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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press Classics
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
A revelatory volume of two of the twentieth century's great poetic innovators, Guillaume Apollinaire and Velimir Khlebnikov, in vibrant new translations by Robert Chandler __________ 'A wonderful parallel anthology and introduction to two poets, both so much more. They are the short-lived, playful, and visionary greats of Modernism: the Frenchman Guillaume Apollinaire and the Russian Velimir Khlebnikov. The translations are splendid and full of life, the context brisk, plain and simply sketched in. This is a book for discovery, for pleasure and delight' George Szirtes, author of 'The Photographer at Sixteen' __________ Guillaume Apollinaire and Velimir Khlebnikov never met, but their restless innovations in poetic form shared much in common. Both pushed poetry to its limit, and their experiments proved fertile for generations of poets to come. Khlebnikov became associated with Futurism, though his inventiveness with language moved him far beyond it, while Apollinaire influenced a dizzying array of avant-garde movements, including Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism. Celebrated translator and poet Robert Chandler offers a stimulating selection from both poets' work in beautifully vivid new translations. Showcasing these poets' exhilarating capacity for innovation as well as their more direct, heartfelt verse, Birds, Beasts and a World Made New offers a surprising journey into the world of two great Modernist poets.
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123
BIRDS, BEASTS AND A WORLD MADE NEW
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE & VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY ROBERT CHANDLER
WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY D.M. BLACK, PETER DANIELS, EDWIN FRANK, KIRSTEN LODGE, CHRISTOPHER REID, PAUL SCHMIDT, JOHN WAREHAM AND GEORGE SZIRTES
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
Contents
Foreword
Guillaume Apollinaire and Velimir Khlebnikov were both extraordinarily creative figures who worked in many different genres. This small book allows only a glimpse of their work. Since it is relatively easy to find reproductions of paintings and drawings linked to Apollinaire, our choice of illustrations is weighted towards Khlebnikov and his colleagues. Another major omission—for copyright reasons—is Samuel Beckett’s translation of one of Apollinaire’s first masterpieces, the long poem titled ‘Zone’.
A Note on Names and Spellings
Khlebnikov’s given name was Viktor. In 1908 he adopted the pseudonym “Velimir”—a southern Slavic word, meaning “great world”. Some spellings of proper names are now controversial. For towns and cities within Ukraine, we have adopted the Ukrainian spellings: Kyiv and Kharkiv, rather than the more Russian Kiev and Kharkov. We refer to the artist David Burliuk as “David”, rather than “Davyd”, since that is how he spelled his name during the forty-five years he lived in the USA. It is harder to be sure which is the best spelling for Malevych. “Malevich” is the more Russian spelling; a reason for preferring it is that the artist spent his most productive years in Moscow and Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad. “Malewicz” is the Polish spelling; the artist’s parents were Polish, and this is the spelling he was accustomed to from childhood and which he used when signing his name in Latin characters. For this book, however, we have opted for the Ukrainian spelling. Malevych was born in Ukraine and spent his first eighteen years there. He was more an internationalist than a nationalist of any kind, but he repeatedly referred to himself as “Ukrainian”, and he took pride in his Ukrainian identity. Ukrainian folk art was important to him and a key inspiration for his Suprematism. A recent decision by the Stedelijk Museum, which holds the largest collection of his work outside Russia, illustrates the difficulty of pinning a national label on such a protean figure. In 2023, the museum reclassified him as Ukrainian—rather than Russian—yet they continue to use the Russian spelling. Here we have tried to be more consistent, but we hope it will soon, once again, be possible to focus more on Malevych’s art and less on his nationality.
Introduction
The early twentieth century was a time of cultural ferment in many European cities—and especially in London, Paris, Petersburg and Vienna, capitals of empires then at the height of their power. The rigidity of their power structures would soon bring about the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, but in some respects these empires were surprisingly open and flexible. Many of the writers, thinkers and artists who came to prominence in their capitals did not belong to the dominant class or nationality. Pablo Picasso was not French, nor were Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot English. In Vienna, Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler were Jews, and Egon Schiele was a provincial.
