Russian Loves | Episode 12

The Be-Loving Imaginer

PODCAST #12: RUSSIAN LOVES

by

Martin Bidney

Wordsong is like music generally – it transforms whatever it touches. When I select a poetic mentor to teach me word music, I reshape what I’ve heard, and then my reshaped self replies with a new music – always new because engendered by what I’ve just heard.

Nineteenth-century poets Alexander Pushkin, Michael Lermontov, and Athanasius Fet – lyrical writers in the Romantic tradition – are three of my Russian poetic mentors, friends, collaborators, comrades, guides, teachers, examples – and interviewees.

In talk-show format, I’ll translate a lyric by one of my guests and then reply to it in the style I’ve just learned by doing the form-faithful English rendering! The spur to creativity offered by the interview approach to a cross-cultural encounter, what I call “dialogic” or conversational translating, is a continual source of renewed vigor and poetic strength. I’ll offer samples from the “Russian Loves” section of my Amazon compilation, Six Dialogic Poetry Chapbooks.

Pushkin’s “Prisoner” and “Raven” both offer a mood and feeling that makes the poem feel like a folksong, so I respond gladly – to the first with exhilaration, to the second with alarm. “I built myself a monument” is a model for a goal-oriented manifesto-poem, and I offer a similar invitation.

Lermontov’s “Angel” and my “Homo Dubitans” offer comparable sober-minded assessments of the perils of retrospection. Lermontov’s triumphant “Clouds,” with its melodious meter, “set free” no fewer than four of my exuberant “replies” in comparably singable stanza forms.

Fet is the least known of the three masters, but Russian readers have generally ranked him near the top of their roster of supreme lyrical adepts. “Bees” made me want to unfold an explication of the poem’s cleverly subtle psychology in my “reply.” Fet’s poem “Don’t Ask” challenged me even more strongly to reply with psychological spelunking. “My Day Gets Up” took me deeper into the poet’s ways of exploring how his past affects every moment of his present awareness. I was startled at the tenderness and power of these too-long-neglected lyrical revelations.