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	New York Review Books The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems Translated by Paul Schmidt New York Review Books 128 pages. $14.95

Performance Art

The theatrics of Russia's Silver Age poets come alive in Paul Schmidt's theatrical translations.

By Benjamin Paloff
Published: December 21, 2007

There may be no better assessment of the importance of literary translation to our appreciation of foreign verse, albeit by a kind of inverted logic, than W.H. Auden's lament that he never understood all the fuss Russians made over Alexander Pushkin. Auden is not to blame; even the finest renderings of "Eugene Onegin" provide a stronger sense of Pushkin's wit and Оlan as a storyteller than of his often earth-shattering artistry as a poet. Those who can appreciate Pushkin's genius in Russian can only look with pity on those who cannot. This helpless condescension does nothing to expand the poet's readership abroad.

The situation of poets of the Silver Age, lasting roughly from the turn of the 20th century until shortly after the October Revolution, is that much more perplexing. On the one hand, there is no shortage of admirers around the world who praise the greatness of Osip Mandelshtam or Marina Tsvetaeva; on the other, there is a serious dearth of English-language versions on which such praise might be founded. Thus to say that Paul Schmidt's death in 1999 deprived the English-speaking world of one of our best and most idiosyncratic translators of Russian verse would be both accurate and appropriately eulogistic, yet somehow still inadequate. Rather, he was one of the very few translators to succeed in inhabiting the Russian Silver Age and bringing it to life in a language that was, well, if not always quite its own, then remarkably close.

In this vein, the greatest monument to Schmidt's talent is undoubtedly his three-volume "Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov," which demonstrates such whimsy and resourcefulness that it warrants the attention of any admirer of poetry or serious student of the art of translation. Indeed, Schmidt's accomplishment is demonstrably art in translation, and while "The Stray Dog Cabaret" comprises a very different project than his single-author efforts, its artfulness is evident on nearly every page.

Itar-Tass Among the poets who read at the Stray Dog was Vladimir Mayakovsky, here shown one year before the bar opened.

The book takes its title from a nightspot popular with artists and writers in pre-Revolutionary Petrograd. Opened in 1912 and closed just three years later, in its short life the Stray Dog was a major literary salon, where the likes of Khlebnikov, Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, Sergei Yesenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky would meet to read their latest poems, discuss politics and aesthetics, and occasionally act like spoiled children. Although one can read about this basement cafe in any number of Petersburg histories or literary biographies, perhaps no account communicates the creative atmosphere and personal theatrics of the Stray Dog as effectively as Schmidt's book.

Schmidt himself has to share credit for this achievement with the book's editors, Catherine Ciepiela and Honor Moore, whose savvy presentation makes a fitting tribute both to the poets' genius and their translator's labors. Ciepiela, an accomplished scholar of Silver Age poetry, sets the cultural stage in her engaging introduction; Moore, a noteworthy American poet and memoirist, describes the translator's life and career in a brief and moving afterword. The additional critical apparatus, including notes to the poems and biographical sketches of their authors, are helpful without being obtrusive, and they effectively advance the reader's sense of the Stray Dog as a space for collaborative poetic theater.

The theatrical angle comes from Schmidt's own approach to translating Russian poetry, and the editors have been wise to run with it. Ciepiela notes that Schmidt, himself a lifelong theater professional, "wished us to recognize this poetry as a shared endeavor enacted in a public arena. This is poetry as drama, the pleiad as ensemble, the translator as director -- or better, as master of ceremonies." That the poets are then listed "in order of appearance" seems fitting, as does the arrangement of poems in such a way as to speak with one another, creating dramatic dialogues that thread through the whole, carried along by Schmidt's usually exceptional versions.

Appropriately, the collection opens with an untitled, stage-setting poem by Blok:

Night. A street light, a drugstore,
A street. A vacuous shadowy light.
Live five, ten, fifteen years more --
Nothing will change. There's no way out.

Die, you only start all over
And it's all the same as before:
Night, ice in the dark gutter,
The street, the street light, the store.

Schmidt renders these stanzas with equal parts simplicity and dramatic flair. He is as attentive to the poem's silences as he is to its utterance, and his judicious consideration of form conveys the music of the original without allowing it to fetter his English. Like many of the pieces in "The Stray Dog Cabaret," this is a poem composed of dramatic gestures, scripted by Blok, but performed by Schmidt. Although most of these poets would meet misfortune after the Revolution -- Mandelshtam would die in a transit camp; Yesenin, Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva would commit suicide; Akhmatova would suffer years of loss and indignity under Soviet rule -- here they remain locked in their personal yet public melodramas, their histrionics barely touched by history.

If translation is, as American poet Charles Simic remarks, "an actor's medium," then Schmidt is perfect for the task. But actors are sometimes better suited for certain roles than for others, and this is true here as well. In addition to the versatile treatments of Khlebnikov, a number of canonical poems, including Mayakovsky's "Me" and Blok's masterpiece "Twelve," appear in truly masterful form. Schmidt has a similarly strong ear for Pasternak, as we hear in this stanza, from the theatrically themed poem "To the Meyerholds": "I adore your awkward way of walking, / that lock of hair, eagerly gray. / Even if it's a part you are playing / To the hilt -- go ahead. One must play."

Schmidt is less even in his execution of the remaining poets, particularly Mandelshtam and Tsvetaeva, whose rhetoric can be as perplexing as their music is rich. While he sometimes succeeds in approximating their distinctive marriage of sound and sense, as he does in sections of Tsvetaeva's longer work "The Poem of the End," more often he leans toward one or the other, producing less a solid translation than a gloss for a translation that might have been. This is the case, for example, in the flaccid opening to Mandelshtam's late poem "Leningrad": "I've come back to a town known by heart -- / In my veins, like the smell of childhood sickness. / You're back? Then take your medicine: / Fish-oil, slick, light tracks in canals." In its Russian original, the poem has a driving rhythm and sharp masculine rhymes, vowel repetitions that sound like the poem is wailing, and images that are both haunting and mysterious. Here, however, the rhythm is slack, the imagery obscure rather than strange. This falls so short of the book's standard that one wonders whether Schmidt ever intended it to see the light of day.

But such shortcomings are rare in "The Stray Dog Cabaret," and they do little to diminish the virtuosity the book otherwise represents. As new poets and translators test themselves against the challenges of the Silver Age, Schmidt's work calls for constant consideration, both for its craft and for what it succeeds in communicating about a foreign milieu. The Stray Dog, a bar that was closed so long ago, raises the bar.

Benjamin Paloff is a poetry editor at Boston Review. His poems have recently appeared in Gulf Coast, Jacket, The Literary Review and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Michigan.

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