Nikolai Zabolotsky. Columns. Translated from Russian by Dmitri Manin. Introduction by Darra Goldstein. Arc Publications, 2023. Paperback, 144 pages. $16.49. ISBN: 9781911469155

This bilingual volume of Nikolai Zabolotsky’s ??????? (Stolbtsy/Columns) in English translation by Dmitri Manin is supplied with a series editor’s note; a translator’s preface, in which Manin shares his history of translating Zabolotsky and addresses his translation aims and process; and an introduction, in which scholar Darra Goldstein reflects on Zabolotsky’s biography and work with an emphasis on the literary merits of Columns. Zabolotsky kept re-working his Columns throughout his life. The source for the translation at hand was the 1958 version of the cycle of poems, compiled but not published in Zabolotsky’s lifetime. Arc Publications elected to cut sixteen poems from the 1958 Columns for length; however, a complete volume of all poems from Columns, the 1929 and the 1958 versions in Manin’s translation, augmented with scholarly essays, is planned for publication by Slavica (Indiana University).¹

The 1929 Columns, published in Leningrad, was Nikolai Zabolotsky’s poetical debut—and starkly successful both in literary quality and the reception of the reading public. All narrative poems, Columns is a delectable, formally metered and rhymed phantasmagoria of feral images, concepts and plots: a spectacled corpse flees his coffin and strolls through the city; an infant high in a tree rejects the amorous overtures of a sky girl; a monk cat turns murderous and is executed by hanging; shop scales read the Paternoster; clocks are extirpated. In their richly detailed, masterful grotesquery, the poems in Columns are a textual equivalent of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights -and translating this glorious delirium while preserving form is a tall order for any practitioner. Luckily, in this edition, Zabolotsky, a poet of the maximalist school, finds a consonant soul in his translator, Manin, who manages to recreate the originals in a cloth that matches the luxurious brocade of Zabolotsky’s ingenuity, expressivity, and wit.

One notable success of the translation is Manin’s treatment of sound. Walking the reader through the street carnival of Columns, Zabolotsky again

[1. Previously, the entire 1929 edition was translated by Daniel Weissbort (Selected Poems by Nikolay Zabolotsky, Carcanet, 1999).]

and again turns to music both as a poetic subject and instrument: to brass and jazz bands, chanting priests, singing factories, bread bakers hammering on cymbals, “monotonously polyphonic” ringing of crystal glasses (p. 53), clacking of wooden hinged wings, clanging of top hats—yes, clanging; music played in bars and on motorboats, music made by bars and motorboats, music for the “many-footed dancing blob” (p. 131). In surrealist transmutation, music here is made material, even carnal, and the carnal laid to notes. In his renderings of this musicality, Manin is attentive to Zabolotsky’s soundscape, attuned to its phonetic detail, and successful in bringing the resonant qualities of these Russian poems to the Anglophone reader.

...The circus glitters like a medal,
The circus is a finger rattle,
The circus tootles a nose harp
And bangs a heart against a heart! . . .
(“The Circus,” p. 85)

Here, surreal is as surreal does, and the music of a circus band underscored by the cacophony of ambient noise plays roughly on the human anatomy and/or emotions with the percussive consonantism of the translator’s [tl; tr] clicks.

In “The Late-Night Bar” (pp. 24–27), a female entertainer (“siren”) performs a sentimental song about a lover lost to a deadly gunshot wound:

. . .â????? ?? ???????? ????? ?????,
??? ?? ????????? ?????,
?????????? ????? ????????,
?? ????? ???? . . .

. . . And whiskey hanging in the shot,
About the scarlet whisk that shot
From temples to the anguished breast
When he fell promptly. . . .

The translator finds phonetic coincidence in English, which is not an exact match for the original distribution of alliteration, yet preserves the drama and the sound trickery of the poem in full.

To paint his master strokes, Zabolotsky handles the Russian language with proprietary irreverence. His imagery relies on deconstructed habitual usage; he throws the reader many grammar and vocabulary curveballs. Dmitri Manin deals with Zabolotsky’s occasionalisms and agrammaticisms deftly and courageously, risking readers’ double-takes to great payoff.

