Doublespeak: Poetic Language, Lyric Hero, and Soviet Subjectivity in Mandel΄shtam's K nemetskoi rechi (original) (raw)
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If language is the house of being of a poem, what is the house in which a translated poem comes to reside? Following Paul Ricoeur, I call that metaphoric house the house of remembering and mourning. This is because translation, Ricoeur suggests, involves both the ‘work of remembering’ and the ‘work of mourning’. The work of a translator advances the original piece by ‘salvaging’ it but is also accompanied with ‘some acceptance of loss’. This loss he notes is where the seeds of mourning begin to sprout. In this essay I discuss translation of Osip Mandelshtam’s Russian poems into German by Paul Celan. In 1958 Celan experienced a close encounter with Mandelshtam’s poetry, an encounter he began to describe as Begegnung (encounter). Celan began working with the poems in 1958 and, in less than one and a half years, translated 45 poems by the Russian poet. In an essay, ‘The meridian’, Celan describes poetry as Gespräch, ‘a conversation or dialogue and often a despairing dialogue.’ I can spot traces of despair in Celan’s translation of Mandelshtam and this despair, I argue, is the source of mourning translators more often than not experience.
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Enthymema, 2014
The end goal of this paper is to shed light on the changes in the lyrical subject self-identification logics that were characteristic of Russian poetry of the 'modernist' era. We are going to focus our attention exclusively on the poems with a lexically expressed I, which build the nucleus of the poetic fraction of literary texts and allow to get a clear idea about the mechanism of selfnaming that we regard as fundamental for self-identification of the lyrical I. The paper discriminates between the two methods of lyrical subject identification/self-identification: referring and attributing. Based on this, we suggest determining four basic functional incarnations of the lyrical subject in Russian poetry of the 18th-19th centuries, which are in part terminological reconsiderations of the conventional Russian philology categories. These incarnations are: 1) 'anonymous' lyrical I referring directly to the real author; 2) lyrical I referring to the author through the prism of in-text heteronymic or metonymic transcoding; 2) lyrical character (lyrical hero) referring to the author through the prism of metaphoric transcoding; 3) role character (role hero) with zero reference to the author. The revolution that affected the strategies of lyrical selfidentification in Russian poetry of the Silver Age manifested itself in some fundamental shifts. First of all, kaleidoscopic multiplication of lyrical I's, both through the lyrics of specific poets and even within individual poems. Second, blurred boundaries between different incarnations of the lyrical subject that had been more or less clearly contrasted in poetry of the 19th century. Third, theatralization and problematization (to the extent of open conflicts) of the relationship between the author and his/her lyrical 'doubles'.
Slavonic & East European Review, 2019
This article suggests that Vasilii Zhukovskii’s ‘Sel'skoe kladbishche’, his 1802 translation of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’, offers a way of understanding the transition from eighteenth to nineteenth century literary culture as a shift from isolated or individual consciousness towards an open or communicative subjectivity. We can place ‘Sel'skoe kladbishche’ at the inception of a lyric phenomenology, where lyric becomes an extension of consciousness and cognition. The discussion privileges hope as the forward- and outward-looking sentimental structure that underlies this communicative subjectivity. Close reading of the poem dwells on sound as a medium negotiating between world and poetry, between impression and expression. Zhukovskii’s poetic practice is contextualised amid German idealist philosophy: his engagement with this body of work before and after ‘Sel'skoe kladbishche’ is shown to inform and elaborate on the lyric subjectivity that defines his elegiac imagination.