Translator’s Note: “Translations in Bare Outline” by Lev Oborin

Both as an active organizer of poetic life and as a creator of texts, Lev Oborin is increasingly a force in Russia’s contemporary poetic landscape. What appeals to me particularly in his work is the variety — he dips freely into a wide range of styles and structures without binding himself inextricably to any. And so he preserves a freedom in his interactions with poetic material that is often lost by more easily “branded” poets. Given this, it is natural that his social and political ideas find expression in some part of his corpus, as they certainly do in this piece; yet he is not an avatar of the poet convinced that art must in principle submit to a guiding commitment to a social and political position. The poet’s own take on the poem translated here is revealing in that regard: it was composed, he tells us, in Vienna and belongs to a cycle of poems written (and this may recall Brodsky and his acolytes) as if they were translations from collections representing other European poetic traditions.