Endarkenment
Selected Poems
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
The poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko made his debut in underground magazines in the late Soviet period, and developed an elliptic, figural style with affinities to Moscow metarealism, although he lived in what was then Leningrad. Endarkenment brings together revisions of selected translations by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova from his previous American titles, long out of print, with translations of new work carried out by Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, and Eugene Ostashevsky. This chronological arrangement of Dragomoshchenko’s writing represents the heights of his imaginative poetry and fragmentary lyricism from perestroika to the time of his death. His language—although “perpetually incomplete” and shifting in meaning—remains fresh and transformative, exhibiting its roots in Russian Modernism and its openness to the poet’s Language School contemporaries in the United States. The collection is a crucial English introduction to Dragomoshchenko’s work. It is also bilingual, with Russian texts that are otherwise hard to obtain. It also includes a foreword by Lyn Hejinian, an essay on how the poetry reads in Russian, a biography, and a list of publications. Check for the online reader’s companion at endarkenment.site.wesleyan.edu.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Russian experimental poet Dragomoshchenko (1946-2012) wrote in an elliptical, self-referential style that was generally at odds with the more established formal poetry of his peers. Luckily, he formed lasting relationships with like-minded American poets, such as Lyn Hejinian, who translated and championed his work abroad. Here, Ostashevsky assembles an essential volume of previously un-translated poems with interpretations by six translators placed alongside their Russian originals spanning over three decades of innovation. In tackling larger themes of mortality and temporality, Dragomoshchenko wrestles with the capability of language itself. In "Paper Dreams," for instance, "Death/ has no name it is only a list,/ the spilling over of the two-way mirror,/ where the equal sign is rubbed away." Elsewhere, in the series "Nasturtium as Reality," images of the flower both enliven and obfuscate a shifting matrix of signification and memory, occupying " position of equilibrium. A parenthesis, which one doesn't want to close." What arises is a poetics that, in the vein of Wallace Stevens, explores ambiguity and does not reveal itself so much as dance at the edges of meaning, residing "in the location between the glimmering and what lies below." Bilingual Edition.
