Translator's Note

In a brief essay on the Russian-American poet Julia Nemirovskaya published in 2016, I wrote that her delightfully inventive lyrics “have led me down curious routes of imagination and helped me arrive at a more humble and humane vantage point on the world.” In the years since, I’ve continued to follow those routes — they seem to be never-ending, yet each stop along the way reveals new wondrous views. In that essay I also noted that at the heart of Nemirovskaya’s poetic mission is “a radical extension of empathy,” which can only be accomplished by a feat of imagination. In order to understand anything from the inside — be it an inanimate object like a pencil, or the concept of time, or (most difficult of all) a fellow human being — she must imagine herself into the very core of the matter. When translating her work, I take my cue from Nemirovskaya and imagine myself into the core of each poem.

Speaking of cues, in rendering the first poem below — where the poet complains about a portly personified “Time,” which sucks all the air out of every room with its persistent cries of “O” — I added a dash of theatricality. In the original, the first line reads something like “here/now time steps out in front”; but all of Time’s actions — its grand entrance, its hammy hollering — felt so stagey that I brought in the stage itself: “Time takes center stage…” Everything about the poem is play-like and playful, down to the nursery-rhyme-style trochaic tetrameter, which I preserved in my version, and the “gu-gu” at the end (a Russian onomatopoeic word for a small sound or peep, usually used with a negation: “not a sound/peep”). And as in all good children’s games, meanings double and triple; the letter “O,” for instance, is used in two senses — as an utterance and as a shape. The first line of the second stanza features an irreproducible double entendre: when read in isolation, it could mean “if only there were time enough,” but in the context of the next line, it must be read as “if only time were / square in shape.” To compensate for the lost pun, I inserted one of my own, adding a third “O” with a new sense — an exclamation of frustration: “O if only time were different.” Since the poem reminded me of the childlike yet deadly serious voice of Stevie Smith, I hinted at a British manner. Compare “This makes life so very dreary” with the following lines from Smith’s “Bereavement”: “She had so much to do so very much / And used to shuffle round upon a crutch.”

In the poems that follow, Nemirovskaya takes us into the world of a forgotten poet whose life she is writing up for an encyclopedia of Russian authors (“Lives of the Poets”); into the dream-life of her own eyes (“The Eyes’ Journey”); into her own creative soul (“Inside”), which she brilliantly compares to the finite lead of a pencil; and, finally, into the inner world of translators, with all our aspirations and limitations. In each case, imaginative empathy leads the way. That last poem, set partly in the Underworld, is generously dedicated to me; it has now made its way into English, finishing its circular journey. But “finishing” isn’t the right word. As I said earlier, the routes down which Nemirovskaya travels are really never-ending. I can’t wait to see where she takes us next.

Boris Dralyuk

In the Classroom