Стихи и проза к стихам

Satunovsky is, above all, a delight—a personality. From the first words of a poem, he leaps from the page to sit beside you, shoot the breeze, maybe get a little profound, maybe just make you cackle along with him. Funny, moving, lewd, vicious, sweet, defiant, and always attentive—to the moment, to memory, to the strangeness of his own thoughts and feelings. In an unpublished essay written in the 1980s, his friend and fellow Lianozovo poet, Vsevolod Nekrasov, remarked of Satunovsky’s poetry: “It manages to catch awareness in the very act of becoming, speech in the act of arising; it catches the very crux of who he is . . . I don’t know of anyone else who can catch his own self at poetry this way.” Satunovsky never falsifies, never normalizes, never squeezes anything into a mold. If a huge leap, associative or even seemingly random, occurs to him in the moment, it goes in the poem—so that even a very short poem can end up far from where it started. He jumps between languages, too—his Russian is transformed on a molecular level by words, syntax, and intonations from his other tongues, Ukrainian and Yiddish, and if that weren’t enough, he liked to sprinkle in bits of languages he encountered while fighting on the Eastern Front, or which he didn’t know but was just curious about. As for structure, he avoided the regular stanzas favored by the Soviet poetic establishment, inventing—as though on the spot, a little differently for each poem—free verse forms that manage to be as earthy as anecdotes and yet intensely musical at the same time.

We worked on these poems both long-distance and—too rarely!—in person, with long lulls and short, productive bursts, always trying to be faithful not just to Satunovsky’s language, meaning and (where possible) rhythmic and acoustic effects, but also to his casual intensity, the bewildering shortness of the epic leap from ordinary speech to poetry.