Night Wraps The Sky: Writings By and About Mayakovsky
Edited by Michael Almereyda
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
Review by Rosy Carrick
[L]earn from Lenin but don't canonise him.
Don't create a cult in the name of the man, who all
his life fought against all and every cult.
Don't trade in objects of this cult.
Don't trade in Lenin.
(From 'Lenin', trans. Herbert Marshall, 1965, p.41)
On a superficial level, Night Wraps the Sky looks good; the book is beautifully produced and makes much use of personal and professional photographs of Mayakovsky and his contemporaries and friends. Sourced from the poet's museum archives, most have not been aired in previous collections and are not straightforwardly to be found on the internet. These photographs however are one of few strengths in this collection. NWTS may most accurately be described as an object of the cult of Mayakovsky: offering an admiring and romanticized series of appreciations and reflections on the poet and his work, it is at heart a gift book - certainly not useful for serious research nor really, in spite of its claims, for the appreciation of poetry either. Although compelling in places, on the whole the collection lacks the kind of editorial dynamism that would make for a truly interesting new addition to those already in existence – there is nothing here that we haven't seen before. Additionally, in de-emphasising Mayakovsky's political and propagandistic writings to the large extent that it does, it acts almost as a form of propaganda in itself; disseminating and re-presenting information, omitting those poems strongest for the Soviet cause, such as 'Very Good!', or 'Vladimir Ilyich Lenin', and leaving its readers with a misleading and sometimes inaccurate “full-length portrait of the man and the mythic era he came to embody” (NWTS, sleeve introduction).
The book's major problem is unwittingly explained by its editor Michael Almereyda, when he outlines in the introduction that his 'chief aim [is] to reintroduce the poet to English-speaking readers, stitching together a suitable patchwork of documents, photographs, posters and other imagery'. (p. xxvi) Aside from the problem of what may be considered 'suitable', a point to which I will later return, the result of this 'patchworking' is that there is no biographical or historical depth to the finished work; instead merely a series of fragments. In some respects this works well; the constantly overlapping array of voices lends to the book a certain momentous energy that certainly makes for compelling reading; although there is a general narrative progression throughout, most contributions are self-contained units - nothing is lost as a whole from opening the book to any random page for a quick-fire round of Mayakovsky-appraisal. And some of the sources are excellent - amongst others, extracts and quotes from Viktor Shklovsky's Mayakovsky and his Circle and Lev Kassil's Mayakovsky Himself offer intimate firsthand insight into the poet's life and work, as does Almereyda's short account of his conversations with Rodchenko's grandson, Aleksandr Lavrent'ev. To give credit to such sources as potential in-roads to other, more interesting works however, is not enough to make this collection interesting by proxy; in fact their brevity of appearance here is terrifically unsatisfying, serving only to highlight what NWTS would like to be, in contrast to the ultimately derivative work that it is.
The list of contributors is at times baffling, as are its omissions. Much time is given to the ostensibly authoritative thoughts of Francine du Plessix Gray, whose negative and dismissive characterization of Lily Brik, 'the handsome, erotically obsessed, highly cultivated [woman who] dreamed of being perpetuated in human memory as the muse of a famous poet' (p.111) takes on the appearance of truth in that all sources here are treated equally, as fact. Nowhere is it challenged on the personal bias that she explicitly expresses in Them, the memoirs from which this quote is taken, on account of the relationship between Mayakovsky and her mother, Tatiana Yakovleva: '[t]hrough him, I may have come into the most treasured part of my inheritance: my mother's grief... my mother was not only one of Mayakovsky's two muses but his last great love'. (p.84) Her view of the relationship between Brik and Mayakovsky: '[m]utual friends remained amazed... by the despotic manner in which she treated him and the fearful obsequiousness with which this dynamic, seemingly powerful man catered to his mistress's every wish' (NWTS pp. 113-114) is very different to those accounts given elsewhere by both Brik herself and her sister, Elsa Triolet. The former, in her memoirs, recounts that 'Volodya did not merely fall in love with me; he attacked me, it was an assault. For two and a half years I didn't have a moment's peace' (quoted in http://brutalism.co.uk, 2010), whilst the latter maintains that:
[h]is behaviour towards his friends was stormy, possessive, closed, violent and, in general – unbearable! He could be really sinister... [h]e was an extremely demanding friend – he would interpret everything as neglect or lack of consideration for him (from Mayakovsky: Russian Poet, 2002, p.82).