This was a time of hope, of exploration and cross-fertilization between the different arts—and the magnetic pull of these capital cities made them into meeting places for artists and writers from a variety of backgrounds. In London, Ezra Pound, an American, befriended the great French sculptor and draughtsman Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, then penniless and unknown. In Paris, Guillaume Apollinaire knew all the most gifted visual artists of his time, including the Spaniard Pablo Picasso, the Romanian Constantin Brâncuși and several Russians and Ukrainians; like Pound, he was a generous promoter of other people’s work. In Vienna, painters, sculptors, architects and designers worked together in the movement known as the Vienna Secession. In Rome Filippo Tommaso Marinetti put on Futurist theatrical spectacles along with Umberto Boccioni and two other young painters. And in Petersburg, Futurist poets and artists collaborated on projects of all kinds, including the opera Victory over the10Sun (1913). Nearly all the central figures of the avant-garde—David Burliuk, Pavel Filonov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazymyr Malevych, Mikhail Matiushin, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin and Vasyl Yermilov—illustrated innovatively produced collections of Futurist poetry.
Several of these collaborations were important. Gaudier and Pound admired each other’s work and shared an interest in Chinese culture; the years of their friendship were, for each of them, the years of their greatest achievements. Gaudier’s death in the First World War was a blow from which Pound never recovered. Gaudier was as gifted and ambitious as Pound himself; his companionship might at least have slowed Pound’s descent into the crazed anti-Semitism and megalomania of his middle and later years.
The friendship between Apollinaire and Picasso was still more fruitful. Like Pound and Gaudier, they were equals. And, like Pound and Gaudier, they worked in different fields and so were not direct competitors. They could make fun of each other; many of the postcards and letters they exchanged included good-humoured caricatures of each other. In 1918, they were witnesses at each other’s weddings and were evidently planning a joint publication: new poems by Apollinaire together with prints by Picasso. But like Gaudier, Apollinaire died young, and his death was as great a blow for Picasso as Gaudier’s was for Pound. Fifty years later, Pierre Daix wrote, “Talking to Picasso, I always had the impression that Apollinaire was the congenial friend with whom he could share everything, the friend no one else ever replaced.”1 Picasso still had an equal, in Matisse, but the two were rivals more than friends.
Another fruitful collaboration was that between Velimir Khlebnikov, a great poet who was also a gifted artist, and Pavel Filonov, a great artist who also wrote poetry. Neither was born into the world of high culture; without the opportunities provided by a great capital, 11it is unlikely that they would have met. Filonov’s father died young and his mother struggled to make a living as a washerwoman. His introduction to art was through helping his elder sisters to earn money by embroidering towels and tablecloths in a cross-stitch learned from his grandmother; until the age of eleven, he also danced regularly in the chorus lines of three Moscow variety theatres.2 As for Khlebnikov, he spent his first years in a remote settlement in the Kalmyk steppe, about three hundred kilometres northwest of Astrakhan, on the edge of the Volga delta; his father was a civil servant, the official administrator for the Kalmyks—a nomadic Buddhist people—and the family lived in a house surrounded by yurts. The father was also a scientist and ornithologist, and he passed on to his sons a lifelong love of birds.
When Khlebnikov was five, the family moved to Volhynia, an area in what is now western Ukraine, bordering Poland. When he was almost eleven, they moved to the northern Volga; and when he was twelve, to the Tatar city of Kazan, where he completed his secondary education. He went on to study a variety of subjects—biology, mathematics, natural sciences, Sanskrit and Slavic languages and literature—at both Kazan and Petersburg universities, though he did not complete a degree. In the early nineteenth century, Nikolay Lobachevsky—“the Copernicus of geometry”—had been the rector of Kazan University. This probably made mathematics—and non-Euclidean geometry—all the more important to Khlebnikov.
Summing up the effect of Khlebnikov’s upbringing, the literary historian Donald Rayfield wrote, “The contact with nature combined with familiarity with Tatar, Ukrainian and local dialects to give Khlebnikov an uncanonized lexical store so rich that his own ‘word-creation’ was only a natural step.”3 Astrakhan and the Volga delta remained important to Khlebnikov. The delta was a symbol 12of openness to winds of every kind; it was both a staging area for migrating birds and a meeting place of different cultures—European and Asian; Slav and Turkic; Christian, Muslim and Buddhist.
