Blok = blues-rock - Anselm Hollo's "The Twelve" - what the hell come on baby

In January 1918, Alexander Blok banged out “The Twelve,” a twelve-canto idiosyncratic response to the revolution.  I have read four versions recently: from the 1970 Stallworthy and France collection, from the new 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, translated by Boris Dralyuk and Robert Chandler, a stiff, formal version by George Reavey found in Willis Barnstone’s Modern European Poetry anthology (1966), and a wild blues-rock version by Finnish-American beat poet Anselm Hollo (The Twelve & Other Poems, 1971).

A Revolution has hit.  In the first canto, a woman sees a banner with a political slogan and regrets the waste of good cloth.  Meanwhile, twelve revolutionaries wreak havoc.  One of them has a girlfriend who is a prostitute, probably.  He murders her for, you know, fraternization.  He feels bad, but there is revolutionary work to do.  The twelve soldiers are joined by a dog and are led by – this is the famous, mystifying, last line – Jesus Christ.

The most accurate version is – how would I possibly know?  They are all entirely different in places, but the great difference can be seen at the end of Canto XI:

Forward, advance,
    The Working People!  (Reavey)

Forward, and forward again
the working men!  (Stallworthy and France)

I’ll expand the next one:

Their measured tread
rings in your ears.

Soon –
their mortal foe will wake.

And the blizzard dusts their eyes,
day and night,
without halt…

Onward, onward,
working folk!  (Dralyuk and Chandler)

got to keep movin got to keep movin
blues fallin down like hail
& the days & the nights
keep on worrying me

for a hellhound on my trail yes
hellhound
on my trail  (Hollo)

So for some stab at literalness, I guess one of the first three, but for awesomeness, obviously the Hollo.  He has to rearrange the action in the cantos a bit, but the Robert Johnson lyrics – that is all “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937) with two words from Blok (“& nights”) added – are a good fit.

Hollo’s number one trick – not his only trick – is to turn the cantos into songs, to convert Blok into the blues rock of his, Hollo’s, time, ready for Mick Jagger, or in this case Mose Allison:

I am Vanya I’m the man
I’m the man I’m the seventh son

I can talk ‘n I can sing
I sure know how to do that thing

Katya Katya Katyenka  (Canto IV)

In the Canto V, the point of view switches to the jealous, crazed, revolutionary Petya – there’s the disciple’s name:

what the hell come on baby
shake out of that groove
you been playing around baby
you been playing around a lot
been playing around with them lootenants baby

but you never been playing with a plain joe like me  (Canto V)

And in the next Canto, poor Katya is dead.  The lieutenant gets away, I guess.  I have no doubt that part of the inspiration for this version was Hollo’s realization that “The Twelve” is a kind of murder ballad, an all too common classic American form.

I suppose someone unfamiliar with the idiom would find Hollo’s translation pointless, but I found it loud, crackly, and energetic.  Thrilling, but I’m glad it’s not the only one I read.

Damn books, be silent - some Alexander Blok

A year ago I read a cluster of books by the extraordinary generation of Russian Silver Age poets.  I skipped the slightly older Alexander Blok for logistical reasons, now addressed.  I read the other poets write about Blok: “But the talk is what I remember,” writes Anna Akhmatova.

The Twelve and Other Poems, translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France (1970), is a workhorse overview.  Fifty poems, covering 1900 to 1918.  Blok’s personality is evident, and some of his subjects: his mysticism, St. Petersburg, a succession of semi-imaginary semi-muses (the Beautiful Lady, the Snow Maiden), bouts of drunken Bohemianism in the company of other great poets, and finally his idiosyncratic embrace of the 1917 Revolution.

I get lost when the poems become too mystical, unless this counts as mysticism:

I am nailed to a bar with liquor.
Been drunk all day.  So what!  I’ve lost
my happiness – gone in a troika
careering into silver mist.

It is easier for me to understand Blok as a Bohemian, a poète maudit, which is not the whole story, but is at least one of his modes:

I want to live, live to distraction:
to make the present live for ever,
make the impersonal human, cover
with flesh whatever now has none!

