USSR journal, Lost in translation

10 January, Igor asks what about money for poetry? He says he needs more Sonoma County poems to translate. He wants a penpal. I think he thinks he’s going to strike it rich with us. Rotor magazine said it will donate a computer to Igor for this project. His self-importance needs no translation.

The club is busy with translating sci-fi stories. Famous people like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke. I tell them that I can publish their Soviet poems translated into English in Green Fuse, Poetry USA and feature their work on KPFA, in a radio review. There is no money in it for them. I tell them that we need 17 to 20 poems that will represent Cherkassy. Everybody is sitting back on their laurels. Rotor promises that it will make a Cherkassy equivalent of Poetry USA, publishing California poets in translation.

Igor’s mother hands him a jar, he fills with piss as they discuss the problems of publishing. I’m so frustrated, I want to scream, and quit the program. His loving parents remove the jar of piss, don’t know what to make of that. Try not to think of it. But it is an apt metaphor.

We drink thick marsala and coffee, eat awful Soviet chocolate and discuss poetry. Oleg calls Professor Shpak who translated Thomas McGrath into Russian, to say that we’re running late. I’ve been a crab all day, snapping at everyone. The doctor who adjusted my back, threw me across the bed as if I were a sack of potatoes. I hurt more now than I did before. We are at loggerheads with so many different systems colluding.

His mother, in a blue house dress, sits on the floor next to the Cyrillic typewriter. I think she thinks she’s his agent. How to explain to them that we poets don’t have groups, we don’t have sponsors, and bank accounts. We poets work alone, without pay. Without censorship. Someone mentions Jesse Helms. I have to convince them that this is an altruistic cultural exchange.

Earlier, Oleg and I worked on a poem. The problems of translation make themselves apparent. I understand a few words like dollar, Marina, conversation. The nuances of language I understand, please—everyone is talking all at once. Everything takes longer than expected. The autonomy of two separate groups standing on a 70-year-old cultural bridge that cannot be crossed. Window to the west, indeed.

I leave Igor’s, dissatisfied. So little was accomplished. They are too afraid to publish our poems for fear of censorship, they become their own worst enemies, censoring themselves. How the hell is perestroika supposed to work if everyone is so timid? What next? I need a publisher here as well, apparently. I’m a little annoyed—getting work published here isn’t my responsibility, it’s their’s.

We are running late for every meeting, getting nowhere fast, we are more and more off schedule. Oleg says it’s fine, we’re on Soviet time. Dr. Shpak is next. Perhaps we will do better with him. We need several pans in the fire to accomplish anything at all which only leads to more confusion.

When John Masura told me about Dr. Shpak it sounded like a good connection. Oleg made a face and suggested that Dr. Shpak was a little bit crazy. Called me a proletariat a American poet, and mentions his book. What the hell is a proletariat American poet anyway?

Maybe Dr. Shpak is crazy, but he did translate Thomas McGrath‘s Letter to an Imaginary Friend, into Ukrainian, which sold a whopping 50,000 copies. That’s not slouching, and he has been working on an anthology, Istoriya Amerikanskoy poesii XX stolitia (1912-1945).

Vetted writers like Whitman, Twain, Frost, and London are accepted in the USSR—McGrath is neither mainstream nor safe. The common denominator is love of land, I think. And Marxism. McGrath was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.Valery mentions an essay of his, A Soviet View on McGrath, published in the North Dakota Quarterly. Tells me to contact Fred Whitehead in Kansas City.

But he is also querying me on the American poets of the 1980s. I share what books I brought, an armload from City Lights, and Zeitgeist Press, including David Eggars. Mostly Beat or street poets vs. the academic, mainstream, or Iowa workshoup poets. Apparently the Beats are contraband.

Later, Oleg realized that Dr. Valery Shpak is OK. And I make a mental note that I mustn’t trust his judgment of people so implicitly. He’s not always right— even if he lives here. Old habits die hard.

(Later they will translate one of my “proletariat American” poems into Ukrainian. I have no idea if it was ever published.)