Although du Plessix Gray does give a similar description of Mayakovsky's behaviour towards his friends (as distinct from that towards his lovers) later on in the chapter of Them from which the excerpt here is taken, her account of his character generally remains rigid and romanticized. Of course, Mayakovsky's character was “romantic”, but in tracing her experience of him solely through that of her deceased mother, it only ever appears narrow and nostalgic. One of her later narratives in NWTS represents the sole description of the event of the poet's suicide. Although she acknowledges that he 'had been rehearsing this act in his poetry since his adolescence' (p.246), there is no mention of his former attempts to do so in his life. Here, again, a broader context would have been interesting. Discussing conversations between Brik and Roman Jakobson on the subject of the poet's suicide, Herbert Marshall (whose own inclusion in NWTS is a pitiful three sentences) recounts Brik's response: 'Volodya get old? Never! He's already tried to shoot himself twice, leaving one bullet in a six-shooter. In the end the bullet will strike.' Regarding the 'suicide poem' itself, in a subsequent direct conversation with her, Marshall recalls Brik telling him 'that it was not the first time he had written farewell poems and letters... he was always giving “farewell performances” ' (1965, pp. 27-28), a fact which is also not touched upon by du Plessix Gray here. Triolet herself has no voice whatsoever in this collection, and Brik's two short contributions are devoid of personal exposition. Given that Lily Brik is widely recognized as being the great love and muse of Mayakovsky's life – indeed, 'an indelible part of it' (as described by A & S Charters in I Love..., 1979, p.xiv), her exclusion here greatly diminishes the potential scope of this collection.
Such lack of texture contradicts Almereyda's introductory 'hope' that in the book's assembly, 'multiple Mayakovskys can face themselves in one volume.' (p. xxvii) His later response to a tour guide's by-heart rendition of 'Letter from Paris...' at the Mayakovsky museum in Moscow ('[t]his, I told myself, is not my Mayakovsky', p. 259) makes clear that the version of the poet that he has in mind is not particularly open to multiplicity. Indeed, he is explicit in his estimation of the poet's politics. Briefly alluding to what he refers to as Mayakovsky's politically-based desire for 'poetry as uproarious breaking news', he continues:
[b]ut hindsight grants a blood-soaked historical view of the Revolution's final costs, and Mayakovsky's bluntest propaganda now feels particularly hollow, unconvincing and coarse. (Or rather, that's how it registers in the English translations I've come across. You will not find much outright agitprop in this book.)
(p.xxiii)
Presumably, here he is referring primarily to the strongly politically-focussed translations of Herbert Marshall who, for example, presents the final lines of 'Left March' as:
Chests Out ! Shoulders Straight !
Stick to the sky red flags adrift !
Who's marching there with the right? ! !
LEFT !
LEFT !
LEFT !
(1965; p. 130)
as distinct from the softer, and quite different translation of Alec Vagapov:
Deck out the sky with drape!
March boldly ahead, don't be late!
Who's marching out of step?
Left!
Left!
Left!
