----------------------------------------------------------------------- What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry: A Recent View from St. Petersburg A Translation of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko's "On the Superfluous" Evgeny Pavlov, Translator Princeton University evpavlov@princeton.edu Š 1998 Evgeny Pavlov. All rights reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Translator's Preface 1. "All this is familiar; still it needs to be repeated. In its very essence the decorative grid of the Chinese interior is inexhaustible. Repetitions do not exist as long as there is time. Thus non-coincidence, deviation, residue, all requiring a different approach" ("Syn/Opsis/Tax" 5). These words of the Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (iguana@comset.spb.ru) that open what may very well be considered his poetic manifesto[1] would also make an excellent epigraph to the text that follows here. It has been five years since his work was introduced to PMC readers in the 1993 Symposium on Russian Postmodernism (PMC 3:2).[2] The brief essay in the present issue is in many ways a repetition of what was then said by and about him. Yet the non-coincidence is apparent. Five years ago Russian postmodern poetry was too much of a conceptual curiosity to be dealt with entirely on its own terms. In 1992, after a bilingual reading by Arkadii in Charles Bernstein's poetics seminar at SUNY-Buffalo, where he was then a visiting fellow and I a graduate student, I remember being asked how his work sounded to a Russian ear--whether its ostensible affinity with American Language poetry did not make for a certain foreignness, constructedness, a certain out-of-the-test-tube quality.[3] At the time, I was unsure. His poetry was certainly most unlike anything I had ever heard or read in my native tongue. As Barrett Watten put it in his contribution to the PMC symposium, Dragomoshchenko's poetry "rips a hole in the lyrical fabric of [Russian] tradition's... authority" by resolutely breaking with the "overdeterminations of sound and sense that have provided the standard for Russian verse" (Watten 2). The question of influence, of tradition and innovation, of "lineages and cultural formations" (Perloff 13) thus suggested itself before any other. It was an obvious one. It remains to be explored further. 2. Today, however, new lines of questioning can also be pursued, or at least invoked. Now that "the momentum that has brought the ["Third Wave" of Russian literature] brilliantly crashing on our shore" (Perloff 13) has somewhat subsided, other approaches seem possible. One of them is to imagine what it would be like to view post-Soviet poetry as something other than a representational practice specific to a given context, and thus, as something not always already determined by, or reducible to, a habitual set of national attributes current at a given moment. This possibility is not easily recognized simply because it appears to have few immediate uses. 3. Consider the history of Dragomoshchenko's essay "On the Superfluous." The piece was commissioned by a small British journal as a commentary on the contemporary state of poetry in Russia. Yet the text Arkadii wrote and asked me to translate was flatly rejected as it contained no actual information about the specifics of the poetry scene. The editor was in fact puzzled and, I think, slightly insulted. He was clearly expecting a straightforward report on the latest poetic trends but instead received a dense paratactic rumination that mentioned Russia only in passing and was mostly concerned with poetry as "something superfluous" to what we generally talk about when we talk about poetry. In other words, Dragomoshchenko's reflections offered a view of poetry and its scene that was not centered on any particular historical, political, cultural, or literary developments, links or connections other than those poetry itself projects "in its constant self-questioning." The view of poetry presented in his essay was, to be sure, poetic. For that very reason it was deemed redundant, gratuitous, self-indulgent--superfluous, as it were. 4. Which, of course, illustrates Arkadii's point only too well, even though one cannot but sympathize with the British editor's frustration. Dragomoshchenko's own frustration, however, is also understandable given the context out of which he is writing--the context on whose framing we always rely so heavily in our discussions of Russian poetry. What happened to poetry in that context is succinctly described in the first two paragraphs of "On the Superfluous." But the framing and the framed keep changing places. Poetry, Dragomoshchenko insists, is "always something else;" it is "that state of language which in its workings constantly exceeds the actual order of truth" ("Syn/Opsis/Tax" 7). It exceeds its context as easily as it exceeds its poet. Without asking the poet anything, they