Leonid Schwab is a lyric poet who hauntingly suggests whole civilizations. He holds a unique place in contemporary Russophone poetry, drawing together—and shaping—vastly different poetic modes. His new translated collection, Everburning Pilot from Cicada Press, now makes this legacy available to English readers in a substantial way for the first time.
Schwab was born in Bobruisk, Belarus in 1961, and he has lived in Israel since 1990. Winner of Russia's prestigious Andrey Bely Prize in poetry, he is described in Maria Stepanova's introductory essay as an epic poet, even while his poems are particularly compressed, often less than half a page in length. The poems selected for this volume and presented chronologically span his career, from 1987 to 2015.
Numerous poems in this volume, especially the earliest, invoke narratives, sometimes ominous, through lightly sketched characters. The opening poem, “The guests were gathering at a dacha . . .” (Gosti s΄΄ezzhalis΄ na dachu) suspends a group of people midwinter in a house its host has left “as if he had stepped out for a minute” (22–23). Other poems plant individuals or clusters of them in landscapes that often threaten to engulf them, as in the unnamed (nearly unpronounced) figure in “Chipping at bushings with gunpowder . . .” (Vtulki otbival porokhom), who walks through city blocks and out into a valley in search of his brother (63). As the poems progress in time, they tend to pan out so that the landscape seems to predominate. But even at these larger scales, he never abandons the intimate and human. This is a postindustrial, often militarized landscape that features an automobile cast against a “worldwide ocean”; a national border someone would like to breach much as they would like some potato soup; a seashore gone missing from memory right along with a radio receiver (110–11). The poetic universes Schwab evokes extend through imperial periphery right out into space, and back again. In the 2000s his verse becomes at once more abstract, abandoning punctuation to strings of images and expressions, while also more frequently engaging the aphoristic and archetypal bent of oral culture.
Schwab's poetry will resonate with readers of diverse exposure and predilection, but especially with those familiar with Russian poetry. His verse at times betrays an almost classical or Pushkinian wit; an Acmeist attention to telling details and to the archeology of culture. Perhaps less obviously—given Schwab's practice of gesturing at worlds that never coalesce or have long ago dissolved—his poems, with their cosmic scale and juxtaposition of humans against a larger universe, also echo the metaphysical lyrics of Evgeny Baratynsky and Fedor Tiutchev. The motif of the pilot recalls the Futurists’ technological poetics, exemplified by Vasilii Kamenskii's 1914 Tango s korovami (Tango with Cows), structured partly by the perspective of a pilot plying the air. At the same time, Schwab's poetry is wholly contemporary in its exploration of empire and the postcolonial periphery, its deconstruction of nation, its proximity to an apocalypse seen through the lens of people moving forward through daily life. Notable is Schwab's attention to groups of people, villages, communities, and how together they navigate these fragmented, layered environments.
Everburning Pilot also represents a significant contribution to literature in translation. These poems were translated in a thoroughly collaborative manner over the course of a decade, starting with the small collective of Daniil Cherkasskii, Alexander Spektor and Anton Tenser, who later worked with a looser collective of seventeen translators, all contributing to varying degrees. This approach is increasingly common at least in the field of Slavic, East European and Eurasian studies as an effective way to introduce important undertranslated poets into English while “crowdsourcing” the labor and creating a community of readers around that poet. (Typically the poet is invited into the workshopping process, as was Schwab.)
With care and a consistent core of translators, such groups are able to produce highly effective and cohesive clusters of translations—the case with Everburning Pilot. Schwab's poetics shift over the decades, an evolution his translators reflect, moving adeptly through various modes. Meanwhile, the group retains much of the original diction and syntax while almost always using idiomatically natural English; and conveys much of the original meter and sound without sacrificing meaning and feel—a delicate balance, given that contemporary Russian poetry often still deploys classic poetic form that can sound distractingly artificial in an English-language context. Numerous translations ingeniously recreate consonance or sound clusters, such as in the line “Sup fioletov, sel΄d΄ poet na bliude,” rendered as “The fish is singing, and the soup—violaceous” (72–73). The collection overall renders tight and gorgeous translations of tight and gorgeous (and/or eerie, muted, resonating, forceful) poems.
A poem from 1996 details:
In the gullies spare machine parts shine white,
I regret the fundamentals of natural science.
I'm tsar, my dinner's never ready, I hold a grudge like Jacob,
I am done for, thank God, as they say.
