Endarkenment. Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

      FOREWORD

      The great Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko passed away on September 12, 2012. Born on February 3, 1946, in Potsdam, Germany, he spent his childhood in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, which he experienced as a site at which numerous languages and cultures intersected and co-existed. At the time of his childhood, in addition to Ukrainian and Russian, one could hear Moldovan, Polish, Romany, and Yiddish on the streets of the city, and his awareness from early childhood of the language’s habit of producing simultaneously convergent and divergent meanings must be understood as a fundamental source of his poetry. Similarly fundamental was his memory of holes in the fence enclosing his grandmother’s small garden. These were the apertures through which he made his first conscious observations of the world, irregular circles of sensation. They were portals, but they became over time, emblematic, too, of the aporias that puncture consciousness and that neither knowledge nor speculation can ever fill. The polyglot city and the holes in the fence proved to be dual points of departure for Arkadii’s poetics; they also appeared in one of his first letters to me.

      “My youth went by in the Ukraine,” he wrote, “in a small town in the southwest. Let’s write: there was a garden. There were holes in a fence. The grandmother had a God. There were holes in my memory, which later began to correspond to holes in fences, through which I used to run away, though their significance, I think now, is quite abstract. Let’s write: there was a book. And now I am wiping away my tears, and taking off a wet hat, gluing on an ink beard, and warming my hands over a fireplace. The rain was loud. I want to think of this town. From the 16th century on, this town was a real melting pot, simmering, over the flames, all sorts of things, cultures, languages, religions. Everything: Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Greek, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, and.… And again I hear this town’s dancing, intractable tongue.”¹

      Arkadii was exquisitely attuned to language, with its syllables and silences, its restless, ephemeral patterns—“the formulae of dragonflies.” His writings weave through the windy mists and sunstruck hazes of language, catching a flutter of movement at an etymological intersection, spotting a flicker of past desire in the echo of a word. In conversation his ideas came rapidly, even insistently, but he was a meditative writer, drawn into absences as well as intersections. He was obsessed with time, but not, as so many poets are, because he mourned its evanescence or transience. Instead, time as he came to know it, was expansive—moments don’t flee; they swell, spread out. He inhabited time, lingered in its circles, dreamed its language. His powers of scrutiny were microscopic and mystical; his magnitude of thought was macroscopic and sought the cosmos. He was a poet of the Far East and of the Far West; he was a philosopher of distance in whose thinking persistent attention was given to proximity.

      He heard what most of us forget on waking, he caught the echo in the spaces between things, caught the faint aroma of some intention, some

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