Ophelia – Harpy Hybrid Review

                              She swam and sang...

I slept to you,
slept into you,
and then, to fall asleep, escaped from you
behind a cardboard wall, as if unbound,
alone.
I wove July with you—I wove and sang, 
parting the silt like arras.
Just as you wanted, there was light,
there was my wanting what you wanted.
And sank, and sang, and swam.
You slept. Clouds lay above, 
as if unbound, without sleep, without a blanket.

Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk and the author

О ф е л и я

                              Плыла и пела

Спала в тебя,
спала к тебе
и засыпать сбегала от тебя,
как одинокая, за спичечную стену.
Июль сплела с тобой, сплела и спела,
и, словно шторы, тину развела.
Как ты хотел, и стал нам свет
и стало так, что я что ты, хотела.
…И падала, и пела, и плыла.
Ты спал. Вверху лежали облака,
как одинокие, без сна, без одеяла

Irina Mashinski

Three Questions for Irina

What is the significance of this work to you? What is the significance of the form you chose for this work? What was the process for creating this work?

The four pieces included in this selection are from very different eras of my life, but they all come together and interact with each other in my new book, a prosimetrum titled The Naked World. When I say ‘interact,’ I mean that they chime with each other as they will, without any involvement on my part.

“Before Dawn” happens to be the first piece I translated, or, rather rewrote in English shortly after my arrival to the US in 1991. It must have been a way of coping with the uneasy feeling of being suspended between the two linguistic realms, one of which I felt that I was losing, and the other one, an enigmatic stranger, albeit with a kind face, that suddenly appeared in my life, and that needed a lot of guessing on my part. As it is obvious from how both of the poems look, a few shells broke off in the process, and the focus shifted: the English version is more understated and hints at the idea of ‘no name’ only very subtly.

These two languages are likened to a birch tree (the English language) and a willow (the Russian) in the poem evoking these two very different creatures. It was one of the first poems written directly in (into) English, and it addressed this state of in-betweenness once again, but at a different time and different level of my immersion in the language. If rewriting “Before Dawn” was almost a game, an exploration of the possibilities (and impossibilities), a challenge of sorts, as the Russian original relied heavily on sound, or, rather, on the subtle effect of the combination of the consonants and the rhythm, that seemed untranslatable, the poem “Between A Willow and a Birch Tree” was a real poem in a sense that it wasn’t a game at all, but rather an event that began, lasted for some time, and then concluded itself.

The only prose text here, the ‘essay’ “The Poet and the Child,” deals with ‘names’, too. However, its main focus is on the power of similarity and on the metaphor as a way of resisting symbols. The latter is one of the important underlying themes in The Naked World. The text was written in Russian a long time ago, and relatively recently translated into English by my friend and collaborator Maria Bloshteyn.

“Ophelia” is a part of a triptych included in one of my recent Russian collections, Ophelia and the Trowel. The other two poems of the triptych, “Morning” and “At the Train Station,” have not yet been translated. “Ophelia” was miraculously recreated by my other friend and collaborator, Boris Dralyuk. It is to Maria’s and Boris’s remarkable sensitivity and delicate craft that these two English texts owe their very existence.

Irina Mashinski was born in Moscow. She graduated from the Physical Geography Department of Moscow University where she later completed her Ph.D. studies. In 1991, she moved to the US where she worked as an interpreter, a high school teacher of Mathematics and Science, and taught at universities. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New England College. Irina Mashinski is the author of ten books of poetry in Russian. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015), and co-translator of Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames (NYRB, 2018). She is co-founder (with the late Oleg Woolf) and editor of the US-based StoSvet/Cardinal Points literary project, which includes the Cardinal Points Journal (Brown University). Her poetry and essays in English appeared in Poetry International, Plume, The World Literature Today, International Poetry Review, Inventory, and other journals and anthologies. Irina Mashinski is the recipient of several Russian literary awards, and, with Boris Dralyuk, of the First Prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition (UK). In 2016, she won the Hawthornden Fellowship. Her first English-language collection, The Naked World, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil.

Boris Dralyuk is the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution and Ten Poems from Russia, and translator of Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. His poems have appeared in The New Criterion, The Yale Review, Jewish Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Maria Bloshteyn was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and emigrated to Canada when she was nine years old. She received her PhD from Toronto’s York University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, where she examined Dostoevsky’s impact on American literature and culture. She is the author of The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (2007) and the translator of Alexander Galich’s Dress Rehearsal (2009) and Anton Chekhov’s The Prank (2015). Her translations have also appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015).