The dead man triumphantly strolls down the streets,
The inmates lead him, bridle over their arms,
He trumpets a prayer in his resonant voice,
Wringing his hands to the skies.
He wears brass-rimmed spectacles, membranous frames,
Subterranean water fills him to the brim.
And over his head wooden birds bring together
Their loudly clacking hinged wings.
There’s rumbling around, there’s clanging of tophats,
And the heavens in curls—but below
Is an urban rectangle with a door unfastened,
And behind glass, a rosemary bush. (“An Etching” p. 33)

“An Etching” is filled with uncommon imagery and estranged objects. It would be safer for the translator to write “a boxy city building with the door open” but he opts for keeping the strangeness strange, and so the reader of the poem in English is compelled to the same mental exertion from which the reader of the poem in the original Russian suffers—or benefits.

The world of Columns is intensely physical. There’s so much flesh that’s living and wanting, so many corpses, butchered animals, flesh as food—and to augment the already-embodied, the animus of abstraction is often clad here in flesh, too, and ideas are made things. Zabolotsky’s world is bursting at the seams with thing-ness, and from the seams, true horror often peeks through the jazzy clangor of merry insanity. In the folk-inflected “Temptation” (pp. 97–102) a peasant unwilling to be taken by death offers his only daughter in his stead, and so death takes the girl:

. . . There’s a hillock in the leas,
There’s a maiden making pleas
In the grave: “It’s dim and dank,
My wee hands turned black and shrank,
My fair hair has gone to bits,
Feather-grass grows from my tits . . .”

The theme of the poem and the folky tune are reminiscent of Child ballads, many of which are tales of naked horror sung in simple, but currently antiquated, language. Here, the translator finds justified use for such words as “lea” and “wee,” which would be contrived and over-quaint elsewhere in the book, yet create useful intertextual messaging for the Anglophone reader in this instance.

When the maiden’s corpse bursts raining worms, the horror evaporates and comedy takes over. The poem ends in a tongue-in-cheek “???? ????— ????? ??. ????, ?? ??????, ???????!” (“Here’s a maid turned cabbage soup. Laughter, stop the laughing, stop!”) The poet addresses laughter itself, which in Zabolotsky’s world of chicken, fish and human corpses seems to be a vagabond force roaming unleashed.

Like horror, uproarious wit repeatedly peeks out of sudden cracks in Columns, and rendering the funny is a translator’s challenge that Dmitri Manin overcomes with seeming ease. In “A Trial of the Will” (pp. 119–124) two sages with the un-sage-like names Korneev and Agafonov sing lofty praise to a teapot:

. . .A piece fit for the Pantheon, of
The English a luxurious ghost,
A piece that holds one’s eyes engrossed,
That clears the mind and burns the heart,
Disposes the infirm to art,
Brings merriment to hardened souls,
That brightly shines and warmly glows —
Does this exalted artefact
Worthy of taking center stage
Reside now in a wretched shack? . . .

After the adoration of the mundane teapot reaches its crescendo, it devolves into an argument and then into a passing of the teapot back and forth with various existentialist justifications and attendant emotional swings. Manin brings the deadpan, intentionally bathetic humor of this absurd exchange into English by mixing registers adroitly:

. . . KORNEEV:
You have, good sir, my gratitude.
Now I’ve attained tranquility.
Farewell to you. I’m still in tears.
(Exits)

AGAFONOV:
I let my soul soar in the spheres,
I rest my body on the cot,
And I shall shortly summon back the pot. . . .

In rising to the considerable challenge of translating Columns, Dmitri Manin shows that, as a translator, he is a many-trick pony, and that his dedication and skill are a match for the complex task of rendering Zabolotsky’s multilayered formal masterpiece. We will venture a guess that this translation was a labor of true love for Manin, and that the forthcoming complete volume of Columns will be fully worth the wait.

Anna Krushelnitskaya, Delos, Vol. 39 No. 2 (2024)

[PLEASE NOTE: The Russian language does not copy & paste properly on this website, which is why some of the above text has come out as just question marks; we at Arc Publications apologise for this.]