Philip Metres on Russian Poet Arseny Tarkovsky

(We've just published Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev's translation of " I learned the grass as I began to write . . ." by Arseny Tarkovsky in the May 2011 installment of TWO LINES Online. To help contextualize this work, introduce the major poet who made it, and give some sense of the translation challenge it posed, today we have a post from Metres.)

Speaking of Soviet poetry during an interview toward the end of her life, Anna Akhmatova called Arseny Tarkovsky the one “real poet.” In her words, in 1965, “of all contemporary poets Tarkovsky alone is completely his own self, completely independent. He possesses the most important feature of a poet, which I’d call the birthright . . .”

In a time when Russian poetry was anything but independent, Tarkovsky’s verse maintained its resolute allegiance to his own poetic vision. Tarkovsky lived from 1907 until 1989, and spent most of his life as a translator of Turkmen, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, and other Asian poets, only publishing his first book of his own poems during the post-Stalinist "thaw" (1962). Of a younger generation than Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva, he both absorbed their Silver Age tradition and hearkened back to the simple primordial music of Pushkin. He was wounded in World War II, lost a leg to gangrene, and wrote some of the most powerful poems about the Second World War. Later, his son Andrei became an internationally celebrated filmmaker; in a number of his great films, Andrei features his father’s poems—not simply as homage but as demonstrating the aesthetic continuation between the poetics of language and film.

Though "I learned the grass as I began to write . . ." comes from the third book-length project of translation on which I’ve embarked, the challenges of translating Tarkovsky’s poetry has led me more than once to pronounce the translation impossible. Though it was true of Gandlevsky’s and Rubinstein’s, Tarkovsky’s is finally a poetry that moves and lives through its music, through its complex meters and rich sounds; Tarkovsky’s poems include dactylic, iambic, amphibrach, free verse, and other meters—each of them employed to effects deeply embedded in the Russian poetic tradition and ear, echoing previous poems and moods, and resisting what occasionally seems to be dark or hopeless subject matter. Any simple literal translation demonstrates the fatality of the enterprise.

To take one example from his early work, “If I were as prideful” is written in dactylic trimeter (plus a final beat). To translate the power of that rhythm to the troubled love poem, I found an amphibrach meter emerging, which is a playful, almost youthful sound to go with the poetry of desire. “Valya’s Willow” relies on the musical play in Russian between “Iva” (willow) and “Ivan”. Ideally, one might translate this poem as “Will’s Willow,” which suggests the shared destiny of soldier and the tree of mourning. Each of the poems, then, presented its own challenges; however, to register Tarkovsky’s stylistic shifts over the course of a life of poems, has become the ultimate challenge.