On Elena Shvarts
Elena Shvarts writes poems that mix the fervour of Dostoevsky with the formal clarity and freedom of Mikhail Kuzmin. She shares the religious quest of the former and the mystical stylizations of the latter. She brings the city of Petersburg to life much as they did, but also sets her poems in a timeless, boundless arena where values are transcendent, aspirations infinite. Her poems can exude the polyphonic characterizations of Dostoevsky, and her long sequence of Lavinia poems from the 1980s has the feel of a novel. The intensity of her short lyrics and her longer narrative poems is Dostoevskian as well. In the poetic tradition, Tsvetaeva or Mayakovsky are closer models for her sense of drama and romance. Other poets have attributes she sometimes displays – Khlebnikov’s surreal juxtapositions, Zabolotsky’s urban clangour – but Shvarts inevitably sounds like none of these predecessors, despite all the ways that she lovingly and compellingly speaks from within the traditions they established. She is among the best-known poets of contemporary Russia, a poet who performed her work in the Leningrad underground in the 1960s and 1970s and emerged to a wider audience in the glasnost and post-Soviet eras. Twelve volumes of her poetry have appeared in Russian, and a two-volume set is in preparation as of this writing. She has now travelled abroad many times to festivals and public readings; she has been honoured with the Andrei Belyi (1987) and Petersburg Northern Palmyra (1999) prizes, among others. Shvarts continues to flourish, writing poetry and prose at an impressive rate, and, more than thirty years into her career, she is still growing as a writer in interesting and unpredictable ways.
The spiritual qualities of her work continue to deepen. She has never
been content with traditional notions of the soul, still less with poetry’s ideas about the self. In the lyric and narrative poems she has been writing since the 1970s, she has asked repeatedly what makes a soul, whether it can be known. She has been unwilling to oppose the spirituality of the soul to the physicality of the body. And so it is no surprise that in the last few years, when Shvarts has written more often about death, she has sought images and allegories that might express the fate of both body and soul after death. She wants to make the soul visible, to give it the kind of substance and materiality that confirms its existence. That materiality results in extravagant language that can work as palpable rhetorical equivalent to a poem’s themes. Shvarts’s language is precise but adventurous, letting her draw on vocabularies that mix as vividly as do the rhythms and forms of her verse.
Translating that language into English poses special challenges. The
delicate formal features can be hard to reproduce, even such simple
iambic lines as are found here in ‘Memorial Candle’, and ‘Conversation with a Cat’. In the latter, the even-numbered lines rhyme in Russian, nicely anchoring the form in a way I could not reproduce in English without wreaking havoc on the immensely calm diction of the poem. Shvarts gets large effects from relatively subtle choices, as in her allusion in this poem to Ivan Krylov’s early nineteenth-century fable ‘The Wolf and the Cat’, where the cat is also questioned but responds garrulously, even speaking the fable’s moral, “As you sow, so shall you reap”. The dead do not speak, Shvarts fearfully suggests, because she has not earned an answering voice: the dead remain quietly enigmatic, like the cat with whom she would converse. Her poem also quotes from First Corinthians (7:29), when Paul (not Peter, as she speculates) reminds us that our time on earth is short, that those who have shall be as those who have not, and they that rejoice shall be as they that rejoice not. But for Shvarts, the key division has to do with mourning; her tears in this, as in so many poems in this collection, gain her neither relief nor sympathy.
All four poems translated by me come from her two latest collections, Solo on a White-Hot Trumpet (1998) and Wild Writing of the Recent Past (2001). The death of her mother is mourned by the poet in these volumes, which cry out in tones of melancholy and grief heretofore unheard in her poetry. In Wild Writing we find poems that are infused by this sadness but take up other themes, some of them historical – the remarkable cycle about the Leningrad blockade and the last poem given here, ‘A Child in the Ghetto Surrounded by Letters’, among them. Such poems point out the way of the future for this fascinating poet. We may look forward to new forms of wild writing about Russia’s present and its past, and about the passions of heart and soul.
Page(s) 218-220
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The