Lev Loseff: Politics, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Stalinist Art

RUSSIAN POET: Lev Vladimirovich Loseff
TRANSLATOR: Daniel Weissbort

INTRODUCTION: ABOUT LOSEFF

LEV LOSEFF, born in Leningrad, USSR, in 1937. Emigrated to USA in 1976. PhD, University of Michigan, 1981. Professor of Russian, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA. Loseff has published five collections of poetry. He has also published plays, essays, works for children. English translations of his work can be found in several anthologies. There are appreciations of his poetry by Joseph Brodsky, Boris Paramonov, Gerald Smith, Vladimir Ufliand, Valentina Polukhina and others.

Loseff (Aleksei Lifshutz) was born into a literary family which had close connections with the absurdist twenties 'Oberiu' group (Ob'edinenie realnovo isskustva/ Association of Real Art), including Daniil Kharms {probably the best known here}, Nikolay Zabolotsky (Carcanet has just published his Selected Poems, translated by Daniel Weissbort), Vvedensky and Oleynikov. Loseff was connected with a group of brilliant poets, notably of course the late Joseph Brodsky (Nobel Prize etc etc; Loseff has in fact edited two collections of Brodsky and is the editor of the forthcoming definitive two-volume Biblioteka Poeta edition of Brodsky's poetry).

His own poetry, which developed comparatively late, after he had emigrated to the States, is quite unique. Brodsky himself draws a comparison between Loseff and Pushkin's slightly older contemporary, Prince Vyazemsky: '{T}he same moderation, the same restrained tone, the same integrity.' Valentina Polukhina (Prof. of Russian at Keele and an authority on contemporary Russian poetry) describes Loseff as a 'poet-philologist, poet-professor, philosophical, ironical, anti-lyrical and anti-heroic.' She elaborates: '{H}is poetry possesses neither lyrical hero nor lyrical addressee. He detests exhibitionism of any kind and either hides himself in the depth of his own texts or portrays himself self-deprecatingly.' Nevertheless, he is a poet of great verbal dexterity. He is, again in Polukhina's words, a 'semiotic wizard'. Paramonov writes how Loseff 'has done for Russian poetry what Chekkhov did for Russian prose, turned it from a collection of ingenious absurdities into a well-organized text.' Loseff is the leading poet of the so-called philological school.

I was introduced to Loseff's work by Prof. Polukhina, although I had come across it earlier, at a time when John Glad and I were preparing a new edition of our Russian Poetry: The Modern Period, (University of Iowa Press 1978, {T}his appeared as Twentieth Century Russian Poetry, Univ. of Iowa Press, 1992, and included three poems by Loseff). After Joseph Brodsky's death in January 1997, I wrote at some length about Brodsky's self-translations, his attempt, in view of the notorious difficulties of translating between the two languages (inflected / uninflected, polysyllabic/ largely monosyllabic etc), to create a kind of inter-language. I was less inclined to dismiss Brodsky's 'experiments' than many of my English or American colleagues.

 At this time I met Loseff in person. His sensibility appealed to me and I began to look at his poetry more closely. Loseff's diffidence about the 'translatability' of his verse ('versicles' he calls it) also rather appealed to me. It is not so much that I felt challenged by this, as that I sympathised, particularly as I was at the time undergoing a crisis of confidence in verse translation: Was it worth it? That question of course should be translated as follows: Was it worth it FOR ME?

I was additionally drawn to Loseff's work on account of his early (family) connections with the 'Oberiuty'. My own translations (at least 20 year in the making) of Nikolay Zabolotsky (1903-58) had benefited greatly from Joseph Brodsky's intervention (this is described in my introduction to the Selected Poems, referred to above). Brodsky had for several years urged me to consult Loseff about Zabolotsky, but I'd not taken this up. When I published an account of my work with Brodsky somewhere, I think in Translation & Literature, Loseff who saw the essay responded in a footnote to an essay by himself, which I in my turn saw! This oblique 'approach' was the occasion for our actually getting together.

It was also clear from the beginning that Loseff who, as I said, was not convinced that his poetry could be translated would not attempt to influence the English (in marked contrast to Brodsky's procedure with his translators). That is, he was prepared to co-operate in answering questions of meaning, in providing contextual cultural information, even in discussing the prosody etc, but maintained throughout that he was incapable of judging the merit of English texts as literary artefacts. Obviously this made him easier, if not necessarily better than Brodsky to work with.

It is also true, however, that I did not discover Loseff. He was brought, if not exactly handed to me on a platter. Once introduced to his work, I liked it very much indeed and the further I delved into it, the better I liked it. Nevertheless, I cannot honestly say that I would have focused upon it had I not been led there. Does this matter? I don't know. I'm an old-fashioned individualist, but times have changed. When I began translating contemporary Russian poetry, in the Sixties, discoveries were to be made everywhere because so little was known. Now a great deal more knowledge is readily available. A far larger landscape has come into sight and perhaps we 'explorers' should avail ourselves of these aids and be less serendipitous.

Briefly then, Loseff strikes me as one of the most interesting poets of his/my generation; there is certainly a kind of brotherly affinity between us. I wish I had the time I had back in the Sixties at my disposal to work on his poetry. But, in my own sixties I have more commitments and also I feel more urgently the need to be doing my own writing. So, I bring Loseff what I am able to, together with much fellow feeling. That is worth something at least.

As a poetry translation workshop teacher (primarily at the University of Iowa, where translation workshops were invented) for 25 years, I know very well how few poems can be adequately dealt with in the context of a class, even (I imagine) in the context of an internet workshop. And yet, as I have always told members of the workshop, if you want to translate a poet it is important to have a synoptic view of his/her work. Every poet, every writer, has his own lexicon, his own ways with words. Obviously it is one thing to translate, say, two or three poems of a poet and quite another to translate a representative selection. I cannot even say that I myself am yet familiar enough with Loseff's whole oeuvre. Anyway, I hope that the flavour of his work will begin to come across.

I intend to illustrate the process of translating, with early drafts, excerpts from translatorial inquiries and authorial responses, revisions of the original drafts and highly tentative 'final' versions.

In parenthesis are comments or instructions that have been interpolated afterwards, to make this text, I hope, more accessible or comprehensible.

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