Wracked with grief, this poem lets the poet's lost friend speak from beyond the inescapable finality that has separated them
This week's choice, Look for Me, is a translation by the poet Peter Daniels of Ищи меня by Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939). It's from the handsome, bilingual edition of Khodasevich's Selected Poems recently published by Angel Classics.
"… A modernist, but with a classical temperament" is how Daniels positions Khodasevich in the Preface, going on to quote David Bethea's comment on the Russian writer as "a transitional figure who stands to the modern lyric tradition as does Auden, mutatis mutandis, to that of England and America". Even more helpful a comparison might be WB Yeats, who was only 20 years older than Khodasevich, and also died in 1939. I wonder if Khodasevich (who left Russia in 1922 and finally settled in Paris) ever came upon the Irish poet's work. Like Yeats, Khodasevich resists the stylistic ferment of his age: he seems timeless.
One of the pleasures of this Selected is that Daniels's English versions avoid the impression of "light verse" which can sometimes result from a translator's adherence to formal prosody. Poet-translators not infrequently dodge this hazard by the innovation, known, ironically, as "imitation", which allows a radical re-casting of the original. Daniels finds a balance: he's certainly not out to recast Khodasevich in his own image, but he is concerned to find a contemporary English poetic idiom which combines both lyricism and gravitas with a certain modern "edginess".
Ищи меня has five beats to a line, except for the fourth. This, Khodasevich lengthens to an Alexandrine, or trimètre – perhaps to give him space to emphasise the speaker's movements as a kind of hide-and-seek. Daniels loses the Alexandrine, preferring consistency with the iambic pentameter. Otherwise, he retains the metre and ABAB rhyme-scheme of the original, and, in the second and third stanzas, the alternating feminine-masculine endings which are such a feature of Khodasevich's melodiousness. The "edginess" comes in where Daniels rhymes on a minor word in an enjambed sentence: "than" in the first stanza, "might" in the third. The Khodasevich line is more traditionally shaped. But Daniels is surely right to use a method that prioritises the rhyme-sound.
He works close to original word-meanings, too: any shifts are of the unavoidable variety. The noun "light " in the first line ("свет") is changed to "air" because the English word is later needed as an adjective, "lighter" – an awkward homonym. And it seems that "sunray" and "ray" are being used to fill a lexical gap in English: there's no single word to describe the reflection of the sun's light that the Russian word ("зайчик") suggests.
Look at Me is an intensely personal poem relating to the the suicide of Khodasevich's friend, Muni (Samuil Viktorovich Kissin) in March, 1916. Muni had saved Khodasevich from suicide in 1911, and the latter "reproached himself terribly for being unable to save his friend in return". The poem Lady expresses more directly Khodasevich's self-scourging guilt over Muni.
Look for Me filters the longing for connection with his dead friend obliquely, by making Muni himself the speaker. The monologue evokes a glimmering, edge-of-vision sense of his continuing but elusive presence – as "vanishing wings", "a sound, a breath, a sunray … ". While spring, of course, is the season of rebirth, the images of fire suggest that Muni's recovery for Khodaevich will be as painful as touching fire. The hands stretched into "the restless flame of day" in the second stanza are "trembling". Ultimately, if the dead man's presence is to be felt, it will be as tassels of fire at the poet's "quivering" finger-tips. Muni seems to plead for a return to life, but simultaneously demand a sacrifice from Khodasevich. There's an echo, perhaps, of Dante in Canto 27 of the Purgatorio, encouraged by Virgil to walk through fire as the necessary, cleansing prelude to attaining Paradise and reunion with Beatrice. However, the metaphysics are not Dante's. The longed-for meeting in Look for Me will be attained through an effort of imagination.
Khodasevich was a realist and a sceptic, even if some of his poems, like this one, reveal trace elements of the poetic movement that preceded him, Symbolism. Look for Me was written at a time of political turmoil, and perhaps its incipiently violent "flame" images and haunting sense of evanescence, connect it to a revolution which, for many writers of Khodasevich's generation, brought hope and dismay in rapid succession. But it also reminds us that love and grief are forces not to be extinguished by political events, and that the hardest battles in a warzone are not always the bloodiest.
Look for Me
Look for me in spring's transparent air.
I flit like vanishing wings, no heavier than
a sound, a breath, a sunray on the floor;
I'm lighter than that ray – it's there: I'm gone.
But we are friends for ever, undivided!
Listen: I'm here. Your hands can feel the way
to reach me with their living touch, extended
trembling into the restless flame of day.
Happen to close your eyelids, while you linger…
Make me one final effort, and you might
find at the nerve-ends of each quivering finger
brushes of secret fire as I ignite.
20 December 1917 – 3 January 1918
ИЩИ МЕНЯ
Ищи меня в сквозном весеннем свете.
Я весь — как взмах неощутимых крыл,
Я звук, я вздох, я зайчик на паркете,
Я легче зайчика: он — вот, он есть, я был.
Но, вечный друг, меж нами нет разлуки!
Услышь, я здесь. Касаются меня
Твои живые, трепетные руки,
Простертые в текучий пламень дня.
Помедли так. Закрой, как бы случайно,
Глаза. Еще одно усилье для меня —
И на концах дрожащих пальцев, тайно,
Быть может, вспыхну кисточкой огня.
20 декабря 1917 — 3 января 1918
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