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Birdsong on the Seabed
Elena Shvarts
Translated by Sasha Dugdale



Bloodaxe (Billingual Edition, 2008)
£9.95 (171 pages)


Elena Shvarts began writing in the late Soviet period. Her work was not openly published in Russia until 1989, three decades after Shvarts began writing. Instead her name was spread by underground readings and by anthologies printed in the West. It was mostly after the fall of the Soviet Union that her poetry travelled across to the UK. Thankfully, in 1993, Michael Molnar and Catriona Kelly gave English poetry readers the chance to encounter some of Shvarts' work in their collection of translations, Paradise. Now the task of illuminating Shvarts' poems in the English language has been taken up by Sasha Dugdale, with the Russian originals printed opposite each translation. Birdsong on the Seabed presents poems from six of the collections Shvarts published in Russia between 1989 and 2004.
 
Shvarts, whose mother was the literary manager of the Bolshoi Dramaticheskii Teatr, was born in St. Petersburg in 1948. Peter the Great's marble city occupies a number of the poems in Paradise and the fact that the city was originally built on a Russian wilderness of bogs and marshland appears to be in the back of the poet's mind. Shvarts views her native city through her own unique looking glass. She admits that the city bears some resemblance to Venice and Jerusalem, something that Peter the Great desired. However more often than not, St. Petersburg's looming tower blocks, swept amid the blue and brooding waters of the Neva, makes for a dangerous poetic setting. At one point in Paradise, the poet looks out of a stained-glass window and wonders 'where are we after all?' ('Black Easter'). It is no surprise that she is confused, for Shvarts' piercing gaze takes in all the reflections and parallel worlds that flash up in the intersecting architecture of the city. In her St. Petersburg, a staircase looks like a 'funnel' twisting down to a hellish abyss. When the poet steps outside onto the street she watches one of St. Petersburg's trams 'flush crimson' as it is hit by a ray of sunlight. This nightmarish account of the city recalls works by Gogol and Dostoevsky. It remains a wilderness hidden behind many elegant facades.

A lighter emphasis is put on Shvarts' relationship with St. Petersburg in Dugdale's Birdsong. Here Rome, where Shvarts lived for a time, comes under her visionary gaze, of which 'The Garden of the Villa Medici' is an example. It is night time and the poem's persona is alone in the villa of the poem's title.  She is listening to the floorboards creak under her feet. She begins to think about the Roman Empire and her thoughts linger on the Goths that conquered the city many centuries ago leaving blood everywhere. With this horror in mind, she thinks she hears her door being pushed ajar and the darkness she sees outside seems like 'a heavy glance' from all those who have suffered in the city. Shvarts' insight into Rome comes close to clairvoyance.

In Birdsong, the reader also encounters the complexities of Shvarts' spirituality. It is unlikely that Shvarts followed the Russian Orthodox Church; none of her poems are direct hymns to God. But it is clear that she believes in some ethereal force. Angels, places of worship, stars, spirits and candlelight frequently appear in her poems. Certainly the Bible is a source of inspiration for Shvarts, with its hoard of miraculous stories. Many of the poems in Birdsong record Shvarts' own celestial epiphanies. In 'Our Lady of the Three Hands in Nikolsky Cathedral' we find Shvarts' speaker standing before a sculpture of the Virgin Mary. She is in the middle of a divine vision: 'I fell in love against my will/ with You - your net was cast' she confesses to the sculpture. The icon stands alone outside in the falling snow and the speaker perceives a luminous radiance around the edge of the icon's blue case. She is convinced that she is in the presence of a benevolent goddess: 'If we have sinned against You/ You will forgive, I know.' Shvarts also casts religious fanatics in an admirable light in her cycle 'The March of the Fools on Kiev,' which draws on the Russian tradition of the Iurodivy - a madman or woman who has divine knowledge. Christianity offers a well of ornate imagery, but Shvarts also acknowledges the consolation it can provide for the uncertain soul. As she tells us in 'Grand Elegy on the Fifth Corner of the Earth', the cynical mind sees only darkness, where there is 'no shelter'. For Shvarts the act of worship at the Christian cross involves sacrifice, symbolised by the final image of 'Grand Elegy':

    There is one salvation in water:
    Keep looking in, until the Cross, extending slowly, tears your flesh
    from within.