ask, is it possible to ask about that to which no answer is possible; not asking, they ask: does such a question exist, whose absence gives birth to the same irresistible anxiety which quite naturally excites doubt about many things, and first about the fascination of the paternalistic relations between the holder of truth and its user... And what answer might it be, this pearl, locked around its shell? ("Syn/Opsis/Tax" 7) 5. "On the Superfluous" does not provide an answer to that impossible question; it fails to describe contemporary Russian poetry or its scene. What it does describe, however, is a "four-dimensional landscape of an impeccable action" where every step is in the right direction, where "having begun in one thing," one finishes "in another without having moved at all" (Xenia 66). Department of Comparative Literature Princeton University evpavlov@princeton.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- On the Superfluous[4] Arkadii Dragomoshchenko 1. It is not particularly appropriate to speak of poetry these days (today it is something unnecessary, superfluous; something that has become the lot of either poetologists trying to extract some ontological root from ephemeral quadratures, or of sentimental ignoramuses who at some point should have gone to police school). Yet it is difficult to say accurately how popular it was in the times that in turn shifted "poetic conversations" into a class of partially unidentifiable phenomena. Having gone through a series of procedures in which it was simplified by aesthetics and pneumatology, poetry found itself at a place where "everything is understood" or, on the contrary, is not worth understanding. This is at best; at worst, poetry has arrived at a certain ideological space that represents it as an instrumental practice of language. 2. Despite attempts at decolonizing and excluding poetry from the sphere of Great Literature, and subsequently introducing it into the conventional bounds of writing, it was gradually barred from naively questioning its own nature as well as the limits of the actual scene, that is, its book, one of the totalizing forms that offer the world existence beyond any "picture." 3. Synaesthesia is the obliviousness of any definition. 4. Beyond the bounds of a metaphor lies the next metaphor, the same way that beyond one word lies another. Beyond memory, however, only the memory-producing machine reveals itself, i.e., the structure of a sign that consists of a trace, that fits into a trace. 5. Thunder is neither the essence of lightning, nor its signifier. By calling time beautiful, horrifying, or sour we only reaffirm our helplessness before the speed of the discord of invisible substances. 6. The privileging of the momentous "now" in the age of representation and of identity between word and thing determined the manifestation of essence (ultimate irreducibility) as presence in that "now," which in no case should have been time but "its timeless nucleus," while time emerged in that classic metaphysical perspective as not-now, not-being, not-truth. 7. Vision is also a linguistic procedure, a process of description, differentiation. 8. Every journey is a message to the past. 9. In one of many possible cases, a regular written/published book can be viewed as an attempt at rehabilitating (possibly, justifying) a preceding book, if one does not see it as a commodity involved in relations obviously separate from the interests of its writer and reader. Svistonov lay in bed reading, i.e., writing, as for him it was the same. He marked a paragraph in red pencil, and in black, entered its altered version in his manuscript. He did not care about the meaning of the whole and the coherence of all. (Konstantin Vaginov)[5] 10. One can only regret the fact that none of Svistonov's books have yet been published. 11. If one admits the obvious, that the culture in which we have been brought up, the one that takes us into its body, forms our language, vision, ideas of ourselves and of the world around us--if one admits that this culture functions as a metaphysical machine of perfection, invulnerable fullness and teleology, then it would be logical to assume that the inner space of the drama, whose players we become at the moment our own history is born, could be described as the space of non-coincidence produced by the machine of self-sufficient fullness, telos... and by our inherent insufficiency determined by the known finitude of existence, or, simpler still, of desire. 12. Which means that it is the "I" that is the breach, the gap taking on different names with apparent ease. Let us compare this "I" to the outline of a hole--the outline of absence. Including that of the present which tends to expand its own meaning. 13. Idleness is much harder than labor. It requires efforts, durations of another sort, and richer imagination. 