Gennady Aygi and Franz Kafka

As part of the publication of the newest TWO LINES, we're going to feature short essays by translators on the pieces they have in the new volume. Today starts things off with Peter France on the links between Kafka and Chuvashian poet Gennady Aygi. France translated two of the perennial Nobel contender's texts for Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, the newest TWO LINES.

If you're intrigued by what you see, you can order Some Kind of Beautiful Signal directly from the Center right here, or on Amazon right here, or Indiebound right here.

To translate Aygi's notes on Kafka is to witness the meeting of two very different life experiences. Franz Kafka, a native of the sophisticated city of Prague, was discovered in 1961 by the young Gennady Aygi, the son of a remote village among the fields and forests of Chuvashia, some 450 miles east of Moscow. When I first visited this village in 1989 (until then Chuvashia had been virtually closed to foreigners) it was a place of wooden huts, deep muddy roads, flocks of geese and herds of cattle, and villagers who were more comfortable in their native Turkic language than in Russian. Aygi was born there in 1934, the son of a village schoolteacher and the grandson of one of the last pagan priests; he only left there in the 1950s, when his poetic promise won him a place to study creative writing at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. Falling into disfavour at the Institute—largely because of his links with Boris Pasternak—he found support in a network of like-minded artists in the so-called Moscow underground, and it was in this milieu that he first read Kafka—in French translation. Thereafter the Czech/German writer was a constant presence; Aygi devoted several poems to him and in 1984 composed the notes he called "O Yes: Light of Kafka" for the Danish journal Cras.

In 1985, Aygi wrote that he regarded "great prose" as "the highest form of verbal art," and he had a huge admiration for writers as different as Dickens and Platonov. But he saw himself as a poet, and was generally reluctant to publish in prose (his many remarkable letters, which have remained private so far, are a different matter). Even so, there are enough such tributes to favourite writers—including Pasternak, Khelbnikov, Celan, and Char—to make up a small book, which New Directions plans to publish in the fairly near future.

How then did I come to translate this prose, together with six volumes of Aygi's poetry? In the 1970s I was translating the poetry of Pasternak, and I first went to see Aygi in a remote Moscow suburb to talk about Pasternak, whom he had known well. We talked for hours about poetry and many other subjects—thus began a friendship that lasted until his death in 2006, and beyond. I knew that Aygi himself was a poet, and that he had gone over to writing poetry in Russian rather than his native Chuvash on Pasternak's advice, but I didn't yet know what an eminent poet he was to become—several times nominated for the Nobel, even though for many years his poetry could not be published in Russia. In the conditions of the Cold War, I didn't get to Russia very often at that time, and I began to translate Aygi as a kind of "conversation at a distance," but also to feel my way into a poetry which, like most other readers, I found challenging and difficult. Then, after a few of my translations had appeared in journals, I gradually found myself with the mission of bringing this extraordinary poet into the English-speaking world.

Whether translating the prose or the poetry, I try not to "domesticate"—I want to present Aygi in all his unfamiliar strangeness. He leaves much unsaid, and often he leaves words hanging in the air, calling on the reader to work out the connections. His syntax and punctuation serve this end, as does the layout of words on the page and (in poetry at least) the powerful rhythmic drive of his writing, which came over very strongly when he read aloud in New York, Beloit and San Francisco on his one American trip in 2003. I shall be happy if this latest publication brings him more readers in the U.S.