(poetrypoem.com, © 1968)
It is understandable that Almereyda would want to relieve Mayakovsky of his “second death”, as Pasternak names it; that of his “compulsory propagation” following Stalin's forceful re-endorsement of the poet's work in 1935, and of those translations which privilege the political and/or propagandist content at the expense of formal and linguistic innovation, but it is clear that rather than simply redress the balance Almereyda is keen to cleanse the poetry in this collection of its political thrust as far as he is able. Thus, apart from '150,000,000', there is no primarily political poem present here, despite the fact that roughly one third of Mayakovsky's output was straight propagandist verse/captions. Additionally, there are instances in these new translations commissioned by Almereyda in which specific propagandic terms in the original Russian are rephrased more generally, and thus appear to be less politically rigorous. For example, the line in 'An Extraordinary Adventure...' which is generally translated as '[I am] worn out with ROSTA publicity' is here changed to 'swallowed up with posterwork' (p.146) despite the Russian text explicitly expressing the former term: 'что-де заела Роста' (my emphasis). One could argue that Vinokur, responsible here for the latter translation, is simply interested in making the poem more accessible to the contemporary English reader with no prior knowledge of ROSTA, and has nothing to do with political obstruction per se, but that in itself would be a questionable approach. Further, in 'At the Top of My Voice' (here translated as 'Screaming My Head Off', p. 3), the lines formerly translated by George Reavey and Herbert Marshall respectively as:
Agitprop
sticks
in my teeth too
(The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, 1975, p.222)
and:
I'm fed
to the teeth
with agitprop, too
(1965, p. 404)
are in this collection “adapted” by Ron Padgett, to the far more relaxed phrase:
I've had every kind
of bullshit
up to here!
Quite apart from the fact that – once again – in the original Russian the term 'agitprop' is unmistakeably explicit:
И мне
агитпроп
в зубах навяз
this alternative reading seems to me to have far more to do with getting Mayaovsky into Padgett's preferred style of New York school vernacular than it does with simply translating the poem from one language into another. Given Vinokur's statement on p.199 that Mayakovsky's 'references [are] so precise, arcane even', it seems absurd that such terminologically precise particularities as these have nevertheless here been downgraded to generalization. In omitting, with the smugly politically-correct position of hindsight, the inclusion of Mayakovsky's 'hollow, unconvincing and coarse' agitprop work, the suggestion is made that he in some way 'turned off' his poetic skills in order to work on this propagandist verse, whereas in fact, as George Hyde notes in his introduction to Pro Eto, '[h]is propaganda is often brilliantly inventive in linguistic terms. [...] Invariably it is more than propaganda, being linked to a complex drama of identity.' (p.14) Further, the implicit suggestion is made that Mayakovsky himself was ignorant of the encroaching realities of his time and of his cultural position within it, an idea which is clearly rubbished by the poet's own work – not least his two final politically scathing plays, and arguably the fact of his suicide itself. The inclusion of some of these poems would have made an accomplished translation of 'At the Top of my Voice' illuminating on this point. The frustrating effects on him of the irreconcilable nature of political and personal creative expression are explicit in the lines (which immediately follow those quoted above) :
I'd rather
compose
romances for you--
more profit in it
and more charm
But I
subdued
myself,
setting my heel
on the throat
of my own song.
The sentiment of this translation by Reavey — which could only feel out of place from within the political void of NWTS - is radically altered in Padgett's 'Screaming My Head Off', which reconfigures it as:
Give me one love song:
They're nice
and they get the money.
Anyway I thought
I was smart
Putting my foot
in my own mouth.
That poetry which is included is largely presented, like the critical pieces, in extracts, and appears to have been chosen so arbitrarily in terms of the multiplicity of its translators that, as the central focus of the collection, it feels thoroughly distorted. Almereyda expresses his concern in the book's introduction that 'few English translations of Mayakovsky are currently in print', positing this as both the main reason for the book's existence and in partial justification of his 'foregrounding [of] new translations of seminal work'. (p.xxvi) Given this concern (which is in any case unwarranted; in fact it is very easy and generally inexpensive to source major English translations of Mayakovsky, even from mainstream websites such as Play.com and Amazon), it is bizarre that so much of the poetry is presented incomplete. As Almereyda points out in his introduction, he is not a Russian speaker, and so his insistence on the need for newer, better translations, as well as his claim that those in NWTS 'capture... more spark and grit and fire than most versions... elsewhere', is unconvincing, not least because this chopping apart also works to undermine the poetry offered; it is as though Almereyda is keen to 'prove' the beauty of Mayakovsky's verse to the uninitiated by offering a small taste of it, with the effect that no value is placed on the complete poems themselves.