Khlebnikov and Filonov were outsiders. It is easy to imagine why they might have felt a sense of kinship as they explored new artistic possibilities. The same could be said of Picasso and Apollinaire. Apollinaire and Khlebnikov, however, had yet more in common, although they never met and probably knew of each other only by hearsay.
Both poets had a gift for drawing and spent more time with artists than with other writers. Both are renowned as innovators but remained respectful of traditional forms. While best known for his rejection of punctuation and his calligrams—his inventive arrangements of words to form small pictures—Apollinaire also wrote Whitmanesque free verse, delicate octosyllabics, discursive rhyming poetry and even alexandrines as resonant as Racine’s. He has been described as “the last of the poets whose lines young people know by heart, one of the most French of our poets, in the pure tradition of Villon, of La Fontaine, of Gérard de Nerval, of Baudelaire, of Verlaine”.4
Khlebnikov was equally free in his approach to matters of form. Like Apollinaire, he often wrote in perfect rhyme and metre; he also composed at least one calligram. He invented several thousand neologisms and sought meaning in the shapes and sounds of individual letters. He contributed to the Futurist collection A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, signing up to their call for Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy “to be thrown overboard from the steamship of modernity”—but in many respects he was an unlikely Futurist. In reality, he admired both Pushkin and Tolstoy. He felt more at home in the Russian and Ukrainian countryside than in Moscow or Petersburg. He wrote about mermaids, shamans and forest spirits, often in archaic 13language. Back in Astrakhan after the revolution of October 1917, while working for a local military-political newspaper, he helped his father organize a nature reserve in the Volga delta—the first such reserve in all Russia. While his Futurist comrades enjoyed shocking the public, painting their faces and dressing as clowns, he himself was a poor public performer. For all his apparent grandiosity—his pseudonym, “Velimir”, is a southern Slav word meaning “great world”—he was deeply shy.
Both Apollinaire and Khlebnikov were willing to follow a thought or feeling wherever it might lead them; neither felt bound to adhere to a consistent ideological line. Much of their work is simple and compassionate. Apollinaire’s war poetry is still underestimated; no other European poet so clearly registered such a breadth of emotional response to the war—from patriotic enthusiasm to shocked horror and blank numbness. And Khlebnikov’s manifesto–poem ‘Appeal by the Chairmen of the Terrestrial Globe’ retains its power even though most other examples of avant-garde rhetoric now seem dated. What lies behind this ‘Appeal’ is a sense of deep horror at the nature of modern warfare, convincingly expressed.
In their deaths, as in their lives, both poets were emblematic of their times. Apollinaire died aged thirty-eight, on 9 November 1918, two days before Armistice Day. The immediate cause was Spanish flu, but he had been weakened both by repeated exposure to poison gas and by head injuries sustained two years earlier. Curiously, given his reverence for numbers, Khlebnikov was born exactly thirty-three years before Apollinaire’s death, on 9 November 1885. He too died young, on 28 June 1922; like many other Russians during and after the Civil War, he had been weakened by years of severe malnutrition and repeated bouts of typhus fever.
In spite of dying so young, both poets left work that reads like a final testament. Apollinaire’s ‘The Pretty Redhead’ ends: 14
But laugh laugh at me
Men everywhere especially people here
For there are so many things I’m afraid to tell you
So many things you’d never let me tell you
Have pity on me
And the last section of the “supersaga” Zangezi, which Khlebnikov saw as a summation of his life’s work, is an argument between Laughter and Grief. The two figures eventually recognize their mutual dependence. Laughter concludes:
I am Laughter, a lightning rod,
I catch and deflect
the curses, the fury and fire.
While you, Grief, are a reservoir
for the world’s most ancient waters.
Both poets were essentially classical in their outlook, seeking balance and harmony even in the grimmest of times. André Breton said of Apollinaire, “He was a great man. Lyricism personified.” The same could be said of Khlebnikov.
