From the tragedy of history, from the pleasure in form and the depth of feeling, poetry of the highest radiance arises in Eastern Europe. Two Russian poets and one Lithuanian poet write in echo chambers reverberating in many voices.
Traces and relics of bygone life. – Fireworks over Leningrad, today St. Petersburg.
Not long ago, the Russian poet and author of the grandiose memoir “After Memory” Maria Stepanova revealed the layers of collective and personal history to us in her volume of poetry “The Body Returns” (2020). In her new cycle of poems, which have now been published under the title “Girls without clothes” in the impressive translation by Olga Radetzkaja, the theme of layers is varied: it is always about clothes that cover the body or – if discarded and left to their own devices – become wistful testimonies of the past, threadbare memorabilia.
Elegiac view of the world
The traces and relics of a past life are once again at the center of Stepanova’s elegiac view of the world. One believes to see her leafing through photo albums when she describes (semi-)naked girls, lascivious and freezing, boldly posing or slightly shy. The touching evocation drives away any thought of pornography.
The poet proves to be even more in her element in the cycle “Clothes without us”, in which chemisetts, kid gloves, travel fox fur and children’s kimonos mourn the “lost bodies”. “No naked, shivering anthropos emerges from the dark wardrobes”, the empty cloth covers full of “sweat stains, dust bunnies, lint” and “traces of red wine and remorse” tell their own story. This ends in a rhymeless wreath of sonnets like this: «Show the clothes undressed to the bottom. / Teach them to become earth, / Where what was nothing is suddenly all the world.»
In the third cycle of poems, «Bist du Luft», we experience an I that dreams, that moves through blooming or historically damaged landscapes as if rehearsing walking and breathing, and that converses with a beloved dead person. The verses gradually create space and presence, as a reader you breathe with them. Because Maria Stepanova has the suggestive power to work magic with words. Here a half-rhyme, there a ringing assonance, plus a rhythm, tamed in four-line stanzas. This is precision work that swings out in terms of content and opens up new poetic territory.
In terms of formal mastery, Maria Stepanova learned much from her late colleague Yelena Schwarz (1948-2010), who was one of the celebrated exponents of Leningrad’s unofficial literary scene during Soviet times. Now the poet can also be discovered in German, in a selection of poems edited and carefully translated by Daniel Jurjew: “Book on the windowsill and other poems”.
allusions and alienations
Jelena Schwarz surprises with a variety of themes and forms, with travesties and games with mythological figures. She wrote a longer cycle of poems under the name of a fictional character, Arno Zart. He writes letters to a poetic vixen, who in turn corresponds with a Chinese. One senses the intricate allusions and allegorical alienations, after all, for a long time it was important for Schwarz to dupe the censorship. It didn’t harm her ingenuity, nor her love of storytelling.
In another long cycle of poems, «Cynthia», Schwarz pretends to translate poems by the Roman lyric poet, although such poems have been demonstrably lost. The fictitious game allows her to skillfully construct formal parallels between then and now and to make the struggle between the Dionysian and the Apollonian tangible.
She is more unmasked in shorter poems. These are dedicated to the blockade of Leningrad, a “child in the ghetto surrounded by letters” or the “song of a bird on the seabed”. We also find an “Elegy on an X-ray of my skull” and a “Memoir of the Psalm,” in which Schwarz short-circuits her tears, which she sheds on the Neva, with Babel’s streams. The biblical reminiscence appears neither pathetic nor self-pitying, but it is touching: “But I circle in a wild and empty roulette – / About milky white blindness / Lead me up the mountain, You my simple God!”
Grand seigneur of Lithuanian poetry
Jelena Schwarz is a master of transformations and a multi-registered language artist. Last but not least, her courage to go her own way undeterred explains the admiration she enjoys among the younger generation of Russian poets. Except for their education and artistry, which is hard to beat.
But one can hold a candle to her: the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova (born 1937), who knew Anna Akhmatowa, was a close friend of Joseph Brodsky and displayed his enormous erudition as a professor at Yale University for decades. Venclova, the author of essays (e.g. about Vilnius), literary studies and an extensive book of conversations with Ellen Hinsey (“The Magnetic North”, 2017), is the undisputed grand seigneur of Lithuanian poetry. Several of his volumes of poetry have already been published in German, and Cornelius Hell is now presenting 33 of the author’s poems from the years 2003 to 2021 in a coherent translation.
“Variation on the theme of awakening” is the name of the volume that measures places and times, takes up biblical and ancient motifs and revolves around one theme in particular: transience. For all her curiosity and cosmopolitan openness, Venclova – like Brodsky – is an elegiac who challenges the laws of decay with formal severity. Horace and Derek Walcott, Guillaume Apollinaire, Seamus Heaney and Ossip Mandelstam help him as interlocutors.
In his poems, landscapes also become echo chambers that reverberate in many voices. The result is an astounding wealth with a variety of references. Venclova always keeps the balance between vividness and reflection, between sensuality and narration. Most convincingly in the subtly rhyming long poems. The multi-part poem “From Chinese Notes”, which weaves Chinese history and the present into a fascinating tapestry of words and ideas, ends like this: “The frescoes are full of nicks, like clouds / even the rocks are not permanent / and one could begin to hope , / that the war is finally over.»
Venclova’s gaze, mostly close to things, occasionally rehearses the perspective “sub specie aeternitatis” and strives for composure. Love of life and existential seriousness are the two sides of the coin, which unfolds its own radiance in each poem. Great poetry, to say the least.
Maria Stepanova: Girls without clothes. Poems in Russian and German. Translated from the Russian by Olga Radetzkaja. Suhrkamp-Verlag, Berlin 2022. 69 pages, CHF 35.90.
Jelena Schwarz: Book on the windowsill and other poems. Edited and translated from Russian by Daniel Yuriev. Verlag Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2022. 108 pages, CHF 31.90.
Tomas Venclova: Variation on the theme of awakening. Translated from the Lithuanian by Cornelius Hell. With an afterword by Michael Krüger. Edition Poetry Cabinet by Hanser, Munich 2022. 109 pages, CHF 29.90.