Tomas Venclova (#poetry)

Azovstal

Hail to you, forgotten Goddess of History!

With your rocket-shell retinue, slaughtered soldiery,

We recognize you--emerging--that day of fear,

When caterpillar treads and helicopters cross the border.

 

Then we grow accustomed to your rule. At first:

A high-rise's ruptured chest, trees ablaze on the coast,

Blasted train junctions, the endless steppe's theatre

Where, mired in black earth, Mazepa was cursed by Peter.

 

For Death is still young--she needs agility, time--

To train, master her craft--slowly takes aim,

Flails for a while: the body greeted by shrapnel

Only after the fifth try--after, a dead lull falls.

 

A drone traces an invisible path in the air.

The twenty-year old guard slowly leads an elder

Behind a fence's shelter--what matter he's a civilian--

For both, the last few meters will only lengthen.

 

A pea coat's owner abandons one site of ruin--

Occupies another. A satellite docked in the heavens

Impassively looks on. Cannon blast a nitrogen cistern;

Ten blocks have been taken--gloria nostra aeterna.

 

How distant the harbours and train stations of salvation!

Facing the checkpoint: friend or foe? It's unknown--

Will they shoot or let you go--chickens left by the gates

For looters, goats loose in the yards--turn the gaze

 

To the map with unmarked Trostyanka, Merefa, Irpin--

With their torn-off roofs thrusting up through nettles,

And caught in the throat: the stench of those no longer,

While children learn to say 'traitor', 'rifle', 'hunger'.

 

A bullet, not a seagull, incises the low tides' line,

Beyond a broken window, a mirror reflects clear skies--

Descendents born in shelters observe it with fear,

For not God's kingdom, but a sky of nuclear threat is near.

 

Clotted blood stains. The bass and alto of explosions.

For every Thermopylae there will be an Ephialtes.

Bid them farewell--for honour or shame, you don't know:

The path's cut off--in the end, the Medes will break through.

 

So then, Goddess of History, war remains war

In a hostile city: a sunshine-struck boulevard.

A student under a linden grinds a cigarette into sand,

Repeats the old line: "How sweet it is to hate one's fatherland".

 

And the soldier--his comrades won't recall his patronym--

Subsists on stale air in the underground labyrinth,

Yet when his words cease, stone and concrete will repeat

The defiant riposte Cambronne hurled at the attackers.

 

-Tomas Venclova (tr. Ellen Hinsey & Rimas Uzgiris)

 

Azovstal is the steel works in Mariupol where Ukrainian troops resisted the Russian assault in 2022 far longer than expected.

 

Tomas Venclova (b. 1937) is a Lithuanian poet. While Lithuania was still under Soviet control he was not allowed to publish his own poetry, and worked as a translator into Lithuanian from various languages. In 1977 he helped found an organization to advocate for the rights awarded by the Helsinki Accords of 1975, and was deprived of his citizenship and exiled for his efforts. He ended up a professor at Yale.

 

Venclova is sometimes touted a possible recipient for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but at the age of 89, his moment has probably passed. 

 

The Grove of Eumenides came out from Bloodaxe Books in the UK last year. 

 

The orginal Lithuanian text and a different English translation can be found here. The stanzas rhyme AABB in Lithuanian, and the English translators use slant rhyme to preserve some of that feel. 

 

Some other notes: 

 

Ivan Mazepa was the hetman of the Cossacks allied with Peter the Great until Peter decided he was no longer going to defend Ukraine from Sweden during the Great Northern War. He was anathematized by the Russian Orthodox church, but is now a Ukrainian hero.

 

Gloria nostra aeterna - (Latin) our eternal glory.

 

Trostyanka, Merefa, Irpin - Ukrainian towns attacked in Russia's initial assault on Ukraine in 2022.

 

Ephialtes was the traitor who showed the Persians (Medes) how to get around the pass at Thermopylae and fall upon the Greek defenders in the rear. He was proscribed by the Greeks and later killed.

 

How sweet it is to hate one's fatherland - a quote from the Russian poet Vladimir Pecherin (1807-1885)   

 

 

W. E. B. Du Bois (#ccspin)

"The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line."

The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois is, in its way, a tragedy. And that's despite that he became a famous man, that he lived to ninety-five and kept his marbles until the end. But he wanted America to work, and did what he could to make it so, and it didn't, for him.