One faith that is unwavering in Shvarts' mind is her belief in poetry - its greatest power is to transform the self. Despite occasional abstraction, the reader is led to believe Shvarts' outreachings from the self because of the persuasive authority of her vision. In the poem 'Arboreous Cathedral' from Birdsong, Shvarts asks the reader to believe that she can hold a whispering conversation with a forest: 'my soul then turned and asked/ of the smallest of those (trees) there/ why gather and huddle in this ark here?' At the end of the poem we are able to see Shvarts as an unearthly creature flying out of view across the sea:

    And if you can't find me, when you turn back -
    Fly over the sea and beyond.

Shvarts exists in what Dugdale describes as a kind of 'aerial bodiless freedom.' She often refers to herself in terms of her 'soul' and her poems sometimes begin with the poet imagining herself in flight: 'fleeting shadow/ a golden slant briefly passed/ I follow' ('Why not everyone sees angels'). Her writing allows the author to enter an exquisite freedom. In her introduction, Dugdale refers to a story circulating that Soviet censors asked Shvarts to remove the word 'soul' from her writings. Shvarts refused and her work remained unpublished. 

Shvarts' sense of her poetic calling is strong. Indeed at one point in Birdsong she claims that even angels would regard her poems highly ('Poetica - more geometrico'). Her fierce self-regard shines brightly in 'The Last Night', a poem in which Shvarts imparts a dark prophecy. In a voice of chilling foresight, Shvarts states that on the night of the apocalypse Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon, will suddenly disappear and that humankind 'must outlive' this. Whirling through these lines is all the sorcery of a mystical vision:        

    Prayers and poems in the deserts and cities
    Play and sing with all your might,
    The living must outlive this night,
    Be wedded to trees,
    Laugh with the bird.

However, for all her grand prophecies, Shvarts rarely sounds pretentious. Her poems are full of adventures that reduce the darkness of her voice. In 'Grand Elegy on the Fifth Corner of the Earth' the poet is carried on the back of a lion from the southern part of a cross that is raised skyward. From A Wild-Script of Recent Times (2001) we read of Elisaeus Bomelius, an Englishman who Tsar Ivan condemned to death by roasting. Hauntingly, the poem begins:

    The bell rang for vespers:
    The moment of Elisaeus' death.
    Slowly a crown of thorns
    Is lowered on the criminal head.
    Unwilling executioners
    Fasten him to the stake
    Fan the flames within the chambers:
    'Burn, you wretch', the Tsar has spoke.
    Our Tsar is hungering for sure,
    An appetite for roasted morsel,
    A constant need for new-fangled -
    In truth it's why he rules us all…
 
    (‘An Englishman Roasted in Moscow’)

According to Dugdale's attentive and detailed introduction, one of the reasons why Shvarts lends herself so readily to English is because of the 'bold simplicity' of her imagery. During the process of translating Shvarts, Dugdale claims that certain phrases appeared to her as a picture 'drawn in inks and brightly coloured.' However praise is due also to Dugdale for capturing Shvarts' off-beat music and the traditional patterns of Russian rhyme. Yet there are some bizarre poems in this collection, written in the style of psychic dialogues between the poet and elements from the natural world, like the River Fontanka and the Polestar. Many of Shvarts' descriptive verses verily hurtle down the page, digressing this way and that, letting off one glimmering reflection before suddenly standing to a halt. Indeed, one might compare the act of reading her poems to the journey of the ghoul in 'The Dead are more in number':

    Without warning, ghostly creatures
    From a corps-de-ballet bear me aloft
    In brightest day…