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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Books Russian Literature, Flowers Bar & Restaurant, and Galya Diment

Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 10:19 AM

In 2004, I sat at a table (mirror overhead) in Flowers with Clarence Brown and Galya Diment. Brown is a translator whose book The Portable Russian Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, introduced me to three brilliant late-20th century Russian writers: Yuri Kazakov, Vladimir Voinovich, and Sasha Sokolov. Galya Diment, who is a professor in UW’s Slavic Language and Literatures program, and whose book, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of of Samuel Koteliansky, I favorably reviewed last week, made the meeting happen. She knew I admired Brown’s translations and tastes in writers. Brown was in his mid 70s at the time, recently retired from Princeton, living in Seattle, and writing book reviews for the Seattle Times. At one point of our conversation, he got mystical and explained to me that he saw language as God and God as language. (Spinoza's triangle saw God as a triangle, my favorite translator saw God in words.) At the end of the lunch, he gave me a gift: A signed copy of his translation of Osip Mandelstam’s autobiography The Noise of Time. That precious book is somewhere in my library, which I have been unpacking for a year...

Galya Diment has lost contact with Brown, whose last ST book review appeared in 2006. This is the sad news. The bright news is that the paperback of Diment's wonderful book Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel (Diment argues that Marc Szeftel, a Russian Jew who taught at Cornell University and, later in his life, the University of Washington, was the model for Nabokov’s fictional character Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, a sad, bumbling, but lovable Russian-born professor) is coming out this spring, as well as the paperback of A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, which in its hardback form is not cheap.

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Been a while since I read Mandelstam, a unique and somber poet. I believe there are some published letters between him and a woman poet which are good.

Posted by dnt trust me on September 11, 2012 at 10:31 AM

Stalin in general had a high regard for poets and musicians. Although they were terrorized, few were actually arrested, let alone sent to the gulag, something that wasn't true of other sectors of Soviet society in the 1930's. Mandelstam, unfortunately, came up with a scathing poem about Stalin and while he was careful only to recite it to a few trusted friends, one betrayed him to the NKVD and that was the end for him.

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

Posted by Matt from Denver on September 11, 2012 at 10:47 AM

What Tonderai, mountain man of Zimbabwe, really wanted to write was: Hey, I'm that African that can read. See, I got lots of books! Look at me!

Of course, it took him a long paragraph to get there instead. Real writers call this filler "word fat".

Posted by Stranger'sWorstNightmare on September 11, 2012 at 7:05 PM