~ Nationality: Russia ~
Черный человек / The Black Man by Sergei Yesenin
Sergei Yesenin‘s poem stunningly translated into film by director Alexander Fedorov (who also contributed the voiceover, soundtrack, and some of the animation), with additional animation by Nikolay Vologdin and videography by Mikhail Kazantsev and Artur Zaynullin. There’s also a version without the English subtitles.
Blue Notebook No. 10 by Daniil Kharms
https://vimeo.com/77906248
Jacky De Groen, a masters student in animation from Belgium, made this videopoem last year based on a text by Daniil Kharms, the early 20th-century Russian author of surrealist poems and absurdist short stories; “The Blue Notebook, No. 10” is one of the latter.
This is the second film based on this text that I’ve shared here. Compare Franco Geens’ version.
Man and Woman by Sergej Timofejev
Edmunds Jansons made this video for a piece by the Russian-Latvian poet Sergej Timofejev, a member of the Orbita collective and a pioneer of Russian-language videopoetry.
Nidon (Condemned) / נידון by Haim Lensky
A new poetry film from Israeli director Avi Dabach. According to the Wikipedia,
Haim Lensky (1905–1942 or 1943), also Hayyim Lensky, was a Russian poet who wrote in Hebrew. He wrote the bulk of his verse while imprisoned in several Soviet labor camps from 1934 onward.
Poem About Big BIGMOUSE by Ludmila Ulanova
I’m spotlighting children’s poetry films and videos this week, a diverse collection of works by children as well as film-poems made by adults for children. This is an outstanding example of the latter. About BIGMOUSE (Про Мыху), animated by Constantin Arephyeff (or Arefiev, in a more standard Romanization) won the award of the children’s jury at the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2010. This is the English version narrated by Stephen Coates, who collaborated with the author and a couple of other people on the translation. There’s also a Russian version.
As in many Eastern European poetry animations, the text is used as a jumping-off point for a different, more elaborate story-line. However, this also feels very familiar in the context of children’s literature, where the artwork in illustrated books often does much more than just illustrate.
Blue Notebook No. 10 by Daniil Kharms
A poem by the Russian absurdist poet Daniil Kharms, A.K.A. Daniel Charms, animated by Franco Geens.
Physicist (Физик) by Sergei Timofeyev
Diana Palijchuk and Artur Punte added English subtitles to this Russian-language videopoem from Latvia, part of the Orbita 4 collection, which won the Latvian Poetry Prize in 2005, according to the website for the Orbit multimedia poetry collective and the invaluable services of Google Translate, which rendered this bio for the poet, Sergei Timofeyev:
Born in Riga in 1970.
Poet, author of five books of poetry (three of them were published in Riga and two in Moscow and St. Petersburg). He participated in many poetry festivals – in the UK, Holland, Sweden, Ukraine, Germany, Slovenia, Georgia, etc. Translated into the languages of those countries. In 1999 he became one of the organizers of a multimedia poetry project “Orbit”.
One of the first post-Soviet area began to develop the genre of poetry video (the first work – “Orchestra Rehearsal” was filmed and assembled together with director Victor Vilks in 1995). Other poetry video (in the poem “Light”) was involved in the finale of the festival poetic video “Zebra” in Berlin in 2001.
In 2003 he joined the short list of Russia’s Andrei Bely Prize. Along with the rest of the project “Orbit” was in 2005, the Latvian Poetry Prize for audio-video collection “Orbit 4.”
Continuing the theme of multi-media experiments with poetry, in 2007, has pioneered the development of the computer game “I am – Text”, and in 2008 and 2009, together with Arthur Punte realized poetic installation “Room-time” and “Energy Independence Poetry” at the Annual Forum of Contemporary Culture “Balta Nakts”.
Wrote some lyrics for songs by the band “OgneOpasnoOrkestr“, Brainstorm and Intars Busulis. His poems were published in a number of Latvian, Russian and international anthologies: “Dzejas Diena”, “Freed Ulysses,” “Nine measurements”, “This Same Sky (80 poets from 30 countries)”, “A Fine Line: New Poetry from Eastern & Central Europe”, “La Nuova Poesia Russia”, “Hotel Parnasus”, “Ord och spår (Words and Steps)”, etc. A short prose published in German in the book “Sprache Im Tehnischen Zeitalter”.
The most complete collection of texts written before 2005, is available here.
Sergey also oversees the poetic program “North-South” during the annual Days of Latvian poetry.
