New Issue of Asymptote Features Hirato Renkichi, Russian Poetry Feature, Eugene Ostashevsky, More

Asymptote's fall issue is here! This looks incredible. Not heard? It's a "new international journal dedicated to literary translation and bringing together in one place the best in contemporary writing." They are certainly achieving that. The October issue includes poetry by Hirato Renkichi, from Collected Poems, translated from the Japanese by Sho Sugita; new work from Eugene Ostashevsky; and a special feature from Robert Chandler on Russian Poetry. "In the 1960s and 1970s both poets and singer-songwriters performed to huge and enthusiastic audiences in Soviet football stadiums. In a world governed by official lies, poetry was seen as something to live by." Nice primer:

In most of Europe, the invention of print made it seem less important that a work of literature be easy to commit to memory. The decline of a magical or religious worldview also did much to encourage the rise of prose and the decline of poetry. Russia, however, has never seen the full emergence of a rational and secular culture—the official ethos of the Soviet era, though avowedly secular, was supremely irrational—and poetry has, throughout most of the last two hundred years and in most social milieus, retained its importance. Almost all Russians see Pushkin, rather than Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, as their greatest writer. Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva are loved at least as passionately as Bulgakov, Nabokov, Platonov, Sholokhov, and Zoshchenko.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence was unchallenged. There was no prose fiction as important as the work of Derzhavin, Krylov, or the poets of the 'Golden Age'—that is, Pushkin and his contemporaries. Only for a single brief period—the second half of the nineteenth century—did poetry become secondary to prose. The serfs were liberated in 1861. The Trans-Siberian Railway was built in the 1890s. A Russian middle class was coming into being, and the novel, at least for a while, seemed better able than poetry to answer its political and social concerns. Early twentieth-century Europe, however, saw a general collapse of belief in reason and progress. In Russia this was more sudden, and more complete, than in most other countries. The realistic novel now seemed oddly unreal. Poetry again became dominant, and most of the poets of this 'Silver Age' held to a magical view of the world. A poet's business was to listen to the music of other worlds—not to interpret this world. Most of the poetry of Alexander Blok and his fellow Symbolists is incantatory; rhyme and rhythm draw more attention to themselves than in the work of Pushkin or Lermontov.

During the Soviet period, poetry became even more dominant. Even Soviet politicians had a magical belief in the power of the word. The Bolsheviks found it difficult to bring into being the new world they had promised; it was easier simply to proclaim its existence through speeches and slogans. As for poetry, it remained unapologetically itself, insisting on the formal features that distinguish it from prose. Mayakovsky wrote 'agit-prop' slogans; it was crucial, of course, that these be memorable, and so, like most Russian poets before and after him, he used strong metres and prominent rhymes—both for these and for his more complex poems.

As for such poets as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and others who were disaffected with the new reality, they were soon living in what Akhmatova called a 'pre-Gutenberg' age. They could no longer publish their own poems and it was dangerous to write them down. Akhmatova's confidante, Lydia Chukovskaya, has described how writers would memorize one another's works. Akhmatova would write out a poem on a scrap of paper. A visitor would read it—and Akhmatova would burn the paper. 'It was,' according to Chukovskaya, 'like a ritual. Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.' Mandelstam died in a prison camp in 1938. Had his handling of rhyme, metre and other formal devices been less perfect, his widow might have been unable to preserve his work in her memory and much might have been lost.

Find this and a lot more at Asymptote.