In this sense, “Night Wraps the Sky” is a fitting title; the use of this partial phrase from Mayakovsky's final, unfinished poem highlights the extent to which the collection as a whole is at the mercy of its anthologist's seemingly arbitrary discretion. This, after all, is a title written by neither Mayakovsky nor Almereyda, but by George Reavy – 'Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars'; a line which has been variously translated by Erik Korn as 'The sky is wrapped in stars, the gift of night'; by Herbert Marshall as 'Night tributes the sky with silver constellations'; by Belyaeva Dean, as 'The sky bequeathed to us its constellations'; by Andrey Kneller (albeit tenuously) as 'The starry night is grandiose and spacious', and so on. I by no means use this example in order to undermine Reavy's particular translation, but rather to indicate the thoughtlessness of Almereyda's approach. In fact the only direct reference to translation-choice in this collection is a small note on Yankelevich's 'tough-minded' translation of 'Oblako v Shtanakh' as 'A Cloud in Pants'. However, the main justification given for this Americanism - that there is no internal rhyme in the original title, and that therefore this version represents a more accurate translation than 'A Cloud in Trousers', is surely only valid if he faithfully maintains the rhyme scheme throughout the entire poem – which, predictably, isn't the case.
Almereyda's desire to master and impose his own particular version of Mayakovsky onto the pages of NWTS is further reflected by his unashamed vagueness of knowledge throughout the book, with the result that there is no real sense of authority in it. At the Mayakovsky museum he describes the clutter of 'manuscripts and drawings, surely not the originals, but then again, why not?' (p.257). It is the kind of comment one might expect to overhear between a couple of visiting tourists to the museum, but certainly not from the editor of a 'full-length portrait' of Mayakovsky. For all its lofty claims and culturally-enlightening hopes, this collection represents, at heart, one man's rather clumsy, self-indulgent meanderings around the life and work of a poet he much admires. In being that; in plucking Mayakovsky from his social and political context, and re-presenting him in this way, the reader is left not with an augmented or even a clear sense of the figure of Mayakovsky the Poet, so much as with a consciously selective, singular account of Mayakovsky the Cult Hero – his 'proto-punk ferocity... tough-guy tenderness, soulful defiance', etc. (p. xvii) – supported on all sides by material selected for that very purpose of support. In spite of Mayakovsky's boundless and undeniable egocentricity, Almereyda's approach nevertheless remains at odds with the poet's often stated creative and political aims. In his final lecture, given in Moscow on the 25th March, 1930, Mayakovsky makes this particular aim clear: 'I demand help – not the glorification of non-existent virtues. That's what we are talking about, comrades, and not about glorifying private persons.'(1965, p.410) This, I am sure, is not Almereyda's Mayakovsky.
© Rosy Carrick 2012
Bibliography for those interested in reading more... (I discovered to my chagrin that subtitles and blogs do not blend well, hence all the bracketing above - but full info on works cited is here):
Almereyda, M. (ed), Night Wraps the Sky: Writings By and About Mayakovsky, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008
'Back to the Futurist', http://brutalism.co.uk/?p=5, 2010
Charters, A. & S., I Love: The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik, André Deutsch Ltd, London, 1979
du Plessix Gray, F., Them: A Memoir of Parents, The Penguin Press, New York, 2005
Marshall, H., Mayakovsky, Dobson Books Ltd, London, 1965
Mayakovsky, V., The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, trans. George Reavey & Max Hayward, ed. Patricia Blake, Indiana University Press, 1975
Mayakovsky, V., 'Left March', trans. Vagapov, A., http://poetrypoem.com/cgi-bin/index.pl?poemnumber=891412&sitename=vagalec&poemoffset=0&displaypoem=t&item=poetry
Mayakovsky, V., Pro Eto, trans. George Hyde, Arc Publications, 2009
Triolet, E., Mayakovsky: Russian Poet, A Memoir, trans. Susan de Muth, Hearing Eye, London, 2002
No comments:
Post a Comment