In Praise of Poetry. Olga Sedakova
question. It is a tale of education and self-education, an account of a child’s wonder and horror at the world, all blended with a meditation on the nature of the poetic word and of the psyche in which that word comes into being. Olga Sedakova had many educations, as she tells the tale. Alongside her training in literature and philology, there was an ever-growing knowledge of church ritual and religious history, learned from her grandmother, her priests (her dukhovnye ottsy), and her friends, some of whom have been remarkable thinkers and philosophers (like V. V. Bibikhin, Sergei Averintsev, and Yuri Lotman, all now deceased). Along the way, she learned many languages, both ancient (Latin, Greek, Old Church Slavonic) and modern (French, German, English, and her beloved Italian). She became a gifted, experienced translator, rendering works by Dante, Petrarch, Dickinson, Pound, Eliot, Claudel, Mallarmé, Rilke, Celan, and others into remarkable Russian poems. Sedakova’s prose, of which she has written more in the last decades, includes studies of such modern poets as Pushkin, Pasternak, Zabolotsky, and Khlebnikov, as well as memoirs and memorials to contemporaries she honors—Venedikt Erofeev, Viktor Krivulin, and Sergei Averintsev among them.
A number of her essays have treated matters of religion, doctrine, theology, and ethics, and those essays boldly name the real dangers of “moralia” and firmly strike a balance among several risks. As one sees in many passages in “Praise,” Sedakova is not one to embrace dogma or to strike a moralistic tone, but she is also not ready to relinquish the belief that words have ethical force in the world, nor to give up on the hope that the poetic word may yet have particular, special insight to offer. Moralistic thinking, she argues, pushes people to diminish the value of imagination and aesthetics. Sedakova might well agree with the strong statement of American poet and thinker Allen Grossman, that poetry is a means by which “human beings engage, as they can, in the maintenance of a human world in which they can meet one another, affirm one another, remember, see, and foresee one another.”1 Affirming our humanity is one of the gifts of poetry, and in Sedakova’s terms that means a refusal of the world’s many pressures toward mediocrity. Poetry, she tells us, is a radical expression of knowledge about another way of life. What is most radical is the form, which can be a containment of explosive force. Sedakova’s own work abounds in this kind of formal transformation, with astonishing beauty in her “Old Songs” and in “Tristan and Isolde,” which is in some ways about the very idea of transformation.
“OLD SONGS”
Among Sedakova’s cycles of short poems, “Old Songs” stands out for its astonishing and completely deceptive simplicity. It is her finest demonstration of a view that she articulates in “Praise”: that “poetry is a gift, a gift blessed by heaven and earth.” The poems are a form of praise for life on the blessed earth. Although there are actual moments of prayer, for the most part “Old Songs” feels closer to the dailiness of the monastic chroniclers than to the intensity of words addressed toward God or of pious sermons. Events of domestic life are interwoven with intimations of the larger cosmic orders. When there is wisdom, it is that of the people, the narod. When there is advice, it is enigmatic, even gnomic. The lexicon is biblical at times, even occasionally elevated, but there are no specialized words, no obscure theological turns of phrase. It is all astonishingly concrete, built from the simplest of words—stone, child, servant, word, horse, dog, fish, cradle, spruce, garden, star. The elements that fill out the life of the world are gently rearranged, poem after poem, with steadying, organizing pressure exerted from words that designate larger forces. They might be saints’ names, or biblical names, or references to angels or even to God. The result is a sure sense of the order of the universe, its harmonious and capacious embrace of all that is righteous and errant, all that is life and life after death. The voice who gently asks for a walking stick to go out into the garden makes nothing of the fact that it speaks from the grave; the lullaby reassures the baby that dreams of becoming an ocean wave or an angel of the Lord are equally within reach.