Thanks to Artur Punte for emailing and alerting me to what sounds like a thriving videopoetry and multimedia community in Latvia. This September they will hold their fourth Word in Motion event in Riga. Here’s some more background on the group, from a document Artur attached to his email:
Orbit (rus. Orbita) is a creative collective of Russian poets and artists whose works are dedicated to dialogue between various creative genres (music, video, etc.) and cultures. The collective came into being in Riga, the Latvian capital, in 1999. Since that time Orbit has published a number of eponymously titled almanacs in which literary works appear side by side with works of visual art (photography, graphic work, painting). Additionally, Orbit has organized three “Word in Motion” festivals of poetic video and multi-media art in Latvia (in 2001, 2003 and 2007); issued three audio compact discs and a collection of poetic video clips on VHS (2001) and DVD (2005); created several multi-media poetry installations for public exhibition; produced a number of bilingual (Russian-Latvian poetic publications; issued an anthology of contemporary Russian poetry in Latvia—at one and the same time a unique study of this phenomenon; and published a number of other works.
Orbit actively participates in Latvian and international cultural life. Members of the group have been published in many European countries and are frequently invited to European literary and artistic festivals—including, for instance: the International Moscow Poetry Biennial, the Berlin Poetry Festival, the Gothenburg Book Fair, the ARS Festival in Bratislava, the White Nights in Madrid, TARP in Vilnius, the Book World Festival in Prague, and many others. In Latvia Orbit’s achievements have been recognized with the Annual Literary Prize of the Union of Latvian Writers in 2005, the Annual Prize for the best photography album in 2006 and for the best photography exhibit in 2007, as well as a number of prizes for book design and various other literary and artistic awards. Since its founding Orbit appears in literary and multimedia performances in conjunction with invited musicians and video-artists.
The site www.orbita.lv (in Russian) provides an introduction to the works of the group.
“In the forests the gilded leaves” by Osip Mandelstam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inSJvzMth7Q
This video is from a series of Slavyansky Bank television commercials using works of famous Russian Silver Age poets. The dramatization of Osip Mandelstam’s poem is by the Kazakh Russian film director Timur Bekmambetov (see the Night Watch trilogy for more information on the director).
Сусальным золотом горят
В лесах рождественские елки,
В кустах игрушечные волки
Глазами страшными глядят.О, вечная моя печаль,
О, тихая моя свобода
И неживого небосвода
Всегда смеющийся хрусталь!1908
In the forests the gilded leaves
of the Christmas pines are on fire,
And from the bushes the toy wolves
Glower with their terrifying eyes.Oh, my never ending sadness,
Oh, my barely whispered freedom,
And of the dispirited horizon
The eternally mocking crystal!1908
This occasion represents an opportunity for me to develop my thoughts toward an introduction to Osip Mandelstam’s particular symbolic vocabulary, having just received two acceptances of my translations that between them span his whole life’s work. Cardinal Points is taking 2 early miniatures (like this one, from 1908-1910) along with two late ones and 3 of his children’s verses from the mid-20s, when he’d given up on verse and wrote critical prose and poetry for children (the only things he could publish and have a source of income from). And Modern Poetry in Translation is taking a selection of his last poems, from the so-called Voronezh Notebooks. The thing is, the significance of this one is all subtext, one of the earliest efforts of a 17-year-old, newly-minted Symbolist which may yet be said to come to define his entire life’s work (a kind of teleology, holographic anamorphosis in respect to time, an enfolding and unfolding of fate.)
Most (perhaps almost all) Russians have been and are mystified by the meaning of this one (and the rest of Mandelstam’s work) and react to it on an almost instinctual, emotive, gut level, as though it were a piece of pure Impressionism (or rather the Expressionism that chronologically was still to come). This video, in a totally anachronistic fashion, which yet works perfectly so that the poem almost seems to reflect Mandelstam’s foreboding-filled reading of his own fate, envisions a juxtaposition between a scapegoating of a Jewish youth that is then somehow malevolently enacted through the mature poet’s antagonistic relationship with Stalin. Or rather the reverse, the youth a flashback, as though the poem was in reality written to refer allegorically to the political woods and wolves.