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington in Western Massachusetts in 1868 and died in Ghana in 1963. He began writing this autobiography at the age of 90. (There are earlier autobiographical texts.) It was largely completed at his death, but didn't appear in print until 1968. The day after he was born Andrew Johnson was impeached; by his death he's campaigning against the nuclear bomb.

His mother comes from a family of free blacks of long standing; his father was from Haiti; his great-grandfather Du Bois was a French-American Huguenot and a slave owner propagating childen on his slaves.

His father can't get a job in Great Barrington, but his mother is unwilling to leave her family, and his parents break up; young Du Bois stays with his mother and his mother's family. Supported by his mother's extended family, his childhood is pleasant enough. While he gradually realizes he can't be invited to dinner at his white playmates' houses, in less formal circumstances there's friendship, and his teachers quickly realize he's a bright young man. He's taught Latin and Greek, requirements for a college career at the time. He decides on Harvard.

But Great Barrington's public high school isn't considered good enough to get him straightway into Harvard, so he goes to Fisk University in Tennessee, one of the historically Black universities. While there he becomes more interested in music, and teaches school in rural Black communities in Tennessee. But Fisk is too poor and too ill-equipped; he remains determined to go to Harvard.

And he does. He's not the first Black student at Harvard, though there's only been a handful. He will be their first Ph.D. with a thesis on the slave trade. He's regularly invited to William James' house, and intends to be a philosopher, until James points out that 'the world is not in the habit of paying philosophers.' 

He does advanced studies in Berlin at Humboldt University, where he meets Max Weber. Harvard doesn't have the department at the time, but he comes to think of himself as a sociologist, and that field is where all his research work is done, either as a professor or working for different government agencies.

He's also a public figure. In 1903 his masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, appears. (It's on Modern Library's list of the best non-fiction in the 20th Century, and deservedly so.) It's largely pieces that had earlier appeared in The Atlantic magazine. At the time there was discussion in the Black community and their friends about the best way forward. Booker T. Washington had proposed the Atlanta Compromise: that the Black community didn't, just then, need the vote, or access to higher education; they needed to be secure in their persons, vocational training, and to acquire property. Du Bois disagreed, that the vote was a fundamental right of men (and, of course, it was just men) and that those who could benefit from it, deserved access to higher education. He felt that the Black people could be led forward by their own Talented Tenth, if that tenth had access to the tools. Du Bois founded the Niagara Movement to advocate the way forward as he saw it. The Souls of Black Folk covers this conflict, but also has wonderful, touching stories about his time teaching in rural Tennessee.

The Niagara Movement was an important precursor to the NAACP, and when that organization was formed Du Bois was considered for its chairman, but he turned it down; fundraising was going to be a crucial part of that job, and Du Bois felt he was too prickly to take on that job. (He might have been right...) Instead he becomes the editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. He makes into an astounding success; at its peak it has a print run of a hundred thousand copies. In addition to reporting, it also serves (under the literary editorship of Jessie Redmon Fauset) as a major outlet for the new writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

With the depression he gives up the editorship of The Crisis in 1934; sales are down. So long as The Crisis was sending money to the NAACP, Du Bois was given a free hand as editor; now that the NAACP will have to send money to The Crisis, he's worried he won't have so free a hand. But he editied for a good run of twenty-four years. His book Black Reconstruction in America comes out in 1935, he makes a trip around the world in the later 30s, he's a professor at Atlanta University, he returns to the NAACP as director of special research. 

Had nothing gotten better for Black America over those years? Maybe not much. The Ku Klux Klan was founded during Du Bois' lifetime and had not gone away. Du Bois moves from an advocate for integration to one for Black separatism, eventually giving serious thought to the Back to Africa movement. (He does die in Ghana.) 

At the same time the Soviet Union was waging a serious charm offensive on Black American cultural figures. The two big captures were Du Bois and Paul Robeson, the singer. Du Bois says he never became a member of the Communist party, and that's probably true: his prickliness would have kept him from joining. But the US wouldn't give him a passport for most of the 1950s, until finally they were forced to by court order. His support for the Soviet Union makes the first fifty pages of the Autobiography difficult reading: he defends the indefensible, such as the 1956 invasion of Hungary and the Gulag. He writes rather cringingly about the brilliance of Marxist thought. Was America so hopeless that one had to fawn at the Soviet Union? (Don't ask how I would have felt a month ago.) Du Bois needed to take on board the old Russian joke: "They tell us, comrade, and it is true, that under capitalism man exploits man. Fortunately under communism, it is precisely the reverse."

