Adrian Wanner

The poetics of displacement: Self-translation among contemporary Russian-American poets

ABSTRACT This article explores the practice of self-translation by two bilingual Russian-American poets, Andrey Gritsman and Katia Kapovich. A close reading of some of their self-translated texts elucidates the idiosyncratic nature of self-translation and its poetics of displacement. For both Gritsman and Kapovich, translating their own work becomes a means of exploring the mutation of the self through time, migration, and changing linguistic and cultural environments. A significant difference between the two authors concerns the way in which they present their poems. Gritsman invites a comparison between source and target text and the gaps between them in a bilingual en face edition, whereas Kapovich camouflages her self-translated poems as English originals. In spite of the different staging and performance of self-translation, both poets – by stressing difference rather than similarity in translation – turn their self-translated texts into a metacommentary on their own shifting transnational identities.

Vladislav Khodasevich in English and German: an Unplanned Joint Effort

In present-day Russia, Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) is considered one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Yet among Western audiences, even those familiar with the classics of Russian poetry, Khodasevich’s name mostly draws a blank. This ignorance is in part a consequence of the poet’s biography. Having left the Soviet Union in 1922, Khodasevich became a persona non grata in his homeland, while at the same time suffering from theWestern neglect of Russian exile literature. His most devoted champion was Vladimir Nabokov, who called Khodasevich “the greatest poet of our times” in his 1939 obituary published in the Russian exile journal Sovremennye zapiski. Twenty-four years later, in the foreword to the English translation of his novel The Gift, Nabokov doubled up on this judgment by referring to Khodasevich as “the greatest Russian poet that the twentieth century has yet produced.” Yet few people at the time seem to have taken note. In Russia, Khodasevich became a household name only with the onset of glasnost in the late 1980s. In 1989, his collected poems appeared in an initial print run of 100,000 copies. Manymore editions have followed suit, and Khodasevich’s reputation as a classic ofmodern Russian poetry is now firmly established in his country of birth. In the English-speaking world, until recently only a few scattered translations of individual poems were available in journals and anthologies. This has now changed with the appearance of a bilingual edition published in England by Angel Classics and in the United States by Overlook Press, containing fifty-eight poems in the translation of the British poet Peter Daniels. This book appeared almost simultaneously with my own bilingual Russian-German edition of sixty-nine poems. I became aware of Daniels’s edition only after my own translation had been completed. Naturally, finding out that someone else had been grappling with the same challenges that had kept me absorbed for more than two years stirred my curiosity. Reading the English edition, I was pleased to discover a kindred spirit in Peter Daniels. There is a slight difference in the poems that we selected for our respective volumes. I included more early works than Daniels did, since I wanted to document the trajectory of Khodasevich’s evolution as a poet. Furthermore, I found it important to translate all the poems that Khodasevich wrote in and about Berlin, where he lived from 1922 to 1924, since I anticipated that these texts would be of particular interest to a German audience. Daniels translated only one Berlin poem, but he included more of Khodasevich’s late, uncollected texts. In spite of these differences, there still is considerable overlap between the choice of poems in the two editions. A total of twenty-six poems were translated by both Daniels and myself, which provides ample material for a comparison. Aside from assessing the individual decisions and compromises that inevitably arise in the translation of poetry, juxtaposing the