“Old Songs” comprises three notebooks, the very name of which gives them the feel of found manuscripts; one wonders whether Sedakova, who has translated and much admires Emily Dickinson, might not have had in mind her habit of sewing pages of poems together in fascicles. Something of Dickinson’s world in fact is felt in these poems, all short and poised between the worlds of nature and spirit. But whereas Dickinson’s poems most often rely on the common meter of hymns, Sedakova writes her “Old Songs” without the shaping structures of regular meters (save in one poem, the exceptional “Marching Song”), although she does use occasional rhyme and a great deal of lexical repetition and other syntactic patterning, so much so that the usage of free verse becomes not so much an occasion for liberation from traditional meters as the shaping envelope in which intricate patterning can roam freely. As the poet Mikhail Gronas has noted, “Old Songs” is one of the most successful long cycles of contemporary Russian poetry to rely on free verse, in part because of the contrast created by the form with the emphatically traditional content.2 And it is indeed a long cycle, the poet’s longest, totaling thirty-nine poems. A sense of careful placement of poems creates moments of counterpoint and lovely echoes of words, images, and stanzaic patterns. Each publication of the cycle, and there have been several since its first complete appearance in 1990, has printed one poem per page, allowing a generous frame of blank white page to offer itself to the reader for beholding and contemplation. Our translation preserves that sense of silent pause between poems.
“TRISTAN AND ISOLDE”
If “Old Songs” presents complex ideas beneath a surface of seeming simplicity, then “Tristan and Isolde,” a cycle of twelve poems and three preludes from 1978-82, may at first appear to be something of the opposite. We are in the presence of a complex, high-culture text, one with multiple allusions and perhaps many sources. Some readers may think immediately of Wagner’s opera, although Sedakova’s indirect account of Tristan and Isolde’s romance will feel quite unlike the opera; medieval romance versions, as retold by Gottfried von Strassbourg and Sir Thomas Malory, are more pertinent. When we are bid to listen in the poem’s first prelude, we are addressed very much in the mode of Gottfried’s romance, but Sedakova’s poem cycle does not recount the story of Tristan and Isolde’s love. It promises a tale of “love and death,” but the plot elements most associated with the tale of Tristan and Isolde—drinking a love potion meant for someone else, voyage by ship, escape to the forest, punishment among the lepers, and the love triangle itself—are barely mentioned. “Tristan and Isolde” is mysterious at its core, inviting readers to discover slowly what it has to say about the tale of the two famous lovers. One begins to suspect, on reading the cycle’s preludes and its many small diversions, that Sedakova means to keep the myth at some distance, to use its motifs sparsely, chiefly as an impetus to meditate on the enduring fates of illness and betrayal, of journeys and divination, of death and immortality. Yet she also presents as well a searching exploration of the myth—its music, its symbols, its profoundly tragic understanding of love’s travails. An ethos of Christian sacrifice and journey toward salvation seems as significant in the poem as any quest for love’s redemption, and in her account of Tristan and Isolde, we see how the renunciations of love are as powerfully felt as its pleasures. Unlike the myth of Lancelot and Guinevere, with its central quest for the Holy Grail, the tale of Tristan and Isolde has only to do with love, with impossible, all-consuming love.
The re-telling of a myth is a potentially conservative, even staid art form, but Sedakova’s “Tristan and Isolde” attains a kind of wildness that belies any such notion. Some of that wildness is a matter of tone, as when the speaker asks rhetorically how she could possibly know where exactly the waves will travel, or how far the eye can see. The poem calls into question the narrative truths of the myth, and they suggest an allegory that motivates the poem’s refusal to tell stories forthrightly: as the people to whom poets speak are now diminished and poor, so must be the story they are told, even if it comes from a tradition that is ennobled and honored. The word “poor” (bednyi) is heard often in Sedakova’s poetry, and it means something different from the modernists’ frequent complaint of exhausted narratives. Sedakova’s notion of poverty is linguistic, a kind of stripped-down lexicon where decorative or diverting words have been banished, where a narrowed verbal range creates new reverberations and greater ambiguities. The restricted vocabulary paradoxically enriches the poem’s music.
Formally,