That’s the positive expression of the mode.  The negative is perhaps:

           I long to see written
in men’s eyes and in women’s eyes
marks of damnation and election.  (from “Earth’s Heart Is Growing Cold Again”)

If Blok sounds miserable, well, I can’t speak for more than what is in this book, but yes:

Oh, for that grave in the nettles
in which to sleep and forever
forget oneself!  Damn books, be silent;
I never wrote you, never!

That is from “To My Friends,” which is funny.

The results of Blok’s 1909 visit to Italy are amusing given all the pro-Italy propaganda I read recently.  The same sense of beauty and civilization that entranced Goethe and Forster repelled Blok.  He was suspicious of Ravenna (“Sepulchral wastes where the grapes fatten,” from “Ravenna”) and loathed Florence.

Die, Florence, Judas, disappear
in the twilight of long ago!
In the hour of love and in the hour
of death I’ll not remember you.
***
The motorcars snort in your lanes,
your houses fill me with disgust;
you have given yourself to the stains
of Europe’s bilious yellow dust.  (from “Florence,” ll. 1-4)

The next poem in the collection begins “Russia and I, must we suffer one destiny?”  Whatever Blok meant by Russia, he meant it.

You may have noticed some rhymes up above.  I don’t know.  These translations give me a strong sense that Blok was a fascinating person and a weak sense that he was a great poet.  Maybe there are better options now.  Please recommend.

Aside from this book, I scrounged up three more translations of Blok’s great, late poem “The Twelve.”  I’ll look at those tomorrow.

The Stray Dog Cabaret - When fearful friends abandoned me music stayed

The Stray Dog Cabaret (2007) masquerades as an anthology of Silver Age Russian poets – Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, and six others, all of whom knew each other and were patrons to a greater or lesser extent of the bar in the book’s title.  It was a scene, as we might say now.

Paul Schmidt, the translator and anthologist, organizes the book so that the poets and poems comment on, respond to, and even directly address each other.  History progresses – the war, the revolution, the terror.  A series of biographical notes, presumably written by Catherine Ciepiela, with Honor Moore the book’s editor, are almost too depressing to read.  The headers are by themselves too depressing:  Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).  Let’s move back to 1913:

The Stray Dog Cabaret

All of us here are hookers and hustlers
We drink too much, and don’t care.
The walls are covered with birds and flowers
that have never seen sunshine or air.

You smoke too much.  There’s always a cloud
of nicotine over your head.
Do you like this skirt?  I wore it on purpose.
I wanted to show lots of leg.  (Anna Akhmatova)

Osip Mandelstam is not so sure:

This life of constant thrills will drive us crazy:
wine in the morning, hangover every night.
How can we get away from this sick excitement,
the awful flush of feverish delight?

But Blok sends her a drink:

I sent you a rose in a glass of champagne
while the gypsies played as the gypsies do.
Then you turned to the man you were with and said:
“You see his eyes? He’s in love with me too.”

Akhmatova rejects the offer – “You’re a very bad boy.”  And you’re crazy.”

Translation purists, a sad lot, will be horrified when they turn to the notes and discover that with the Blok poem the translator “has created a new poem from three stanzas of ‘In the Restaurant’” and that “[t]he poem actually was dedicated to Maria Nelidova.  “The original poem has no title.”  “The phrase ‘And it makes me cry’ does not appear in the original poem.”

As fine a translator as Schmidt was (his Rimbaud is sure good), to the bone he was a man of the theater.  The Stray Dog Cabaret is a theater piece in disguise.  The actors playing the poets step forward and read their poems to each other before returning to their drinks and dancing.  Before slipping off of the stage, one by one, until only Akhmatova is left, now old, the survivor:

Music
(for Dmitri Shostakovich)

Something miraculous burns in music;
as you watch, its edges crystallize.
Only music speaks to me
when others turn away their eyes.

When fearful friends abandoned me
music stayed, even at my grave,
and sang like earth’s first shower of rain
or flowers suddenly everywhere alive.

A burst of Silver Age Russian reading would be enormous fun, I am now convinced of that.  Chekhov’s plays, Bely, Babel, and all of these amazingly alive doomed musical poets.

The Blue Lantern has improved The Stray Dog Cabaret by introducing two painters to the show.