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.
It’s only when you stand on some street corner on a brightly cold and barren October, only then will you learn that 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. Yes, dear friend, this is it, the City, the one and only, which everyone knows inside out, and here are its percussion and horns, and here’s its chimney stack—the City that’s sitting all by its lonesome like some enormous Otis Company elevator, where everything only references itself, the cast iron heads and tails, the fences and cellars, and in the midst of the streets, right under the feet of the pedestrians, the stairways lead down to the gaping netherworld of the taverns with their warming smells of unfamiliar foods. And believe it or not, you forget quite easily that way over yonder—downward and all the way through to the other side—the early frost has come, and maybe, just maybe, the first light snow has freshly fallen.
So let’s say it began with a vinyl record gleaming through its thin, worn Soviet record sleeve—with frost on that fallow field—the Second Concerto that an American needle never ended up touching. And now there are hollow Zen chimes clanging in the wind on a porch in the puritanical suburb across the river, a porch with the entrance door still bare of the Christmas wreath or breath. But I’ll tell you one thing: someone who was happy back there, on those black—long before the coming of winter—vinyl fields with their wavy grooves, is happy here, in this antiworld, and doesn’t notice that he’s walking upside down. He is ready for anything, except the word “forever,” and stands on the shore of the bird-covered bay, at the very edge of Unmerica, in a scarf as grainy as the earth itself, with the hardened scales of local foliage caught in its loops; he stands in this immobile, impossible, other life, while his smiling transparent double removes his salt-stained boots in the foyer.
Translated from the Russian by Maria Bloshteyn and the author
Irina Mashinski is the author of ten books of poetry and translation in Russian. She is co-editor (with R. Chandler and B. Dralyuk) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015) and Cardinal Points Journal (Brown University). Her poetry and essays in English appeared in Poetry International, Plume, The World Literature Today, and other journals and anthologies. Her first English-language collection, The Naked World, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil.
Maria Bloshteyn is a literary scholar, translator, and editor. She is the author of The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky and the translator of, most recently, Anton Chekhov’s The Prank. Her anthology Russia is Burning: Russian Poetry of World War II is being brought out later this year by UK’s Smokestack Books.
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