But no, this was not so! The date of composition is 1908, indeed one of his very first poems. How eerie then! Just as the smallest part of a hologram contains the whole image, so the epiphany relative to time, not déjà vu but its opposite, a sense of projection into future time, a moment of existentialist tunnel-vision that envisions in sum total a life lived, a time capsule that is then opened exactly 30 years later at the moment of the poet’s death! Just as each cell contains in its double-helix strands of DNA , later transcribed and regulated, in toto at least the instructions for the whole human being, so the woof and warp of fate are to a degree predetermined; as the saying goes, character (regulated by environment, nurture, and circumstance) is fate. It is as though each poet is born to do the work that only she was born to do.
In Mandelstam’s case, this work announces itself in 1911 with a departure from Symbolism and the formation of The Guild of Poets (aptly named for its emphasis on the element of craft), or Acmeism (in the Parnassian sense of “the best of world culture,”) for which Mandelstam then becomes the leading proponent and exemplar. This break with Symbolism however was not a radical one, nor even intended as a disavowal but rather a modification, its primary intention being to shift the focus of symbolism away from the ethereal to the mundane, to the world of objects (“direct expression through images,”) toward “Beautiful Clarity” in the words of the poet and critic Mikhail Kuzmin, from the Dionysian back to the Apollonian. Mandelstam’s symbolic vocabulary I mention at the outset consists of words like “tree,” “candle,” “forest,” “building,” “stone.” It may also be said then that the present early poem initiates the shaping of a world-view, of a symbolic vision that then pervades the remaining 30 years of Mandelstam’s life’s work, and more specifically his complicated and never resolved relationship to Judaism and Christianity.
Sometime during 1911, Mandelstam surreptitiously and almost certainly for practical reasons converts (perhaps on a visit to Finland) so as to avoid the racial quotas and enter St. Petersburg University to complete the studies he had begun at Heidelberg. Being from a thoroughly secularized family, Mandelstam had never felt any Jewish inclinations and because of the “disability” was, if anything, always conflicted about his race. On the other hand, having had no spiritual education, Christianity held out at least the promise of a spiritual life. A conversion to Orthodoxy however, because of the appearance of compulsion and of unethical convenience, not only held little appeal but was likely distasteful, so that even the choice of the conversion (variously cited, to Methodism or Lutheranism) was a source of dis-ease. In all of this, there is a remarkable similarity to Mandelstam in the religious content of Joseph Brodsky’s life and work, so that both of them may be, and have been, viewed as essentially Christian poets.
Now, I must admit that I am projecting in all of this an element of psychologism, but in my defense will say that the act of translation, that reading par-excellence, is above all an act of empathy. Also, a poet myself, I understand that much of a life’s work is not by design but a matter of enactment of unconscious content. Support for such broad assertions would require an analysis of the following poems (see notes,) something that is of course outside the scope of this introduction (but which has certainly been undertaken in the academic context.)
Collection of Osip Mandelstam links:
10 extant audio recordings of Mandelstam reading his own poems.
Video of Joseph Brodsky’s analysis and reciting (in Russian) of Mandelstam, in comparison to Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, and Pasternak and in the context of the catastrophic times of World War, Revolution, and Socialist conformity.
Bruce McCleland’s translation of Mandelstam’s book Tristia with facing, transliterated (“sounded-out”) texts.
Another early cryptic miniature, “Thin cross” (1910,) in Offcourse selection of 6 of my translations of Mandelstam miniatures.
A few more Mandelstam (& Tsvetaeva) miniatures in my translation, including 4 from the Voronezh Notebooks that (though not in these) often contain Christian symbolism.
The seemingly ambivalent, post-conversion “The Lutheran” (1912), with its penultimate line: “We neither worship heaven nor fear hell….”
Mandelstam’s book of children’s verses, Primus, with my English translations.
Epilogue (from Requiem) by Anna Akhmatova
This film is an artifact from a performance called Black Over Red, “a multi art-form choral work combining live music, dance and video on a grand scale with a cast of 25.” It was staged in 2001, a co-production of the Latvian Radio Choir and the Scottish dance/theatre troupe Cryptic, directed by Cathie Boyd, who uploaded the video. The composer was Anthea Haddow.
Epilogue (from Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem)
1
I know now how the faces have fallen,
How from under lids gazes out terror,
How cuneiform’s coarse pages are
Incised by suffering upon their cheeks,
How curls from ashen and black turn
In a single moment completely silver,
And a smile withers on defeated lips,
And in dry laughter shudders fear.
So that now I pray not for myself only
But for us all, who stood there with me
In the intense cold and in July’s heat
Under that red and blinded wall.
