In this blog, translator Helena Kernan talks about her experience of the inaugural year of the Pushkin House Contemporary Russian Poetry in Translation Residency during which she worked with poet Galina Rymbu. The residency took place in February and March 2020 at the Queen’s College, St Edmund’s Hall, and University College Oxford and was held in collaboration with the Queen’s College Translation Exchange and Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine. Applications for the 2021 Residency are open - the deadline has been extended to 7 October 2020. Please see the page on our website for more details.

It’s a predicament that’s all too familiar to translators of poetry: an enigmatic word or phrase in the original text sparks your attention, but, try as you might, you just cannot work out why it’s there or what the poet had in mind when they used it. Cue hours of racking your brains, mining obscure corners of the internet, consulting native-speaker friends and trawling through countless articles for context. Sometimes meanings and intentions crystallise, other times they don’t and a combination of educated guesswork and virtuosic improvisation has to suffice.

But what happens when the poet you are translating is alive? And is not only alive, but also belongs to the same generation as you? Answers to those translation riddles suddenly emerge, as does the possibility of a dynamic two-way relationship. This is one of the joys of translating contemporary poetry, especially contemporary Russophone poetry, which is so fierce, engaged and, above all, alive. I was fortunate enough to work face to face with Russian poet Galina Rymbu in Oxford this spring as part of the inaugural Pushkin House Contemporary Russian Poetry in Translation Residency. Simply existing in the same space after collaborating from afar for two years was a rare privilege, one that made me reflect more deeply on what it means to interpret a living poet through their verse.

It’s not just the scope for asking questions that makes the in-person poet-translator relationship so special. Spending a prolonged period of time with Galya allowed me to excavate her motivations, her sources of inspiration, her values and her myriad poetic voices in a way that would not have been possible remotely. I learnt that Galya likes to work with texts that don’t exist, imagining fragments of recorded human experience that have reached future generations following an apocalypse or ecological catastrophe. I learnt that she has been reading the German Expressionists for years and that their keen ear for fugue-like rhythms and focus on decay and entropy informs her own work. I learnt that, although she was born in Omsk, Siberia, she has Ukrainian and Romanian ancestors, which lends her poetry a fascinating tension between the states, identities and bodily experiences that make up the post-Soviet space.

There were moments of absurdity, too. Which alcopop on the UK market comes close to capturing the sociocultural connotations of ‘Jaguar’ in Russia, we asked ourselves? How can you express the heavy burden of meaning that comes attached to a Soviet street name like ‘Prospekt Mira’? And is there a word or phrase in English that evokes the beating of a military drum, techno music, gunfire and the word ‘there’, all in one, just as ‘там’ does in Russian? The beauty of working in tandem with a living poet is that you can pierce right to the core of these kinds of images, references and soundplay. You discover exactly why they were chosen and which elements of their presence are indispensable. It’s creatively exhilarating and ethically soothing.

It dawned on me during the residency that a translation truly is a co-creation with an author. A text can never be identical in two different languages, and this inevitable linguistic gap frees up space for ingenuity and playfulness on both sides. New emphases and shades of meaning can be drawn out, new connections can be made between poetic fragments, and new alliterations and consonances can materialise. Making adjustments along with the poet gives the sense of crafting a new literary object together, a living text that is the product of intense discussion and the collision of two minds. Translating is always a process of writing anew, even more so when you are writing alongside the poet themselves.

Physical proximity offers another inimitable advantage: it lets you as a translator witness how the poet embodies their own poetry. As the residency progressed and Galya and I gave bilingual readings in both Oxford and London, we developed a visceral symbiosis by observing each other. We began to imitate the rise and fall of each other’s intonation and experiment with performance, unearthing a constellation of new possible rhythms and interpretations. This unique experience allowed me to embody Galya’s poetry fully using the radically different semantic and phonetic tools available in English.

