A recent anthology from the Dalkey Archive—Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology. At nearly 500 pages, this bilingual anthology introduces a new generation of Russian poets to English language readers. In celebration of its release, the Dalkey Archive has organised a number of readings in different cities, including a recent reading on 6 April in DC at Bridge Street Books. Though Bridge Street Books provides only a small space for readings, when the event is poetry-related one hardly expects a packed house—so it was a pleasant problem to find that downstairs it was “standing room only” and a group of listeners crowded upstairs to look down on proceedings too.

It would be nice if all readings of work in translation could be presented the way this reading was organised: each poem was read twice, by two different readers—once in Russian (by one of the anthologised poets) and once in English. Give that the audience was a mixture of Russian and English speakers this method was important, but it also allowed us to hear the rhythms of the poems as they were read in the Russian—this element was quite muted in comparison in the English translations. While I suspect this was partly a result of the reading styles (and, perhaps, the amount of singsong English language listeners tolerate) it was also clear that many of the rhythmic elements and patterns of the Russian originals had not been fully captured in the translations. The gap between the two provided a simple lesson on what is “lost in translation.” The poets present in DC for the reading were Evgeny Bunimovich (the editor of the anthology), Elena Fanailova, Yuli Gugolev and Alexei Tsvetkov. Each poet read from their own work, and Bunimovich, Fanailova and Gugolev each presented work by other poets represented in the anthology as well—a gesture that promoted the work of other poets and in some measure gave the audience an idea of the diversity of work captured in the book.

In introducing the anthology, Evgeny Bunimovich gave some background to the project, indicating that the idea for the anthology first arose when he was talking with poets in DC some years ago. The general rules for the anthology were as follows: poets would be born after 1950; poets would be still alive; poets would be living in Russia. The rules weren’t hard and fast—Bunimovich advised that there were a lot of poets who deviated. Nonetheless, this was a useful set of parameters in creating the anthology—that the majority of included poets still live in Russia means that nearly all of the work captured in the book are new to English-speaking audiences.

Bunimovich opened the reading with an untitled poem of his own, the opening lines of which ran:

It’s no longer awful knowing why they go on about God.
The time is coming when our ranks will thin.
The product of my country, my family, my time,
I stand wrapped in cellophane with a price stamped on my side.

Given that this touches on many of the themes poets in the anthology return to (religion, nation, era, ancestry) this was an appropriate starting place. (The Russians in the audience nodded appreciatively.) He read four of his own poems, including a haiku that had been written as part of a haiku-dialogue with Yuli Gugolev—a touch which added to the notion of a poetic community not simply within the pages of this collection, but among Russian poets in general. The fact that this haiku (“just three lines in all/ of which two are already spent/ so life will pass by”) also functions as a commentary on the form of a haiku broadened the scope of the reading—after Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva or the novels of Solzhenitsynit’s easy to imagine readers who don’t make it a general practice to keep up with world literature to have a ghetto-ised, Stalinised view of the trends and subject matter of Russian literature. Bunimovich also read two poems by the poet Ivan Zhdandov, “Before the Word” and “Transfiguration.”

Elena Fanailova read two of her own poems—“Freud and Korczak” (“The worst thing about murder/ Is not that a friend or lover/ Suddenly becomes a useless victim…) and “As if a caged little beast is running”—as well as one poem each by three women represented in the anthology. (I suppose the rationalisation here is that through Fanailova’s reading we could hear these poems in the female voice.) She read Elena Shvarts’s “Tract on the Indivisibility of Love and Fear,” Olga Sedakova’s “The Earth” and Maria Stepanova’s “The Morning Sun Arises in the Morning.” The highlight of these poems was my introduction to Elena Shvarts’s work, whose poem “Tract on the Indivisibility of Love and Fear” opens:

Deaf man: If a bomb goes off,
you think, “I can’t hear.”
(Don’t enter the dark room,
don’t light a candle,
God might be near.)

Looking into the anthology after the reading, I’ve been enjoying the way she uses voices—in this poem in particular (The next stanza is the speech of a blind man).

Yuli Gugolev read two of his own poems—including the piece “From The Book of Four Precepts,” the poem in which the rhythms in the Russian came out most strongly, seeming near impossible to reproduce in the English—though the translator did a good job, and the English reader was able to replicate the rhythms at some points in his delivery of the poem. Gugolev also read a poem by Aleksander Eremenko, “The Empty Diagram of Complicated Woods”—a poem that, thankfully, became more concrete beyond the complicated emptiness of the opening.

The reading was rounded off by a single poem from Alexei Tsvetkov, who read a poem that is not included in the anthology. He only read the English, and he paused at the beginning to find the poem (“Love Letter”) on his mobile phone. It was a slightly disappointing way to end—I had grown used to hearing the Russian ahead of the English, and I liked to know that at I would have a chance to revisit the poems in the book. Tsvetkov’s poem—read from a small bluish screen—was an ephemeral moment preceding the rush of people chatting, greeting, finishing the wine that was left and departing the scene