Recent remarks by Jackie, Kent, Henry, about contacts with Russian poets very interesting to me as someone who knows the language to some extent but have no personal acquaintance with and only spotty knowledge of recent poets (I try to avoid translations when, in theory, anyway, I could read the original - the result is I have this perpetual backlog of neglect. I have, however, seen both Jackie's and Kent's admirable anthologies).
Like many my age the first "contemporary" Russian poets I was aware of were Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. Their verse seemed to fit in comfortably with a certain sixties "mainstream" in the US. Later, when I learned Russian and met a number of "third wave" emigres - a term that among them, at least, designated the third (Brezhnev era) wave of emigration, the first two being right after the revolution and right after WWII - I found V. and Y. were nearly universally scorned as accomodationists and flabby versifiers.The emigres' hero was Brodsky, who was certainly "uncompromising" in ways that these two were not.
In the context of English-language poetry, of course, Brodsky came to be viewed rather differently, as part of the "conservative" mainstream. Neither he nor the other members of the Nobel quadrumvirate, Walcott, Heaney, and Milosz, are likely to be thought of, by those who habitually think in such terms, as particularly "advanced" poets.
I think it was Mikhail Epstein who wrote that in thinking of Russian poetry you had to reverse all your assumptions. Maybe not as true now as it once was, but there is still arguably some of that mirror-quality left. In the early eighties Epstein classified the two main directions in Russian verse as “meta-realist” and “conceptualist,” characterizing the division between them as an updated version of the realist-nominalist controversy. The “meta-realists,” among whom he included Zhdanov, Shvarts, and Sedakova, went in for hypersaturated metaphors, trying to put as much meaning as possible into each word, while the “conceptualists” went for the opposite, that is, words that pointed up their own status as “empty signifiers.” While the second tendency seems to fit in with much that was happening in English-language poetry, the “meta-realist” direction, which is formally conservative but semantically adventurous (and explicitly religious, according to Epstein) doesn’t seem to have any real contemporary counterpa
rt among us.
As I say, this is all very interesting to me, but others undoubtedly know more about it than I. Do Henry, Kent or Jackie recall any interesting remarks from these poets about how they saw themselves as fitting/not fitting into Russian poetic traditions?
Alan
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