Posts by Maria Bloshteyn

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Irina Mashinski

Poetry fills up drums canisters garbage cans / lakes bogs artificial reservoirs

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you two energetic poems from the Russian by Irina Mashinski, author of The Naked World and a prolific writer herself in both English and her native Russian. Harnessing the potential of Irina’s bilingualism and exophony, translator Maria Bloshteyn speaks of her dialogic translation process: “The process of translation with a bilingual poet becomes much less about the translator finding the perfect phrase or equivalent rhythm in the target language, and much more about assisting the poet by providing variations of translations of a single line or stanza for her to choose.” Dive right into this strange, mesmerising wasteland of this poetic collaboration.

In Absentia

1. Twilight 

The tree is dead,
I drag it down the slope,
half-sinking in the snowbanks.

So will my Faustian questers
someday
haul me through the snow,
in just such tin-stiff mittens,
all my odd loops and whorls,
this tangle, knots upon the bark—
a pattern seen but once.

And just as quiet and pale
as these stunned trees,
my brother-poets will
escort me:
the icy beech, the hemlock, the black walnut,
the birch, the hornbeam, the bird cherry,
the sugar maple, the plantain, the other maple—
that for a long time will burn
scarlet.

When I’ll be dragged
blinded over the stumps—
through the gully,
over remnants of fencing,
the forked road, the post,
the plaster fountain—
the birdbath overturned,
the empty birdhouse, rot and moss,
the gulley, and the rot and moss,

when I’ll be dragged
down for the extraction
of the golden root—

a ragged trench will stretch across the deep snow,
stippled like a greyhound,
as if the angels wrestled on it,

they’ll stand there scattered in farewell,
the slope as deep as a fresh rough-draft,
not noticing how their legs are whipped
awkwardly by my dead branches,
by the trailing
still unyielding roots.

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Translation Tuesday: “Going off to America” by Irina Mashinski

. . . nothing in this world could ever be as lonely as that fall, dry firing a sweep of its cerulean blue leaves across the crumbling ochre sky.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, writer and translator Irina Mashinski presents a lyrical and impressionistic account of finding new sanctuaries in “Going off to America.” Through a quasi-epistolary stream-of-consciousness, our narrator adopts logical wordplay to reorient a new life, illustrating the otherworldliness of an immigrant experience through the inherent strangeness and malleability of language. Words are dissected and negated, leading to a string of neologisms which hint at death, negation, and rebirth: “Amortica,” “A-merica,” “Unmerica.” These altered words speak to a sense of spatial inversion as our speaker confesses to the loneliness of living in a seemingly inverted world, and how one can find a parallel home in its seemingly foreign comforts.

Dear friend—well, yes, of course, that possibility always remains: to go off to America (if only you’re not there to begin with). When even the Symphonie fantastique sounds predictable—then, maybe, yes, the time has come. Then you can hang down, head first, press your ribcage painfully against the metal ribs of the bedframe, lean against the mattressed matrix of the elevator, peer into the elevator shaft in that far—faaar—away entrance, which smells of the shoe cabinet and someone else’s cooking, and to guess at the hammock sagging into the netherworld below, that’s right, to guess rather than see—all of it, to the overturned concave horizon, the unfamiliar underside of the world, with its excruciatingly embossed rhomboid plexus, all the sea stripes, interlaced with terra incognita or tabulae rasae, and black birds with their uneven jagged edges, hollering in the language that you’ve yet to learn—and only then can you cautiously touch the stiff satin dome, punctured by the pattern of beaks and knots. You won’t believe how quickly things will start to happen then, how nimbly the glinting sun will twist and turn to face you, like a polished coin’s head, balancing on its ribbed edge, and the next moment the sailors are already peering mistrustfully into your documents, as if they’re looking out at some finely enamelled horizon, and then the timeworn propeller winds up, and the movie projector begins to whir, and then the phantom called city M disappears in the foam of salty snow whipped up by the trolley buses.

Of course, it’s entirely possible to revive in Amortica, to begin anew and never be reborn again. What you are asking about, what you are calling A-merica is neither this, nor that, nor the other, but a trying of the otherness, which is a priori impossible. Believe me, the negating A- is not accidental—it’s that ironic little taglet, a tag that chases you right into the heart of the nonexistent. Should you also try all that happened to me and to others like me—with my family, dragged to the other side, with a guitar made in a small Russian town with blue shutters and abnormally large apples, and, most vitally, with a carefully selected load of dusty vinyl records, oh, yes, and with another possession: a portable Yugoslavian typewriter with its now forsaken Cyrillic and broken memories? You’re thinking that to go off to America means to return all the cards to the dealer and to take new ones from the deck that contains everything, as we know, except cabbages and kings, including a river that flows through its improbable south and contains more s’s than any other word. That’s why (you’ve heard) the poet gave the name to the cat—the poet is dead, but Morton Street is there, with a symmetrical No.44 at its bended elbow—and there you are, starting from scratch.    READ MORE…