There is so much to be gained from building face-to-face poet-translator relationships, not least a closer alignment of poetic voices across languages and a sense of shared purpose. Pushkin House has launched a truly vital initiative with the Contemporary Russian Poetry Translation Residency. It transformed the way Galya and I work together and promises to do the same for many more poet-translator pairs in years to come.

Some excerpts from the translations that Helena made of Galya’s poems, during the residency. One of them, 'The Rose', will be published in the MPT summer edition, along with 'That Day' and 'Elegy', while the other two ('Her Boyfriend Works as a Bodyguard' and 'Disrespecting the State' are yet to be published).

From 'The Rose'

there is an island far away
where eerie sprites of darkness play
there is no sky
that hangs above it
no water
round its shores

war is something empty
nauseated soil

bam
bam
bam
there in the wild
a rusty rose blooms, her scent
like clotted blood

in her bud:
yellow snails of heads, red
worms of soldiers
move slowly, moths from the houses
burst into flame
in her bud

she’s a riddle of layers, bills
on top of banknotes

her roots, intestines, burble underground
bursting with realm upon realm,
her gut laughs, digesting the district,
her breath is warfare
through leaden nostrils,
her petals – human thigh bones

her roots are lilac throats, there’s three,
her kisser a casket, warfare

our failure to act
right now is an action
in itself

were we born to trample roses like her
or to swallow balls of gas?

From 'Her Boyfriend Works as a Bodyguard'

now we’re riding in a raspberry Lada
down world avenue
where so much has happened
on fucked-up, unfair world avenue
but such a beautiful
such a beautiful
world that belongs to us
daybreak’s already collapsing-piercing through
and above us
a giant coral sun rises
and floods with light the circus,
the columns, the obelisks of victory,
the crumbling embankment
and the tank from the war,
the benches with their empty bottles,
and the factory workers already
crawling out of their houses
in dribs and drabs
towards
the coaches
the stuffy buses

From 'Disrespecting the State'

I always think about that 1% of people
who hold 80% of the world’s riches in their hands.
I knew about them even as a child, and at night, as
I lay awake hungry, I would pick out insults for them for hours,
and nearly sold my soul to the devil for a kilogram of sweets. I asked him
to look into it, if he really existed,
because it seemed the gods weren’t up to the task.
I wonder, how many of them, the 1%, support despotism
or nationalism? How many are homophobic? How many are white men?
And how many hypocritically look to the left
and see only a trembling, rotten, black people-tower,
that collapses on the ground in search of food and water?

Guys, I have the most dead-on fucking outrageous insults ready for you.

Christ would transfigure your heads
Allah would submerge them in a burning river
Osiris would gouge out your eyes

Helena Kernan is currently a graduate student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, where she is working on contemporary poetry, post-socialist memory and performance art in the Russian-speaking world. Helena translates contemporary poetry from Russian into English and has spent time in Perm collaborating with the Russian human rights organisation Memorial to produce an exhibition dedicated to victims of Stalinist repression and record testimonies. She is the English-language editor of the online historical memory platform Imprisoned Youth, which is supported by the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum.

Galina Rymbu is a poet, literary critic, translator, journalist, curator, philosopher and feminist. Rymbu edits an online journal dedicated to feminist literary theory ‘F-Pismo,’ and is also a researcher at the Free Russia Foundation. Rymbu curated a special project ‘It is becoming visible’, dedicated to gender and domestic violence, and discrimination against LGBTQ+ communities in Russia. Her poems have been translated into English, german, French, dutch, Italian, greek, Ukrainian, Spanish, Latvian, Romanian, Swedish and polish and she has been published widely. Rymbu also translates poetry from Ukrainian into Russian. Galina Rymbu has a blog/personal page on Patreon where you can consider supporting here and find out more about her work (NB it is mostly in Russian) https://www.patreon.com/galinarymbu

Nick Teplov is an artist based in Russia and Germany who creates visual-poetic collaborations with Galina Rymbu. Read more about his work at nickteplov.com.