New books about poets and poetry – Weekend
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Guido Mazzoni “On modern poetry”
New Literary Review
Translation Anna Yampolskaya
The book by the Italian poet and philologist Guido Mazzoni is an extremely dense outline of European poetry of recent centuries. When we hear the word “poetry,” we think of a very specific type of text—short, usually (but not necessarily) columnar writing in which some special “I” talks about its experiences in an equally special, individual manner. This is a relatively young genre that emerged at the end of the 18th century and was finally established in European modernism of the 20th century. Despite all the upheavals, for two and a half centuries, lyrics have remained at the center of the poetic map. The remaining genres—large narrative poems, in which the author’s “I” recedes into the shadows, abstract poetry, where freedom of language displaces the transfer of experience—remain on the periphery. The consciousness that underlies modern lyricism is called “expressivism” by Mazzoni. The point is that the most important value for every person is the expression of their own uniqueness. This seemingly noble attitude is actually fraught with a lot of pitfalls. It is precisely this that gives rise to endless identities, and with them fragmenting artistic movements (separated “I” need at least some kind of support from others). It also gradually leads modern lyrics to an increasingly marginal position (for example, in comparison with rock music, which revives poetry as a collectivist ritual). Poetry is an art that has difficulty transcending national boundaries, so Mazzoni’s specific analysis is mainly devoted to the Italian canon (from Petrarch to Pasolini), but his conclusions apply to all European literature, and in general to all modern civilization.
Andrey Krusanov “The Death of S.A. Yesenin”
Publishing house of Ivan Limbach
On the night of December 27-28, 1925, Sergei Yesenin died at the Angleterre Hotel in Leningrad. The official version of death was suicide. Contemporaries immediately offered a bunch of justifications for this action: alcoholism, consumption, depression, problems with women, a feeling of incompatibility with the new Soviet world, and so on. At the same time, Yesenin never talked to his loved ones about suicide and was terribly afraid of death. Rumors that he had been killed began immediately and circulated quietly over the next decades. Already in post-Soviet times, many articles and books were devoted to these versions, but they were all somewhat tabloid and extremely ideological in nature (among the supporters of the version of the poet’s violent death there are many right-wing authors who blame it, of course, on the Jews). Literary critic and art historian Andrei Krusanov, on the contrary, conducts the most dry investigation of Yesenin’s death, analyzing in detail all available documents and evidence – from poems by the poet’s friends to photographs of the corpse and plans of the hotel. Conclusion: murder.
Hannah Arendt, Remembering W. Hugh Auden
Publishing house Jaromir Hladik Press
Translation Shlomo Krol
Hannah Arendt’s short essay on W. Hugh Auden appeared in The New Yorker in 1975. Auden died a year and a half earlier, Arendt had less than a year to live. On the eve of his own death, a great philosopher writes about the passing of a great poet in a popular magazine, and this, of course, is a rather unusual situation. Arendt, as she knew how, emphasizes the significance of the moment, but avoids any pathos. Here her manner perfectly matches the hero. Auden’s character, as described by Arendt, is a very British mixture of eccentricity (primarily domestic, but also intellectual) and a strong commitment to common sense, an arrogant sense of self-importance (“I will be a great poet,” he told his school literature teacher) and sincere kindness, faith by virtue of love, which was difficult to maintain in that catastrophic era in which she and Arendt found themselves living.
Alexander Zhitenev “Gennady Aigi: poetics of the draft”
Publishing house Jaromir Hladik Press
Gennady Aigi is one of the main innovators of post-war Russian-language poetry, an author who is unconditionally canonized, but not very well researched. This lack of reading can be explained: Aiga’s extremely hermetic and at the same time diffusely airy poems are difficult to analyze using both conventional literary means and cultural criticism. They fascinate and resist. Philologist Alexander Zhitenev finds an unexpectedly effective approach to them. He works not with finished poems, but with drafts – with texts in their development. In Aiga’s case, this is not philological fetishism at all. On the contrary, all his poems are a kind of still images in the endless process of reflection and impression. Analyzing drafts allows you to turn them into small films, unfolding narratives. Zhitenev’s “Poetics of the Draft” is a dotted monograph, a journey through several poems, in its structure echoing the sparsely dotted poetry of Aiga himself.
Anne Carson “Bittersweet Eros”
Publishing house AST
Translation Anna Loginova
Canadian poet, classical philologist, translator of Greek tragedies Anne Carson is one of the most significant figures in English-language intellectual literature of recent decades. Bittersweet Eros, published in 1986, is her first book. Outwardly, this work is a little more traditional than Carson’s later works (the wonderful “Autobiography of Red” was translated into Russian), but already in it she masterfully leaps over genre boundaries: a completely academic literary study, an elegant philosophical essay, something like a prose poem . The subject of study here is love. First of all, among the Greeks – Homer, Plato, Archilochus and especially Sappho, however, the analysis of ancient texts goes into the study of the very nature of feeling. Eros, as the Greeks understand it, contains equal proportions of pleasure and pain, closeness and distance. Love creates a distance, a gap between a person and the object of his passion; it makes one realize the boundaries and desire to overcome them. Thus, it is the erotic feeling that creates both the individuality of each personality and its connectedness with others. Carson extends this discovery to rather unexpected areas: for example, Greek eros makes it possible to invent a modern alphabet with letters separated from each other. It thus underlies all written literature.
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