A remarkable poetic account of a man and his daughter. Though relatively unpublished in the Soviet Union until the late 1980's, Gennady Aygi's work has been translated into some twenty languages, and has received major acclaim through many parts of the world. Child-and-Rose is a unique collection of poems and prose chosen and arranged by the author and translator. Taking as its central themes childhood, sleep, and silence in relation to poetic creation, the book is divided into five sections -- Veronica's Book, Sleep-and-Poetry, Before and After the Book, Silvia's World, and Poetry-as-Silence -- all written between 1972 and 2002. In this collection, each poem is a carefully crafted space of language that surfaces from the heart of a poetic consciousness at the limits of intelligibility, as the translator notes. Images of Aygi's Chuvash homeland -- birches, oaks, snow, roses, fields --mix with a disrupted syntax, astonishing turns, gaps, and suspensions that all speak to a quiet stillness of being. Gennady Aygi was born in 1934 in the village of Shaymurzino, in the Chuvash Autonomous Republic, some 500 miles east of Moscow. Due to his ties with Pasternak, Aygi was expelled from the Gorky Literary Institute, and went on to found a society of underground artists in Moscow. He has worked at the Mayakovsky Museum, organizing art exhibitions, although he has lived in poverty for most of his life. He lives in Moscow. Child-and-Rose
Bed Time
in my back I feel always
a heaviness you have gone
you drop off (and I start to doze
like some kind of sorrowful
part)
----
Recognition of the Name
whirl of feelings perhaps
(like vertigo)
before consciousness
(as before a mirror):
with some power of sight gleams
and disappears
like some imprisoned shade
the shy - with quiet pauses
babble
of something Child-and-Rose CHILD-AND-ROSE is a selection of the verse of Gennady Aigi translated by Peter France. Aigi (1934-2006) was one of the major writers of the Soviet avant-garde, writing Russian-language verse of powerful but somehow alien insight greatly inspired by his Chuvash heritage. Among Aigi's output, which ranges from meditations on the horror of Soviet authority to reminisces of Chuvash traditional culture, a few books were dedicated mainly to themes of childhood and innocence. France has collected here Veronica's Book, Sleep-and-Poetry, Before and After the Book, Silvia's World and Poetry-As-Silence, all written between 1972 and 2002.
Bei Dao has contributed a preface expressing his own appreciation of Aigi, showing that in spite of Aigi's particular background he wrote poetry that is meaningful to readers internationally. Peter France's foreword contains a brief biography of Aigi and then explains the difficulty of translating Aigi by commenting on his poem Krug and France's English rendering The Circle. The poems then follow. It is a real pity that this edition does not contain the original Russian alongside the English translation, as in the earlier SELECTED POEMS. Nonetheless, New Directions has printed and bound the book beautifully, with a lovely cover design and a portrait of Aigi by Gennadii Gogoliuk.
Veronica's Book was written in the few years after the birth of his first daughter in 1983, and the poems are a celebration of nascent femininity, with glimpses back to the life of Aigi's mother and more remote ancestors. There is genuinely moving poetry is here, such as Beginning of the 'The Period of Likeness', which opens with and the forces / of the tribe are stirred --- and they float / and turn like wind-and-light --- carrying over your face / cloud after cloud: all expressions / of vanished faces. Nonetheless, I must admit I prefer Aigi's other poetry to this often saccharine delight in being a father. Silvia's World is similarly lightweight, a little work consisting of 32 isolated lines on the life of a young girl in Paris who gave up her room to Aigi when the poet stayed with her family. Some of these are quite amusing.
The book contains furthermore 37 of Aigi's more typical poems. These spans from the 1970s to 2002 and we find classics like the awesome Now there are always snows (Teper' vsegda snega), though the English translation here is only one of infinite possibilities as the Russian original is ambiguous in its parsing.
Two short works of prose are found here. Notes on Sleep and Poetry is a collection of 40 brief musings written over a span of four days in January 1975, while Poetry-as-Silence followed after it. The fragments herein are occasionally hermetic, but generally amount to a clearly understandable metaphysical manifesto of Aigi's poetry, rather comparable to Char's Feuillets d'Hypnos or Tafdrup's Over vandet gaar jeg. In the ninth passage of Sleep and Poetry, Aigi writes Poetry has no ebb and flow. It *is*, it *abides*. Even if you take away its 'social' efficacy, you cannot take away its living, human fullness, profundity, autonomy.
Because of the lightweight nature of Veronica's Book and Silvia's World, and the lack of the original Russian against a facing-page translation, I'll give this three stars. I'd daresay that a better introduction to Aigi, for those who don't yet know his work, would be the SELECTED POEMS volume. Child-and-Rose MagnÃfico! 168
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