15
Self-portrait by Viktor Khlebnikov, 1909
16
Vera and Viktor Khlebnikov by Viktor Khlebnikov, 1893
Portrait of Khlebnikov by his brother Alexander, 1916
part one
BirdsandAnimals
1. APOLLINAIRE
Scholars have tended to focus on Apollinaire’s more experimental poems and on Khlebnikov’s work in the invented languages for which his colleague Alexey Kruchonykh coined the term zaum(literally, “beyond mind” or “beyond sense”—brilliantly rendered by the translator Paul Schmidt as “beyonsense”). This is unfortunate—especially with regard to Khlebnikov. Lazy talk about his obscurity has lost him many readers.
Much of the work of both poets is immediately engaging. Both were able to write simply and with humour. And for all their professed eagerness to address modern themes, both felt a deep and childlike love of animals. Though different in form, Khlebnikov’s first important published poem, ‘Zoo’ (1908–11), has much in common with Apollinaire’s Bestiary(1911).
The tradition of compiling “bestiaries”—books of pictures of birds and animals—goes back at least to the second century of the common era. Bestiaries were particularly popular in mediaeval England and France. Each illustration was accompanied by a moral lesson; the pelican, for example, represented Jesus, since it was thought to tear open its breast to nourish its young with its own blood. Apollinaire and Khlebnikov continue this semi-philosophical tradition, in a playful, often parodic tone.
At one point, Picasso planned to illustrate Bestiary, but the poems were eventually published with woodcuts by Raoul Dufy. The incisiveness of Dufy’s line complements that of Apollinaire’s verse. Francis Poulenc set some of the poems to music soon after Apollinaire’s death. Graham Sutherland’s last major work, first exhibited in 1979, was a new, more surreal set of illustrations.
21
tortoise
From Thrace we have the mystic lyre,
Made by Hermes from a tortoise.
Mountain lions dance from their lair—
We sing as Orpheus taught us.5
kashmir goat
Neither the gold curls that Jason dared
His life for, nor this goat’s fine coat
Can be compared
With the silk mane that hold my heart ensnared.
serpent
You’ve got it in for beauty.
Think of the women who have been
Victims of your cruelty—
Eve, Cleopatra, Eurydice,
And one or two others I’ve seen.
lion
Unhappy image of our age
And the sad fall of royalty;
This one was born inside a cage
In Hamburg, by a chilly sea. 22
mice
O mice of time, brief day by day,
You slyly gnaw my life away;
And all too soon I’ll have misspent
Twenty-eight years, I’m sad to say.
caterpillar
Work hard, poets, work with good cheer:
Work leads to wealth and freedom from fear;
And butterflies, for all their graces,
Are merely caterpillars who persevere.
cricket
This is the slender cricket
Saint John once used to eat.
May my verses be like it—
And feed the true elite!
dolphin
Dolphins leap through the air,
But the sea stays salt and bitter;
Dreams may burst into flower,
But life remains without pity. 23
octopus
He clouds the world with ink
And likes to drink
His loved ones’ blood.
I’m similar, I think.
jellyfish
Floppy heads,
Violet hairdo—
But they enjoy a tempest
As much as I do.
crayfish
My mind is never quite made up
And changing it brings me delight.
I move through life much like a crayfish,
This way, that way, never straight.
louse
We can learn resolve from this insect
We deem so low;
Scratch, gentlemen, to your heart’s content—
He won’t let go.624
carp
You live longer than we do
In your lake in the park.
Has Death forgotten you,
O melancholy carp?
peacock
Often he trails his tail on the grass
But, when he’s feeling randier,
He shows it off in all its grandeur—
And so displays his arse.
ibis
Bird of the Nile, bird of dread,
Your Latin name is like a knell,
Reminding me, “You too shall dwell
In the pale kingdom of the dead.”7
(published1908)
2. GEORGE SZIRTES
A recent collection of essays and poems—TheModernistBestiary:TranslatingAnimalsandtheArtswithGuillaumeApollinaire,RaoulDufyandGrahamSutherland—bears witness to Apollinaire’s continued ability to inspire.The poet and translator George Szirtes has allowed us to include three of his own contributions—original poems, not translations.
25
stag beetle
Horned demon, stag beetle,
Half insect, half Swiss-army-knife,
Your armour seems impregnable.
Have you come to take my life?
ants
May we address any one of you by name,
Jack, Susan, David, Rose and Beth?
