Inerview with Evelina Shats
Is there a difference – apart from the obvious linguistic one – between what you write in Italian and what you write in Russian?
Heidegger said: “Language is the house of life”. Each person renders it habitable in his or her own way. When I left Russia, not being an active dissident, I still tried to free myself from the grip of an exhausted Russian language. I wanted to think in a different way. Italian requires a new mentality, so to speak, clarity, which comes from Latin, an intellectual structure. Liberation from the naivety of an obsolescent system of rhymes, from the simplification of the text that results. Russian? I returned to it twenty years later. I wanted to be able to sing! A poet’s native language is his, his one and only. But he may also use other instruments. And perhaps Italian is the language of reason, Russian that of the soul? Anyway, words, in their depth and density, transcend the rules of this or that language. As for poets, they all speak in several languages.
How do you relate to other Russian poets, Russian women poets?
If there’s no connection with poets, an ideal connection with texts, there can be no poetry. As with culture, there is probably a sort of divine hypertext for the universe. I’m always sleeping with some poet or other! Emily Dickinson, Gottfried Benn, René Char, Paul Celan, Amalia Rosselli. As you see, I like contemporaries. Russians? I simply get lost because of the abundance of contacts, all the excitement. At different times, different poets have been bedside reading for me: Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Mandelshtam . . . And especially – Khlebnikov, Brodsky. Khlebnikov is my university, Brodsky for me represents a kind of unconscious love, hard to understand, like all love, crazy.
You also produce books yourself. How did you get into this? How does your art or craft relate to your poetry?
How did I start working on making books? To find Samizdat! A brilliant school of book creation! Add to that, spoiled sheets, general literary bric à brac. Yes. I simply collected that kind of junk, and then for pennies I bought volumes of contemporary Italian poets. What can I say? Samizdat is humankind’s salvation. Of course, I wanted to laugh it off. I often say that my handmade books are for fools and collectors. In them you’ll find childish love for picture books, the history of Russian visual literature, popular literature, futurist hand production, Italian indifference to the printed text and in general to the text as such. The wish to seduce, to entice people into reading. To make something emotionally alive, something rather like a relic.
What do you think about our collection, a collection devoted to Russian women poets? Don’t spare our feelings! You wouldn’t be the first to object . . .
For me large-scale epic poetry is male. What characterises women’s
poetry is a laconic quality, brevity of exposition. Of course, you can
divide people into brunettes and blondes, short and tall; there are
differences. If poetry is distinct from prose on account of its economy, then women’s poetry is doubly distinct. Take Emily Dickinson – a brilliant neo-classical voice, a voice of contemporaneity! Perhaps this indicates reserve, which is linked to a certain lack of confidence in herself? Still, reserve of this sort leads to an “ecological” awareness, a semiotic rationality and lends the text a naturally contemporary form. Women have entered the history of poetry in an extended front.
Once, when I was asked at a poetry evening what being a female poet meant today, what sprang to mind and what I blurted out was: Poeta sempre femina – The poet is always female. Then I remembered how my friend, the artist Alvaro once exclaimed: “You’ve two quadrangular balls in your noddle!” That’s Blok and Tsvetaeva, the female and male principle. So, let’s see, what about this special issue of MPT? In general any ghetto nauseates me. I agreed to take part, because to be translated into English was seductive, in this case to be translated by you!
This may seem a bit out of context, but you said you were thinking of compiling a book of your own poems dedicated to Brodsky. Can you say what Brodsky as a poet means to you?
For me he is the eternal interlocutor, the other. I’m often in dialogue with him. Yes, it’s time to collect all the poems to JB written over the last twenty years.
A naïve question, perhaps? What’s it like writing Russian poetry outside Russia?
Well, of course, a poet’s country is his poetry. Thank goodness, the earth has long ceased to be square, when everybody knew exactly where to go. One can travel in one’s own shell, wherever one’s nature leads one.
You told us that your father called you goika. Presumably, then, you’ve some Jewish blood in you.
Once upon a time, the Austrian prime-minister Kreisky said that every Austrian was a third Jewish. I don’t know whether that’s so, but every European has got some Jewish blood, if you consider that our blood is the culture, and that religion is its primary material. My love for the Italian language, for the world of the Mediterranean, isn’t it the product of Jewish antecedence and of having been born in the amazing cosmopolitan city of Odessa? Anyway, as Tsvetaeva said: All poets are Yids.
[Venice, May 2002]
Page(s) 194-196
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