the narrative truths of the myth, and they suggest an allegory that motivates the poem’s refusal to tell stories forthrightly: as the people to whom poets speak are now diminished and poor, so must be the story they are told, even if it comes from a tradition that is ennobled and honored. The word “poor” (bednyi) is heard often in Sedakova’s poetry, and it means something different from the modernists’ frequent complaint of exhausted narratives. Sedakova’s notion of poverty is linguistic, a kind of stripped-down lexicon where decorative or diverting words have been banished, where a narrowed verbal range creates new reverberations and greater ambiguities. The restricted vocabulary paradoxically enriches the poem’s music.
Formally, “Tristan and Isolde” offers another sort of intrigue. The poems are metrically varied. One of the poems is trochaic, but most are iambic, with varying line lengths and with a number of lines that have extra beats. Several poems feature many short lines mixed in, and most of the poems use rhyme. The effect of these formal choices is just slightly unsettling, inducing a kind of rough texture or rippling, changing unevenness. To hear the poet read the poem, which one can do on several currently available recordings, is also to hear the gentle presence of regular rhythms.3
Listening is in fact one of the poem’s supreme pleasures. At the poem’s first lines, when listeners are gathered around to listen, the invitation comes with a beckoning to join in sewing a “dress of darkness.” Coming into the world of Tristan and Isolde, we in a sense close our eyes. This is one of Sedakova’s supreme metaphors for the advent of the imagination—it has led her to write movingly of the images of blindness in Rembrandt, for example, and of a childhood memory that associated impending blindness with the fantasy of a completely different universe.4 If the pictures are often suffused with darkness that is partly an aesthetic choice—Sedakova herself would later ask that we think about why Rembrandt’s paintings grow so dark—and it is also a kind of cognitive pre-condition, a way of urging us to close our eyes to the daily sights of life in order to focus the mind more completely on the vision of a dwarf telling fortunes from the stars, or on two unnamed lovers who lie entwined in the darkness, guarded by their faithful dog. Sedakova’s poem is, among its many other virtues, an act of instruction, an imperative that we see and hear the elements of a living myth.
“IN PRAISE OF POETRY”
Sedakova’s essay about her growth as a poet, rather than speaking in a gesture of command, itself seems to respond to a command. The essay opens as if spoken to a knowing friend, Vladimir Saitanov, who asked that she write down the origins for her early work. Sedakova creates a conversational and easy tone, even when complex matters are broached. She refers to poems, historical events, or cultural landmarks without pausing for explanation (our translation includes many notes to aid readers necessarily further from the cultural context). “In Praise of Poetry” looks back to the years of childhood and adolescence. Sedakova later explained that this essay allowed her to combine two genres: the tale of childhood, for her epitomized by Tolstoy’s Childhood, and that of ars poetica. She wanted to communicate the happiness of her own childhood, and to offer “musings on the nature of poetry.”5
In the early recollections of poetry, Sedakova presents both her gently skeptical, adult view of her youthful enthusiasms and also a certain steady regard for the purity of those early feelings. The essay includes some of her earliest efforts as a poet. She neither sentimentalizes childhood nor shows a child’s moments of incomprehension as silly; in fact she singles out three poets—Khlebnikov, Pasternak, and Rilke—for showing us both the world and language as if with a child’s inability to render any impressions as automatic, but also without any sense of amazement. Sedakova perceives a splendid paradox in such poetry, which can be difficult for readers to grasp precisely because of its simplicity. Simplicity itself is no simple concept in Sedakova’s work, as she shows in describing the speech of her grandmother: it is a language made up of names, not words; it has an unconscious originality, the “originality of the pre-verbal world itself.” This language may seem unsophisticated, exuding no erudition, but its ability to match objects or ideas to words is nearly fathomless. These traits mark “Old Songs” as well, a text linked to “In Praise of Poetry” by the figure of the grandmother, as muse and as addressee.
A powerful presence in the essay is the world of music. Sedakova was lucky enough to have a music teacher who also introduced her to poetry, including the work of Rilke. Her music teacher, Mikhail Erokhin, had a wonderful way of inviting her to imagine entire spaces in which pieces of music resounded. A Bach prelude, for example, was presented to her as an evolving, brief narrative: “An old man enters his empty quarters and lights a candle, a corridor lit up behind him unfolds its dimensions; before him is a darkness which can only be sensed, invisible and unfathomable to the eye.” Music may be the supremely important art form for this poet, both for its example of melody, harmony, precision, rhythmic balancing, and for its status among forms of aesthetic expression—its potential purity and distance from burdensome semantic elaboration, its association with divinity and the sublime. Music flourishes as a metaphor in Sedakova’s work. “Old Songs” invokes music in the cycle’s title and in the use of lyrical form. “Tristan and Isolde” can be understood as a kind of musically structured work in its own right. “In Praise of Poetry” abounds in references to musical works in addition to its fine account of the poet’s own musical training. It often uses musical terms to describe poetic phenomena, as when the poet says that she knows only one way of composing a poem, toward a crescendo. The essay itself concludes on a high note: poetry, Sedakova tells us, may “give a voice to that which is silent.” She means here something as much spiritual as ethical. Her praise in this essay is for the “sacred and utterly audacious act of humility performed by poetry.”
Our book concludes with an interview with the poet, conducted in December, 2012, and including specific questions about the texts translated here. Readers may thus hear the poet reflecting on these texts from a later vantage point. As we were preparing the interview and polishing our translations, Olga Sedakova was awarded a translation prize in Moscow. Her acceptance speech seemed the perfect way for us to end this book, allowing the poet to articulate for us the standard we hoped to achieve in translating her work.
We take the occasion of this publication to thank the poet for permission to translate her work, and for her participation in our translation process. We are grateful to her for answering questions, looking at drafts, and providing much information that has informed the notes to “In Praise of Poetry.” Readers will sense that some notes are in fact written by her. Francesca Chessa, Italian translator of “In Praise of Poetry” has been especially helpful to us as well. Warm thanks to all.
OLD SONGS
(Translated by Stephanie Sandler)
FIRST NOTEBOOK
What glitters white on the greening slope?
- A. S. Pushkin
1. OFFENSE
What are you doing, spiteful offense?
I fall asleep, but you do not,
I awaken, and you are already up,
staring at me, like a fortune-teller.
Can you say who offended me?
No, not one—only God, all-powerful.
He permits offense to some,
but holds it back from others.
Or maybe life failed to love me?
No, untrue, life feels pity and love,
it keeps me safe in a secret
