Deleting, Rewriting

Fiona Sampson reviews The Deleted World, Tomas Tranströmer, versions by Robin Robertson

and

An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets, edited by Valentina Polukhina and Daniel Weissbort

These two books seem scarcely to belong in the same review, so widely differentiated are their projects.  While Robertson’s versions of Tranströmer propose evidence of a private passion, the homage of one of our major poets to an international writer whose work has clearly influenced his own, Polukhina and Weissbort’s distinguished anthology is a seriously-conceived introduction – for the under-exposed British reader – to some of the best contemporary work in a tradition of world importance. 

What connects these volumes, though, is the excellence currently surrounding the presentation of wider European writing in the UK.   This autumn sees two major acts of literary translation which, in the mould of Hughes’s Tales from Ovid or Heaney’s Beowulf, refigure the canon for our times: Don Paterson’s versions of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and Sean O’Brien’s Inferno are published by Faber and Picador respectively.  But translation of great living writers – poetry to which much of the rest of the world routinely creates access – has traditionally been a poor literary relation in the UK, where it may be seen as a primarily scholarly activity with lower poetic stakes than those of local verse.  It’s refreshing, then, that what distinguishes both these books is primarily poetic. 

Tranströmer has been widely published in English, and The Deleted World presents just fifteen poems in parallel text, with original Swedish and new English versions on facing pages.  Robertson’s versions have that finely-living detail within their language which makes them read like original poems.  In ‘Sketch in October’, “The tugboat is freckled with rust.”  It’s a delicacy and accuracy of observation which is in the original’s “fräknig”; but must be reconstructed in English, helped by a painstaking ear for the common roots of the languages.  There are common geophysical roots, too.  The landscapes of ‘Autumn Archipelago’ “under the buzzard’s circling point of stillness” could be Robertson’s own east coast Scotland, where “summer gods fumble in the haar”, or sea-mist.  To naturalise these poems in English, this shared aesthetic suggests, is to steal nothing from them; and indeed Robertson’s diction, grammar and lineation all soften the sometimes edgy, to British ears even perhaps overt, bluntness of, for example, ‘Eldklotter/Fire Graffiti’.  But the beautiful uncanny remains:

A blue light
streams out of my clothes.
[…] There is a silent world,
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled over the border. (‘Midwinter’)

Beautiful and uncanny imagery also characterises Polukhina and Weissbort’s alphabetical anthology, from Bella Akhmadulina’s “iron and stone December” (in ‘To Await Arrival’) to Olga Zondberg’s ‘cockle-antartica’.  The anthologist is always vulnerable to claims of exclusivity or over-inclusivity; but Valentina Polukhina and Daniel Weissbort are leading experts on contemporary Russian poetry; and it would be hard to argue with this selection of more than eighty poets, none of them a passenger.  And this is no merely circumstantial collection.  The inclusion of writers living in exile – in Israel (Lisnianskaya, Zinger), Sweden (Derieva), the UK (Ratushinskaya) or the US (Kapovich) – broadens our sense of what can be done in the Russian language and out of a shared tradition.  Some, notably Tatyana Shcherbina and the diaspora writers, already have collections published in English translation; their inclusion here allows us to contextualise their work.  The volumealso contains – as well as a more predictable apparatus of short essays and author notes – a strikingly useful Russian- and English-language bibliography.

An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets includes fine translations by many hands, including a distinguished roster of poets: Maura Dooley, Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Fainlight, Roy Fisher, Carol Rumens and Derek Walcott.  Here, for example, is Fainlight’s characteristically-rhythmic translation of an untitled poem by Inna Lisnianskaya, which assimilates both abstraction and concrete description without breaking step:

Between hope and failure –
and trees with foam on their lips –
the bed remembered how the night passed.

The notebook recollected how the day passed,
how life passed: snow and fallen petals.
How death passes, dust and ashes will not forget.

Elsewhere, Daniel Weissbort’s language has the courage of idiom to render an untitled poem by Elena Ignatova in all its black humour and intelligence:

To sob, pressing oneself against the officer’s greatcoat –
gives one a special colonial thrill.
West is West – but this is East.
 […] Dream of childhood.
                                        The family clan
closing ranks, like the crown over the head
of the eternal tree.  Its scent is corporeal.

However, two examples can’t summarise the complex richnesses of this collection.  Like The Deleted World, An Anthology is required reading for anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry, its capacities and range; what Tatyana Voltskaya calls “the track of an angel.  The track of sun of stones.”

The Deleted World, Tomas Tranströmer, versions by Robin Robertson,  Enitharmon, £8.95, ISBN 1-904634-48-6, 48 pp.

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.