I enjoyed the privilege of collaborating in translation with Daniel Weissbort, a fine poet (admired by Ted Hughes, who said of his poems in the 1992 collection Lake that they "will, for many of us, change the possibilities of English poetry") probably better known as a translator and Director of the Translation Workshop at the University of Iowa. Daniel had read some of my poems, and wondered if I might be more in sympathy with the poetics of Yunna Morits than he was feeling himself at that time, though he had been working on her poems for some years, and had from time to time fallen under her spell. Morits had sent him some tear-sheets of a sequence of over twenty poems which had just been published in a Russian literary journal, and these fresh pieces were what he proposed I should translate. At first I demurred, as I do not read Russian, but Daniel convinced me that it would be worth trying to work from prose translations and using recordings and transliterations to get a feel for the way the poems sound.
The method we used evolved into one which was fully collaborative. Initially, Daniel provided me with a Morits "kit" which included the original poems, transliterations and audio tapes, prose translations, and a sheaf of her earlier poems which he had already translated. I got back to Daniel with my ideas about how a few of the new pieces might work, and questions about nuances of meaning. He then picked up on my approach in some cases and developed it further, in other cases caught my mistakes or suggested better alternatives. Some of the work was done by post, some by phone, some in face-to-face working sessions. At one point I sent him versions via e-mail, and the rapidity and low cost of this form of exchange has much to recommend it when working with someone who might be anywhere in the world at any particular point in time!
Daniel was absolutely correct in his intuition that I would be attracted to Morits poetics. However, this went only some way to solving the problems presented by the poems in terms of one apparently key strategy: the way they often jammed lyric passages up against "chunks" of language which were coarse and sometimes even grammatically inadmissible. Very difficult to reproduce this in a translation without it looking like nothing but a bad translation!
Yunna Morits was born in 1937, in Kiev, from where she was evacuated, during "The Great Patriotic War", just ahead of the advancing Nazi armies. She lists her early influences as "war, flames, a blind father, hunger, cold, great spaces and myself alone in them" … She lives in Moscow. In addition to several collections of her own poetry, Morits has published a number of translations, appeared in many anthologies, and her poetry has been set to music and recorded on LP and CD. The poems offered here in translation are from a series written in 1991 and 1992, produced under pressure of extreme circumstances and making few concessions to readers' susceptibilities. They uncompromisingly record a grimly confusing moment in the history of the Soviet Union/Russia.
Yunna Morits (born 1937)
You are my girl
you are my darling,
you are my honey
She lies like a small hill
in a room smelling of chlorine,
thinks with the thin skin of her scalp:
here, I'm dying,
but here – who knows?
Cook, wash, her eyes
say, polish your shoes,
shave, and your tie …
Cotton wadding burns on a stick,
they are cupping
someone.
He went for a smoke.
The doctor had worked in Sri Lanka,
made a mint: "don't upset yourself, man,
she won't suffer, –
I'll manage so she's asleep.
Do you want some halibut and cabbage,
there's some left …"
He smells of halibut and cabbage,
Dear Lord, he's finishing off
hospital leftovers,
don't humiliate him, Dear Lord,
he is my own boy,
find him a young widow
in a clean dress
So they once lived
and so died,
our "sovki",*
in summer their hot water was cut off,
though there was still sugar. And in winter
they cooked cherries, raspberries;
they dried mint, current leaf
and dogrose …
History stinks,
but a life is aromatic.
*"Soviet folk"
1992 (trans. Daniel Weissbort and Leona Medlin)
Yunna Morits (born 1937)
You get home, there's a casino or a Pizza Hut.
Each yard has its President and Vice-.
Muffled in the cotton-wool of privatisation, that
mounted soldier-woman.
The guarded Member drinks Dutch beer from a can,
wrapping his bathrobe round him in Mayoral and
Prefectly fashion,
At this time, the firm's fax informs him,
Burma is trading four trainloads of toilet paper
for a submarine. Bloody flux in the State Bank,
the money's run out, the puppy has croaked, the
Treasurer is not
feeling so good.
"Damned Demo-Craps, kiss your Mother's ass!"
the line lets rip, not knowing how to take its place
in the grave in a civilised manner.
Clio, personally I find aid does not demean me,
but bear in mind it doesn't reach me, – enough thieving,
all the good-looking guys, geniuses, all the brains are leaving;
only the talentless and fools remain behind, like me.
1991 (trans. Daniel Weissbort and Leona Medlin)