What Happened to the New Translation of Dr. Zhivago?

This is was going to be a short post, because of limited time, but I wanted to register something literary and poetry-related I noticed during break that I said I'd blog about.  I had been jonesing for the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)'s extraordinary and lone novel, Dr. Zhivago (1956), for which, along with his poetry, he was awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature, which the Soviet authorities pressured him to decline. The novel itself was not published in Russia until 1988, in the pages of Novy Mir, a major Soviet literary journal, but it did appear internationally in 1957 because Pasternak had given a copy to Italian publishing magnate Giangiacomo Feltrinelli to smuggle out of Russia, which he did, and then promptly had the novel published in Italian, as Il Dottor Zhivago.

Since I'm trying to be concise, I will not delve into all the particulars of the novel, which covers the period from before World War I through the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Civil War there. The Russian authorities despised it; they thought it critical of Stalin, the Soviet State and its ideology, and Marxism. They deemed it counterrevolutionary, too formally experimental, abstract, etc. It is not a conventional novel except in girth. It has a confusing plot, cares little about fluid transitions between scenes, features jarring approaches to characterization, and so forth. At the end of it Pasternak appends poems "by Yuri Zhivago," that offers a fuller demonstration the eponymous protagonist's poetic gifts, but which mainly underline Pasternak's greatness as a poet. A novelist and poet I admire told me many years ago over coffee that he found Dr. Zhivago "tedious," and then, finally confessed that he hated it.  I was surprised, but with a bit of distance, I can understand why he did and why Dr. Zhivago isn't to everyone's taste. (David Lean's 1965 movie, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie was a popular success and a critical bomb, and only partially captures the novel's depth and grandeur.)

Yet, Dr. Zhivago repeatedly presents, at least from the impression I formed from the initial, 1958 English translation of the book, a powerful demonstration of Pasternak's poetic skill; again and again, his descriptions of the landscape, of people, of politics, all of it, come alive through metaphor, simile, synecdoche, metonymy, and other figurative means to the extent that the world of the novel, its background and foreground, almost seem to bristle with life. I should note that the name of the protagonist Yuri Zhivago, points to this, as zhiv- in Russian is the root meaning "life," and Pasternak earlier had published a book of poems entitled My Sister, Life (1921), which had a tectonic effect on Russian poetry. After Stalin began his clampdown, Pasternak turned to prose, and published two books that are among my favorites for their lyrical strangeness and intensity, the short memoir Safe Conduct, and the stories, including the haunting "Aerial Ways" (I have probably read this story 10 times), which together constituted the collection A Childhood in Luvers.  Around the time of the shorter prose works he began writing portions of the long novel, and there are continuities of style. Again, the striking use of metaphors and personification are here, as are the idiosyncratic explorations of time and history, and so much else that flowers in the novel. And in the memoir-with-stories edition that New Directions published many years ago, the poet Babette Deutsch (1895-1982) translates with a flourish many (all?) of his poems included in that collection. Pasternak himself translated works from English and other languages, and Russians loved his translations of William Shakespeare's plays, which critics appraised as being too much Pasternak and too little Shakespeare.

I've already gone on too long. Okay, So let me get to it: Pevear and Volokhonsky are broadly acknowledged as among the most important and best translators from the Russian. Their version of Mikhail Bulgakov's (1891-1940) The Master and Margarita (1967) is so entrancing that I did not want to put it down.  They also famously rendered as whole as is humanly possible Leo Tolstoy's (1828-1910) War and Peace (1869), including leaving in the rivers of French (which was the social language of the Russian aristocracy of the novel's epoch) that fill the book, and they restored Tolstoy's peculiar uses of repetition, which the previous best-known English translation had shorn away. So it was with real eagerness that I grabbed the copy of Dr. Zhivago I saw on sale at one of the moribund Borders (RIP) here in Chicago; I was sure, given their proved skill, and the glowing reviews I'd read, that it would improve the earlier version by many bounds.

But, here's the thing: Pasternak is a poet. And as I began to read the new translation, I kept wondering, where are those poetic passages from the earlier, allegedly "flawed" 1958 version, by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, that I even underlined and noted years before? I don't read Russian, unfortunately for me, but I could see that a laxity, vaguenesses had crept in; the crystalline concision of Pasternak's imagery appeared off compared to the earlier book. Again and again I found myself searching the text for those moments from Hayward's and Harari's version and finally realized that, for all their skill, Pevear and Volokhonsky appear to have blown this one a bit.