Something creeps up the spine, like shame,
Nameless presences: work, scurrying, death.
hybrid
I am nothing. I am neither here nor there,
A citizen of the world, trans-everything
That is the case. I may not belong where you are
But I have teeth and at least one good wing.
(2020)
3. KHLEBNIKOV
‘Bird in a Cage’ is the earliest of Khlebnikov’s poems to have been preserved; he wrote it at the age of eleven. ‘There was steppe all around…’ evokes the world of the poet’s first six years, among the Kalmyks whom his father, by all accounts, administered honestly and conscientiously. Khlebnikov’s younger sister, the artist Vera Khlebnikova, was close to her brother throughout his life. Two years after his death she married the artist Piotr Miturich, the friend who took care of Khlebnikov during his last weeks. Here we include an extract from her own evocation of the Astrakhan steppe.
‘Ornithological Observations in the Pavdinsk Reserve’, a scientific paper co-written by Khlebnikov and his younger brother Alexander, is the fruit of a five-month expedition to the Ural Mountains in 1905, when Khlebnikov was a nineteen-year-old student. The style is fresh and clear, and Khlebnikov is already—as in his mature work—pondering “the language of birds”. Ornithologists have praised the exactness of his visual observations and his ability to find verbal equivalents for bird calls.
Khlebnikov mentions over a hundred different birds in his poems, often calling them by their dialect names. The only English poet with an equal knowledge of birds is John Clare, with whom Khlebnikov has much in common. Both were outsiders in the literary world, fiercely loyal to their provincial birthplaces. Both combine great literary sophistication with an air of childhood innocence. Khlebnikov’s hatred of words borrowed from French or German recalls Clare’s hatred of what he called the “dark system” of Latinate names for birds and flowers. And both poets proved incapable of managing life’s everyday demands. Clare lived his last years in an asylum, and many 27people—understandably, though probably mistakenly—considered Khlebnikov to be mad.
‘A Cliff out of the Future’, from Khlebnikov’s last year, is a vision of a utopia made possible by technology. Even here, though, his love of animals shines through.
28
bird in a cage
What are you singing about, caged bird?
About how you were caught in a net?
About how you first wove a nest?
About how this cage parted you from your mate?
Or about your happiness
in your sweet nest?
Or about how you caught flies
and carried them to your children?
About freedom and forests,
about high hills
and green meadows?
About open fields?
It must be boring for a poor bird to sit on a perch
and look at the sun through a window.
Yet you bathe in the sunshine days
and pour out wonderful song.
You remember old times,
you forget your grief,
you peck seeds
and greedily drink up your water.
(6April1897)
29
A wrath bird
and a love bird
were perched on a branch.
They were joined
by a bird of calm.
The wrath bird
flew away with a screech
and the love bird
followed.
(1905–6)
30
There was steppe all around, flowers, the roar
of camels, circles of yurts, oceans of sheep,
each with the same thin face, and hoopoes—
proud belongers to heavenly wastes—
their wing stripes flinging sparks into space.
So the days passed, and the years followed,
while my good father, terror of the saiga
antelopes, earned the gratitude of the Kalmyks.
Now and then, a caravan, with Cossack escort,
sank deep into the steppe’s far-flung beyond.
Brigands brought change to this empty world;
hearing the bronze jangle of fetters,
ravens circled in expectation of feasts.
Tame ravens pecked meat from my hands—
though freedom means more to a raven
than to a youth awaiting execution at dawn.
Prolonging his neck, shortening the time,
a swan would fly by, crying, “Alone, alone!”8
The patterned metal of a Cossack belt
spoke of the silver of distant rivers.
A flare of brigandry like summer lightning—
such, Man, were the contents of my soul.
