Boris & Nemirovskaya
While Boris Dralyuk writes of the deep reservoir of sympathy and the youthful capacity for wonderment that characterize Nemirovskaya’s work, I’m impressed by how these elements in no way exclude the poet’s modernist sensibility. For example, the extension of fantasy in “At a Glance,” the speaker feigning blindness with the same inventiveness with which she sees trees made of honey and imagines her eyes being a downspout of the whole world, dovetails with Wallace Steven’s “Anecdote of the Jar.” In both cases, the perceiving subject possesses the capacity to constitute (or to consume) her/his environment. The following poem (“Ostankino Park”) asks what source of meaning can engender and sustain the fibers of a society once its alleged deities exist on the same plane as “rattling trucks” and flaps of cardboard. The Spanish poet Luis Cernuda pursues the same theme—and via a similar image—in his “Resaca en Sansuena” when a marble statue, once the centerpiece of a community’s civic and religious life of, is thrown without ceremony into the sea.
I don’t mean to suppose that Nemirovskaya modeled her work on figures of an American or Spanish 20th-century tradition but rather to suggest that translation facilitates a dialogue between literatures, an intertextual conversation otherwise impossible, and foregrounds the point that the best literature—in whatever tradition and from any language—is in the final analysis one literature, an attempt to unravel the unending complexities of the human experience.
Nemirovskaya is also keenly attentive to the progression of time as, I suppose, her poem entitled “Time” would indicate. If texts, as Esther Allen argued, are fundamentally unstable, Nemirovskaya envisions the inherent instability of the world they presume to describe. Sometimes, “a long-dead poet’s voice” is as close as one’s own thoughts; others, the admired poets of the past, such as Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, are so remote that any effort to reach them is swallowed up by the “greedy maws” of decay. In sum, DB’s foreword predisposed me to look for one sort of poet, one most interested in sentiment and imagination, and I’d now say Nemirovskaya possesses those qualities along with a lucid eye and a rigorous complexity of thought.
David Karashima
Accustomed to a theoretical or maybe romantic view of the writer (a young Don Delillo laboring in a monastic Manhattan hovel, an unknown Cormac McCarthy surviving in a backwoods cabin built with his own hands, toiling daily at the page), I enjoyed DK’s survey of the ancillary mechanisms which prop up or even create a writer’s stature. To what extent is Murakami the fruit of his pen, and how much of his reputation is the product of publishing tics, marketing pitches, fortuitous turns, and of course, widespread translation? I wonder, furthermore, if an aspect intrinsic to his work—its themes, its style, its aptitude for translation—makes it especially amenable to the extrinsic cultural apparatuses which have catapulted him to worldwide renown.
As a reader/writer reared under American literary conventions, I was fascinated to hear that the Japanese institutions encourage the novella, the proverbial no man’s land for the aspiring American litterateur whose name isn’t Crane or Melville. I was also struck by the intensity of the visual aspect. That is, while it may be true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, one can surely observe that any book, be it hardcover or paperback, has a cover, and those DK featured were bright, colorful, and even loud, evocative and sometimes strange, one more strategy for building a brand and for perpetuating an author’s mystique. A picture, if projected on the exterior of the Tate Modern, goes for a thousand words at least.
-Josh
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