Though P&V are more literal, the prose has become, well, "tedious" to me, though I haven't given it up yet, since I know the story and still do enjoy it. If you don't believe me, I've done you the favor of having already (not tonight, a week ago) typed up the earlier and the P&V versions of some of the passages that caught my eye the first go-round. Which, I ask you, is more poetic? Is more compelling? Even as fiction? Now, I also wonder, were the critics who praised this new version even aware of this? If not, why not? How closely did they read the novel, and did they recall any of the earlier prose, which, as you'll see below, almost brands itself into your memory. I'll stop there because this has gone on far longer than I intended, but what do you think?

***

Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), originally published in Italian translation from the Russian, in 1957.

English translation 1958, translated from Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago" by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., London, with authorized revisions to the English, Pantheon Books Inc., New York, NY.

English translation 2010, translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, with an introduction by Richard Pevear, Pantheon Books Inc., New York, NY

Hayward & Harari (HH): Turning over and over in the sky, length after length of whiteness unwound over the earth and shrouded it. p. 4

Pevear & Volokhonsky (PV): From the sky endless skeins of white cloth, turn after turn, fell on the earth, covering it in a winding sheet. p. 4

HH: Crows settled on the heavy branches of firs, scattering the hoarfrost; their cawing echoed and re-echoed like crackling wood. p. 5

PV: Crows landed on the hanging fir branches, shaking down hoarfrost. The cawing carried, loud as the cracking of a tree limb.

HH: The half-reaped fields under the glaring sun looked like the half-shorn heads of convicts. p. 6

PV: The sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners. p. 5

HH: Neat sheaves rose above the stubble in the distance; if you stared at them long enough they seemed to move, walking along on the horizon like land surveyors taking notes. p. 6

PV: Its ears drooping, the wheat drew itself up straight in the total stillness or stood in shocks far off the road, where, if you stared long enough, it acquired the look of moving figures, as if land surveyors were walking along the edge of the horizon and taking notes. p. 5

HH: Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviëv or Kant or Marx. p. 9

PV: Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it's a faith in Soloviev, or Kant, or Marx. p. 8

HH: It was hard to keep one's eyes on the shimmering river, which, like a sheet of corrugated iron, reflected the glare of the sun. Suddenly its surface parted in waves. p. 10

PV: It was painful to look at the river. It gleamed in the sun, curving in and out like a sheet of iron. Suddenly it wrinkled up. p. 10

HH: Orioles kept making their clear three-note calls, stopping each time just long enough to let the countryside suck in the moist fluting sounds down to the last vibration. p. 10

PV: At every moment you could hear the pure, three-note whistling of orioles, with intervals of waiting, so that the moist, drawn-out, flutelike sound could fully saturate the surroundings. p. 10

HH: A heavy fragrance, motionless, as though having lost its way in the air, was fixed by the heat above the flower beds. p. 11

PV: The stagnant scent of flowers wandering in the air was nailed down motionless to the flowerbeds to the heat. p. 10

HH: Russia, with its fields, steppes, villages, and towns, bleached lime-white by the sun, flew past them wrapped in hot clouds of dust. p. 12

PV: Past them in clouds of hot dust, bleached as with lime by the sun, flew Russia, fields and steppes, towns and villages. p. 11

HH: The rising sun had cast the long dewy shadows of trees in loops over the park grounds. The shadow as not black but dark gray like wet felt. The heady fragrance of the morning seemed to come from this damp shadow on the ground, with strips of light in it like girl's fingers. p. 17

PV: The sun was rising, and the ground in the park was covered with the long, dewy, openwork shade of trees. The shade was not black, but of a dark gray color, like wet felt. The stupefying fragrance of morning seemed to come precisely from the damp shade on the ground, with its elongated light spots like a young girl's fingers. p. 15

HH: ...and the boat was dragged in to shore as if by a boathook. There the stems were shorter and more tangled; the white flowers, with their glowing centers looking like bloodspecked egg yolks, sank and emerged dripping with water. p. 19

PV: The boat was drawn to the bank as if by a hook. The stems beecame entangled and shortened: the white flowers with centers bright as egg yolk and blood sank underwater, then emerged with water streaming from them. pp. 16-17.

HH: Purple shadows reached into the room from the garden. The trees, laden with hoarfrost, their branches like smoky streaks of candle wax, looked as if they wished to rest their burden on the floor of the study. p. 39

PV: Violet shadows reached from the garden into the study. Trees peered into the room, looking as if they wanted to strew the floor with their branches covered with heavy hoarfrost, which resembled the lilac streams of congealed stearine. p. 35

HH: In winter the street frowned with a forbidding surliness. p. 44

PV: In winter the place frowned with gloomy haughtiness. p. 39

HH: The weather was unseasonable. Plop-plop-plop went the water drops on the metal of the drainpipes and the cornices, roof tapping messages to roof as if it were spring. It was thawing. p. 44

PV: The weather was trying to get better. "Drip, drip, drip" the drops drummed on the iron gutters and cornice. Roof tapped out to roof, as in springtime. It was a thaw. p. 39