14. The technology of idleness is parataxis. The speed of conjunctions without momentum exhausts the possibilities of vertiginous stasis. But the temptation is most often irresistible. 15. The "I" that is unable strictly to follow the strategy of idleness, the "I" that does not rupture the circulation of its language (Khoma Brut's chalk circle[6]), and hence, of history and memory, is doomed to failure. Each thing is the residue of its own description. 16. Perhaps the Russian national idea is contained in the idea of Paradise (a communal "body without organs," sobornost'), while the asceticism of labor, the overcoming of one's own nature (see Aleksandr Etkind) that such an idea suggests, eliminates idleness as effectively as Protestantism does in its everyday facing of Hell. 17. Experience tells us that a tremendous amount seems to have been done toward that end, but most probably, not "the way" it should have been done. 18. An error is always conscious. 19. Sometimes an error is the result of extremely complicated, multi-level operations and calculations (Freud, for the moment, is rejected). 20. Poetry does not err in any projection of its questioning itself because it is the unconscious of a society (a pre-organic formation): the four-dimensional landscape of an impeccable action "where everything converges precisely, even if somebody's notes don't tally." 21. It is the fullest absence (above all, of representation). Meanwhile, the desire for absence is accompanied by the insurmountable fear of transgressing the line that separates from it. But such transgression cannot be called a journey, for it is transgression that never really transgresses (balance caught at the last moment, fear of irreversibility): it abides [prebyvaet] beyond the past and the future and arrives [pribyvaet] at the perfect time of the present (which "evaporates in its own shining")--it arrives at the experience of insufficiency in the return to its own beginning. This is neither good, nor bad. It is the same as "four," "green," or "dream of Paradise." 22. I am not interested in the "how," or the "what," but in the "why." 23. Yet only the idle [prazdnye] set out on the journey [stranstvie]--they who celebrate [prazdnuiut] estrangement [ostranenie] (and removal [ustranenie]) of their "I," they for whom the being [sushchestvo] of the "other, which is so necessary for self-identification, loses its necessity [nasushchnost']." The poet remains a badly exposed photograph in the album of his time. The picture is washed away in the patterns of oozing salts and oxides. Sometimes they represent entirely different relations. But all this is only sooth-saying on coffee grounds. 24. Later they easily claim that he "resembles" someone. On resemblance see below. 25. The author's well-known dictum, "I exist because of the existence of the other," is replaced by a different one: "since my 'I' is separate from my being-ness [sushchestvennost']," the "other" in this case also loses his necessity [nasushchnost']. Pan-European dialogism governs any narrative but not the writing of poetry. "You" and "I," "past" and "future," "and," et cetera can be exhausted in the metaphor of the shell that rotates on the same axis: exterior and interior, moisture and sand, presence and absence--the shell that was once simultaneously the instrument of calling and the labyrinth of hearing. There is no certainty. "Not" signifies ways whose trajectories do not belong to any single design or trace. Sleep is nothing but a combination of phonemes necessary at a given moment. It offers the trusting mind the theme of resemblances, the conjugation of examples, the representation of patterns which are to strengthen that theme. It would appear that the simplest comparison of one thing to another gives evidence as to the coherence of the whole. Yet every word, even if preceded or followed by another, speaks of "not connectibility," "not compatibility," of rupture. Reality consists of holes. As speech consists of difference. Of endless beginnings. This is why "poetry is always something else." 26. But the "accumulation" and subsequent transformation (is it really into its opposite?) of insufficiency again presupposes the growth of its "critical" mass and its transition to something akin to residual "surplus" with whose "expenditure" Bataille was so preoccupied and about which Lukācs, while considering specific problems, wrote the following: The melancholy of maturity emerges from experiencing the fact that the absolute, youthful trust in the inner voice of calling (the trust that risks to liken this voice to the promise of "cultural purposefulness, meaning, unity") disappears or dwindles, and that it can no longer be heard by eavesdropping on the outside world. [...] Heroes of youth are led by gods; no matter what awaits them at the end of the journey--be it the luster of demise, the happiness of victory, or perhaps, both--these heroes never tread alone, they are always led. 27. The melancholy of speech as the state that precedes the activity of its emergence, its "dissemination," "dissection," "sacrifice to a sacrifice"--the melancholy of speech as that which precedes discernment. 