Translator’s Note

The 2021 recipient of the prestigious Arkadii Dragomoschenko Prize for avant-garde poetry, Dordzhi Dzhaldzhireev is one of today’s most boundary-pushing poets writing in Kalmyk and Russian. His dense spell-binding texts synthesize the linguistic experiments of Russian Futurism and the analytic meta-reflection of language poetry. His poems hover between otherworldly incantation and philosophical inquiry. Born in Elista, Kalmykia, Dzhaldzhireev weaves together influences from both European/Russian and Kalmyk culture, challenging centralized notions of what Russian-language writing looks like. His decolonial poetics refuse any straightforward or finalized sense. Combining T.S. Eliot’s meditations in Four Quartets and Cathy Park Hong’s linguistic experiments beyond the metropole in Dance, Dance, Revolution, Dzhaldzhireev invites the reader to imagine a radically de-centered world through his contortion of conventional language. At the same time, Dzhaldzhireev does not relish obscurity for its own sake. His global cultural references—from the persecution of the Kalmyk people to the pre-Roman Italian rite of sacred spring—develop a de-centered optics on history and experience itself, uplifting those deemed “beyond salvation.” As fellow Russophone poet Anna Glazova writes in her foreword to the collection, the use of the noun suffix “-ость” (the equivalent of “-ity” or “-ness” in English), one of the most productive in Dzhaldzhireev’s neologisms, highlights the processual unfolding of our experiences, allowing us to imagine always shifting perspectives. 

Translating Dzhaldzhireev is at once demanding (figuring out what his poems are “about” and “what is happening” is challenging) and liberating (his radical experiments give me the license to experiment as well). In my work with his texts, I have attempted to capture the neologisms and syntax of the original as closely as possible, recreating the density of his constructions. Most challenging of all, strangely enough, is Dzhaldzhireev’s long chains of genitive constructions, which are a typical feature of Russian academic prose but the literal equivalent of a series of noun phrases connected by the preposition “of” can come off cumbersome. In these moments, I usually attempted to create more elegant-sounding workarounds or decided to simply replicate the density. Given the breadth of discourses (scientific, philosophical, history) that his texts draw on, working closely with Dordzhi has been invaluable. He has had an answer for my every question, untangling even the thorniest of his constructions and explaining his most mind-bending images. 

Venya Gushchin