But after those first fifty pages, the Autobiography becomes an autobiography and is a great read about an important man. Still, before I read the Autobiography, the book I had as my spin book, I read The Souls of Black Folk (available from Project Gutenberg) which is, by far, the better book, and the one I should have put on my Classics Club list in the first place...

Having finished my post for the last spin, I can now sign up for new one. 😉

 

 

October Wrapup

October was the week of the 1949 Club and the Nobel Prize announcement. (Anne Carson!) Those two things significantly colored my reading.

Mysteries

Dorothy Lee Sayers/Clouds of Witness

Dorothy Lee Sayers/Lord Peter Views the Body

 

I continue to enjoy my read-through of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories. Clouds of Witness is a novel, and Lord Peter Views the Body are stories. I liked the novel better, but that may just be me. 

 

Ed McBain/Killer's Choice

Ed McBain/The Mugger 

 

Both fairly early 87th Precinct mysteries. Pretty fun. And when you need a book that fits in a pocket...

 

Ellery Queen/The Tragedy of Y

 

More here.

 

Fiction

 

Alvaro Enrigue/You Dreamed of Empires 

 

Enrigue is a contemporary Mexican novelist (b. 1969); this is (I believe) still his most recent novel (2022, 2024 in English). It's Cortes and Moctezuma in Mexico City in 1519. I'm not really certain what I think--it takes a rather surreal turn at the end--but I'll try another novel by him at some point.

 

Alejo Carpentier/The Kingdom of This World

 

A 1949 Club book discussed here. I thought this was pretty great. 

 

Abbe Prévost/Manon Lescaut

 

A fairly famous French novel of 1731, made into an opera three times at least. He's roughly contemporary with Defoe, and he's nowhere near as good? At least that's what I thought. I read this now because it was a clue in Clouds of Witness. 😉

 

Poetry

 

Douglas Dunn/Elegies

 

Dunn died last month and I posted a poem from his book of elegies for the death of his first wife. 

 

Christopher Fry/The Lady's Not For Burning

T. S. Eliot/The Cocktail Party

 

English verse drama in 1949. I was going to do something with for the Club, but didn't. I was kind of disappointed in both. The Cocktail Party starts out so well, a drawing room comedy, before we discover that the lives of our characters are controlled by well-meaning cabal of all-powerful psychologist-like figures. Weird. The Lady's Not For Burning is a comedy, set in witch-burning times. Maybe it would be funnier on stage?

 

Ogden Nash/Versus

 

A reread, also from 1949.  It's full of fun stuff.

 

Anne Carson

 

Carson/Autobiography of Red

Carson/H of H Playbook

Carson/Wrong Norma

Carson/Eros the Bittersweet

I was already a fan, but that she won the Nobel prize sent me off to read/reread several of her books. I've read one other this month and I've got a couple of others I want to reread. Autobiography of Red is a verse novel; H of H Playbook, verse drama; Wrong Norma, prose poems (I suppose); and Eros the Bittersweet, literary criticism. Though genre may not be that helpful a concept with Anne Carson.

 

Non-Fiction

 

W. E. B. Du Bois/The Autobiography

 

My spin book, which I finished early in the month. Interesting, not his best, but well worth reading. I'm still working on a post.

 

Quinn Slobodian/Hayek's Bastards

 

The intellectual afterlife of Friedrich Hayek. Slobodian is not a fan. Right-wing economics, Milton Friedman being the best-known figure. The Mount Pelerin Society.

 

Ashley Kahn/Days of Miracle and Wonder

 

About Paul Simon's Graceland album, how it was put together, and the controversy it caused. There was a cultural boycott of South Africa on at the time: did working with black South African musicians, even if they didn't perform in South Africa, violate the boycott? I think the album's great, and so does Kahn, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. A 2026 release.

 

The books still around the house:

 

 

Have you read, are you considering Anne Carson? Does the Nobel Prize in Literature announcement affect your reading in general?