(1909)
31
from ornithological observations in the pavdinsk reserve
[…] Once we had to spend the night in the cabin of an abandoned mine on the shoulder of Sukhogorsk Rock, but at the first glimmer of dawn we were woken by the wild, triumphant cry of nutcrackers that had somehow got inside the cabin. Nutcrackers are very sociable; we had observed them flying into remote swamps or to treeless peaks and cawing long and despairingly until they got a reply. After that, they usually took off and flew towards the voice or else waited for others to fly to them. Nutcrackers are vociferous. Their calls are unusually rich in intonations; at the sight of an enemy, they caw threateningly, moan and cheep, or else murmur as if talking to someone. After feeding, a nutcracker often sits for some time with its eyes closed and its feathers ruffled, evidently enjoying the sound of its own voice, as if recounting something of its impressions of the day in its own strange language: “Pee-oo, pee-oo, pee-oo,” it moans pitifully. “Pee-ee, pee-ee, pee-ee,” it pipes in a high voice like the call of the hazel grouse. Then, insistently and instructively, “Knnya, knnya, knnya”. Then switching to mutters of “Kya, kya, kya”; and then trembling with intensity, feathers on end as if angry, coming out with a rude, hoarse hiss.
(VelimirKhlebnikovandhisbrotherAlexander,1911)
32
Afewwordsby Khlebnikov’s sister
The apparent silence of the steppe is its voice.
For someone who does not love it or know it, the steppe has no voice. But ask a Kalmyk if the steppe is silent and he will tell you that it is resonant and has many voices. He will communicate all its songs and melodies to you. And at dawn the steppe is a temple. It prays before the face of the sky. Everything sounds and sings as the dawn colours come pouring out. […]
Now and then a thoughtful camel lets out a long groan. With its humps, it seems older than the centuries. A long longing for the long ago. […] The camel is neither beast, nor bird, nor human being, but it has something of each of these. Above all, it has something of the grey, clayey steppe. When a camel moves, it is the steppe that moves; when it groans, the sound comes from the steppe. The camel also has something of the light blue sky. And something elusive from the sunset clouds. It is the world of the steppe; it is the steppe’s quiet, burning gaze, the voice of its quiet. And it is also its silence.
Letters or hieroglyphs of past centuries, the camels move over the steppe in a straight line, where the earth clings to the sky. Where the sky is pink, gold or emerald from the sunset.
In the rays of the setting sun, the camels appear as purple, violet or dark-malachite silhouettes.
What is their salt-desert mind keeping from us? What is it not saying?
The mind of barbed grasses… And their gaze, which has drunk up the world of the steppe, is beyond our understanding.
(VeraKhlebnikova,1919)
33
zoo
to Viacheslav Ivanov9
Zoo! Zoo!
Where the iron bars are like a father, reminding his sons that they are brothers and so preventing a bloody battle.
Where Germans come to drink beer.
And beauties sell their bodies.
Where eagles sit like eternity in the guise of a present day yet to reach evening.
Where the camel, whose great hump has no rider, knows the enigma of Buddhism and conceals the smirk of China.
Where a deer is nothing but quivering fear, which flowers like a broad stone.
Where people’s outfits astonish.
Where people go about frowning and downcast.
And Germans blossom with health.
Where the black gaze of the swan—the very picture of winter, but with a yellow-black beak like a small grove in autumn—is a little guarded, mistrustful even of the swan itself.
Where the dark-blue preencock displays a tail like Siberia seen from the rock of Pavda,10 when over the green of the forest and the gold left by a wildfire is cast a blue net of clouds—and dips in the ground endow this whole scene with any number of hues.
Where you feel the urge to seize the lyrebird’s tail, pluck the lyre’s strings and sing of great Russian exploits.
Where we clench our fists as if clasping a sword and whisper an oath: to defend the Russian breed, at the price of life, at the price of death, at any price. 34
Where the monkeys get cross in any number of ways and flaunt their various extremities and, except for the meekest or saddest of them, feel irritated by the presence of people.
Where the elephants, squirming as mountains squirm in the course of a quake, beg a child for food, imparting an ancient meaning to the truth, “I’m hungry! Gimme something to eat!”—and then they kneel as if begging for alms.
Where agile bears climb up and look down, awaiting their keeper’s command.
Where bats hang overturned, like the heart of a modern Russian.
Where a falcon’s breast recalls the feathery clouds before a storm.
Where a ground bird drags a golden sunset behind it, and all the coals of its fire.
Where in the tiger’s face, framed by a white beard and with the eyes of an elderly Muslim, we honour the Prophet’s first follower and read the essence of Islam.