28. The aspiration to stasis which in the respective rhetorical frame of reference can bear any of the commonly accepted names--Unity, Fullness, Logos, and so on--is described by another metaphor as the aspiration to death, to absolute self-sufficiency and completion. Whereas erotic rapture/rupture always represents the destruction of the forming picture of balance. 29. Perhaps the hidden nature of this rupture, its resolve not to disclose itself, besides being the mystery of its very presentation, is also the pretext (I don't want to say reason) for our daily labor--writing, or some other trivial occupations, ventures, or projects including publishing. From which nothing actually follows. 30. Neither loud, nor quiet. One can sing a song or make a film. If one so desires. About how people speak. About how they only speak or keep silent soundlessly moving their lips (the dream of a hand). Or do both at the same time. 31. As usual, nothing superfluous. Translated from the Russian by Evgeny Pavlov ----------------------------------------------------------------------- COPYRIGHT (c) 1998 BY EVGENY PAVLOV, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS TEXT MAY BE USED AND SHARED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR-USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT LAW. ANY USE OF THIS TEXT ON OTHER TERMS, IN ANY MEDIUM, REQUIRES THE CONSENT OF THE AUTHOR AND THE PUBLISHER, THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS. THIS ARTICLE AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE. A TEXT-ONLY ARCHIVE OF THE JOURNAL IS ALSO AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE. FOR FULL HYPERTEXT ACCESS TO BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO PROJECT MUSE, THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Translator's Notes 1. "Syn/Opsis/Tax" (Konspekt-kontekst in the original) is the author's preface to Description, his first collection of poems translated into English. It also opens his prose volume Phosphor and is included in The Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. The complete Russian-language archive of Dragomoshchenko's works is located at www.vavilon.ru/texts/dragomo0.html. 2. A text-only version of the Septmember 1993 issue of Postmodern Culture, including the Symposium on Russian Postmodernism, is available at htt://pmc.village.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.193/contents.193.html. The full hypertext version of this issue is available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/toc/pmcv003.html#v003.2 (Please note that only paid subscribers to PMC at Johns Hopkins' Project MUSE have access to this site. Information on subscribing to Project MUSE is available at http://muse.jhu.edu/ordering.) 3. Dragomoshchenko's long-time friendship, engagement, and collaboration with Language poets, first and foremost Lyn Hejinian, whose brilliant translations of his work brought him wide recognition in the West, partially explain why the initial American response to his poetry was so comparative. Marjorie Perloff's contribution to the 1993 PMC symposium, for example, focuses, more than anything else, on Dragomoshchenko's position vis-ā-vis his American counterparts. 4. I wish to thank Amy Billone for invaluable help with editing this translation. 5. Konstantin Vaginov (1899-1934), a member of the Leningrad literary group OBERIU, whose work is still largely untranslated into English. The quote is from Trudy i dni Svistonova (Labors and Days of Svistonov), a metafictional novel that constructs complex allegorical figurations of Russia's literary modernity. On some echoes of OBERIU poetics and philosophy in Dragomoshchenko's work, see Molnar. 6. Protection against the undead used by the philosophy student Khoma Brut, main character of Nikolai Gogol's Viy. Works Cited Dragomoshchenko, Arkadii. Description. Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1990. ---. "Syn/Opsis/Tax." Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 9 (June 1991): 5-10. ---. Xenia. Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1994. ---. Phosphor. St. Petersburg: Severo-zapad, 1994. Etkind, Alexander. Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia. Trans. Noah and Maria Rubins. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Johnson, Kent and Stephen M. Ashby, eds. The Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992. Molnar, Michael. "The Vagaries of Description: the Poetry of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko." Essays in Poetics 14:1 (April 1989): 76-98. Perloff, Marjorie. "Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?" Postmodern Culture 3:2 (January 1993). Watten, Barrett. "Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Ilya Kabakov." Postmodern Culture 3:2 (January 1993).