*
The eternal flame, a memorial for the spilled blood of the innocent that burns throughout the middle, third minute in the bottom of the trinity of images that form this film, accompanied by the spine-tingling bass hum of the choir and the mournful vatic tones of Akhmatova’s own slowed down, staggering, ponderous reading, do honor in their faithfulness to her poem as a whole. The black (& white) documentary images of the upper third corner, while tonally appropriate, may be misleading to anyone who has no context for this, perhaps Anna Akhmatova’s best known single poem, through which she has become identified with the fate of all Russia. As she says in the prologue:
I remained with my own people then,
Where my people, in their misfortune, were.
Unlike the source images here, referencing the destruction visited upon Russia by the German Wehrmacht during WWII and, more specifically, some of the worst of it wrought upon Akhmatova’s adopted hometown, St. Petersburg during the 900-day siege in which a million people perished, most starving to death, the context of the poem is the auto-cannibalistic predation by Stalin and his henchmen upon his own people during the various purges of the late 30s. The red wall is that of the Crosses Prison, referred to earlier (in part 4,) outside which the women (mothers, wives, sisters) of the mostly male political prisoners day after day awaited news of the condemned. Again from the preface: “During the terrifying years of the Yezhov repression, I spent seventeen months in Leningrad prison lines.” And from part 4:
Three hundredth in line, care package in hand,
Under The Crosses prison wall you’ll stand
And with the heated waters of your tears
Dissolve the surface of Christmas-time ice.
The images of Orthodox churches and icons quite appropriately suggest the unifying theme of the poem as a whole which, in calendaric and apostolic fashion, consists of 12 parts and in which Akhmatova and her prisoner son are transformed into the universal mother and child so that what is symbolically enacted here is the Passion Play.
The concluding images of St. Petersburg are again faithful to the crux of the poem in that they represent a particularly Russian self-identification of the Poet with her People, Akhmatova as Russia’s conscience and Muse, a Mother Russia so to speak, an ethical, nurturing balance for the Fatherland that requires sacrifice. As she wrote in one of her most famous miniatures, contemporaneous with Requiem:
In Memoriam
And you, my close friends till Judgment Day!
I have been saved as though to mourn you,
To not be stilled as a weeping willow above
your graves but to cry aloud your names
For the whole world to hear. Enter the Saints;
All fall to your knees!–the light breaks through,
In smooth rows stream the citizens of Leningrad,
Living with the dead. For God there are no dead.August 1942
Dyurmen’
*
NOTES
Other translations and musical settings of Akhmatova’s Requiem:
- Judith Hemschemeyer
- Lyn Coffin (beginning)
- Sasha Soldatow
- D.M. Thomas
- Stanley Kunitz reads his and Max Hayward’s version (02/11/10 Poetry in Time of Crisis; END OF PROGRAM)
- The Stanley Kunitz/Max Hayward version at Google Books
- You can listen to 30 sec. samples of all 12 parts of John Taverner’s Choral on Amazon
There’s an extensive literature comparing the available translations; here’s a summary by Wendy Rosslyn (via Google Books). See also the paper by George L. Kline. Lastly, I’m curious but have yet to track down Robert Lowell’s version that appeared in Atlantic Monthly 214 (1964) pp. 62-65.
Akhmatova may be heard reciting the Requiem in its entirety here [mp3] and may be seen reciting “Muse” in a YouTube snippet from a feature film. A complete collection of Akhmatova audio files in Russian are also on the web. Finally, here are five more of my own translations of Akhmatova miniatures.
Potets (The Sweater) by Alexander Vvedensky
This masterful animation by Alexander Fedulov is of the Russian Absurdist Alexander Vvedensky’s poem “Potets,” “The Sweater” or, rather, a neologism for “He Who Sweats,” referring to “death’s dew.” I had previously translated Vvedensky’s powerful prison prose (which stands up well, I think, in comparison to Kafka and Camus) as well as a different long poem, “The Meaning of the Sea” (as yet unpublished). I suggest reading the former to get a sense of the proto-existential themes particular to all of Vvedensky’s work (“I’m dying…. I’m dying.”) From his late 20s, Vvedensky (1904-1941) faced repeated arrest, perishing in transport to one of Stalin’s Gulag concentration camps. His insistent trochees of course represent a sense of the absurdity and powerlessness before such impersonal forces of doom.
Fedulov’s work here is a prime example of Russian animation’s long and honored tradition. His imagery, inspired by Vvedensky’s other poems, such as “The Meaning of the Sea,” speaks well for the work as a whole and I will only offer my translation of a few of the beginning verses (through minute 3:00 of film) as a way into the poem; its insistent driving rhythms, what Frost had called “sound sense,” say most of what can be said about life’s irrevocability.
