Translator's Note
Minimalism has never been a “movement” or “school” per se, neither in art nor literature, so that it is more accurate to speak of typologies, “minimalisms”. One seminal Russian poet in this mode, a central influence on the development of Russian Conceptualism, Vsevolod Nekrasov, argued that a more precise label would be Contextualism. Of Ivan Akhmetyev’s body of work, it may be said that the same two dimensions are foremost, the linguistic and the social: i.e., context. The phonic and visual textures, the semes of a particular tongue, create their own allusions, so that the “concrete,” formal aspects of a minimalist work are foregrounded: it is experienced, by the eye and ear, more instantaneously and thus simultaneously, so that its “shape,” both as image and as sound, is as though “chiseled” from the body of a language, and so the main objective of the translator is to find similar possibilities in the target language. Lastly: the subtext, of course, is key, as for any work of art but more so for a piece of Minimalism – apprehending the cultural and social reality of the specifically Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet context (over and above Modernity/post-Modernity generally,) the “background” (to extend the art metaphor). In this realm, along with the many negativist claims for Minimalism – a securely entrenched mistrust of language, narrative, authority, ego – Akhmetyev, like no other poet since Nekrasov I think, in his own, spare, congenial way, has given us much more attractive, positivist, embodied, spiritual claims.
In his own words:
“how pleasant/to place a hand/on the table”
Or, to close with, the intimacy of the following double-entendre:
“I stand out/from most other writers/in that I'm personally acquainted/with all my readers”.
Alex Cigale