“The sons cease their dancing — you can’t have fun forever, and quieting down sit silently by the father’s extinguished bedside. They look into his fading eyes. They want to repeat everything. The father expires. He becomes engorged like a cluster of grapes. We are afraid to keep looking at what is called his face. The sons covertly and silently enter each into his own superstitious wall.” So ends Part 1 (of 3) at minute 7:00 with the following message slowly revealed in materializing letters: “The Sweat is the cold perspiration that is produced on the forehead of a dying man. It is the dew of death; that is the meaning of The Sweat.”
And here is the beginning of Part 1:
The sons stood by the wall, their feet sparkling
shod in spurs. They turned joyful and intoned:Divulge to us, oh dearest father,
What is the meaning of a Sweater.The father, sparkling with his eyes, replied:
My sons I say, do not confuse
Day’s end with daughter of spring.
The Sweat is terrible, grey and blue.
I’m your father, angel, and saint.
I’m acquainted with his cruelty,
My own death is drawing near,
On my head can be seen gaping
Tufts of hair, bald spots, melancholy.
And if life continues then soon enough
None of the following will remain,
Neither falcon nor a single hair.
Just to know that death is nigh,
Knowledge, sight is woe and blight.The sons, having rung the church bells,
Began to thunder into their tongues.
We’re asking about something else entirely!
We are wearing out our thoughts like imps.
Will you just tell us already father,
What is the meaning of a Sweater.And the father exclaimed: the Prologue!
In the Prologue, the main thing is God.
Now my sons you must go to sleep
So that your answer comes in dreams….
The verse sections alternate with scenario-like prose paragraphs in the manner of a play (which are acted out as interludes in the animated film without being sounded). An example from the beginning of part 2: “The father hovers over the writing table, but do not think that he’s a spirit.” And a bit later: “The father ceases to speak in verses and lights up a candle, holding it in his teeth like a flute. At the same time he slides into the armchair like a pillow.” And so forth; until the final words: “But of course, we knew all this from the beginning.”
See the complete text of “Potets” in Russian. For full credits on the film, see the notes at Vimeo. For more on Vvedensky, in addition to Alex’s translation of his prison prose mentioned above, see also “Vvedensky in Love” by Thomas Epstein and Eugene Ostashevsky’s translation of “The Demise of the Sea.” And for more on Alexander Fedulov, see the Russian-language blog maintained by his son, Kirill Fedulov.
Sveta by Sergey Timofeyev
Diana Palijchuk is the animator, and Arthur Punte did the montage. I found a Facebook page for the author, and he is indeed Latvian — the first to be included on Moving Poems — though, I presume, an ethnic Russian (his poems are in Russian).
Velimir Khlebnikov: Children of the Otter
Contemporary Russian composer Vladimir Martynov discusses his suite, Children of the Otter, which incorporates Tuvan music and throat-singing, and is based upon the “supersaga” of the same title (also translated as “Otter’s Children”) by the early 20th-century Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov. The interview was conducted shortly before the premiere of the work in the city of Perm, near the Ural mountains, last September. The Vimeo page describes the background of the piece in considerable detail.
The story of “Children of the Otter” began in the summer of 2008 when producers Vladimir Oboronko and Alexander Cheparukhin, long-time friends and GreenWave Music partners, approached a renowned Russian contemporary composer Vladimir Martynov.
The idea was very simple: create a composition that would blend ancient sound of Tuvan folk music with the sound of contemporary chamber orchestra.
The Tuvan side of the music would be represented by Huun Huur Tu, the foremost Tuvan band, with which Cheparukhin had been working since the early 1990s and Oboronko joined him in 2005. The contemporary side of the music would be represented by Vladimir Martynov’s composing and Moscow chamber orchestra Opus Posth’s performing.
Vladimir Martynov agreed to work on the project during the first meeting. He knew Huun Huur Tu’s music, saw them live, and was excited about using contemporary composing techniques to blend the ancient Tuvan sound with avant-garde sensibilities of Opus Posth.
He wrote a composition for Huun Huur Tu, Opus Posth, and choir, and also incorporated poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov, famous Russian futurist poet of early 20th century. The composition was named “Children of the Otter” after the name of one of Khlebnikov’s poems.
Excerpts from the 75-minute composition. Again, see the video description for full details. A DVD of the performance is slated for release this month.
