Subject
Re: VN & Konstantin Vaginov (fwd)
Date
Body
>Konstantin Vaginov. THE TOWER, tr. by Benjamin Sher, 1997. Original title:
>_Kozlinaia pesn'_ (Goat Song) Leningrad: Priboi, 1928. Benjamin Sher
><sher07@bellsouth.net>
>
>"`Poetry is an idiosyncratic enterprise' said the Unknown Poet. ... You
>take a few words, arrange them in some peculiar way, then you sit on them
>night after night, brooding and concentrating. You watch as the hand of
>meaning emerges from one word to link up with the hand emerging from
>another word. Then a hand emerges from a third word--and, presto, you are
>swallowed up by the totally new world disclosed through these words."
>
>-------------------------------
>Vladimir Nabokov. _Invitation to a Beheading_, Chapter VIII. 1934.
>
>"...sensing with my criminal intuition how words are combined, what one
>must do for a commonplace word to come alive and share its neighbor's
>sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in its neighbor and renewing
>the neighboring word in the process, so that the whole line is live
>irridescence....
>---------------------------------------------------------
>--------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Konstantin Vaginov, born in St. Petersburg in the same year as
>Nabokov, remained almost unknown from the time of his death of TB in 1934
>until the mid-eighties when he was "rediscovered." (Not an apt term since
>he was largely unknown in his life time apart from a handful of friends,
>mostly connected with the OBERIU circle.) Vaginov was a modernist poet,
>literary theorist, and novelist whose best-known novel _Kozlinaia pesn'_
>(Goat-song) has just appeared in English, translated and published by
>Benjamin Sher <sher07@bellsouth.net> under the title THE TOWER.
> Victor Terras (_Cambridge History of Russian Literature_, p. 479)
>describes Vaginov's novels as featuring "grotesques, travesty, puns,
>verbal collage, and an ever present literary subtext.... _The Goat Song_
>is a pun on the etymology of Greek _tragoidia_. The novel itself draws on
>a nightmarish picture of Leningrad as a cultural necropolis, populated by
>ex-intellectuals, and with the city's great heritage relegated to the
>novel's subtext."
> The novel is a lament for and satire of the Symbolist circle as
>well as a satire of the new Soviet society. The novel also contains a
>prominent system of subtexts drawing on the the Classical and Renaissance
>worlds.
>
>D. Barton Johnson
>Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
>Phelps Hall
>University of California at Santa Barbara
>Santa Barbara, CA 93106
>Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
>Home Phone: (805) 682-4618
>
>
>
>_Kozlinaia pesn'_ (Goat Song) Leningrad: Priboi, 1928. Benjamin Sher
><sher07@bellsouth.net>
>
>"`Poetry is an idiosyncratic enterprise' said the Unknown Poet. ... You
>take a few words, arrange them in some peculiar way, then you sit on them
>night after night, brooding and concentrating. You watch as the hand of
>meaning emerges from one word to link up with the hand emerging from
>another word. Then a hand emerges from a third word--and, presto, you are
>swallowed up by the totally new world disclosed through these words."
>
>-------------------------------
>Vladimir Nabokov. _Invitation to a Beheading_, Chapter VIII. 1934.
>
>"...sensing with my criminal intuition how words are combined, what one
>must do for a commonplace word to come alive and share its neighbor's
>sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in its neighbor and renewing
>the neighboring word in the process, so that the whole line is live
>irridescence....
>---------------------------------------------------------
>--------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Konstantin Vaginov, born in St. Petersburg in the same year as
>Nabokov, remained almost unknown from the time of his death of TB in 1934
>until the mid-eighties when he was "rediscovered." (Not an apt term since
>he was largely unknown in his life time apart from a handful of friends,
>mostly connected with the OBERIU circle.) Vaginov was a modernist poet,
>literary theorist, and novelist whose best-known novel _Kozlinaia pesn'_
>(Goat-song) has just appeared in English, translated and published by
>Benjamin Sher <sher07@bellsouth.net> under the title THE TOWER.
> Victor Terras (_Cambridge History of Russian Literature_, p. 479)
>describes Vaginov's novels as featuring "grotesques, travesty, puns,
>verbal collage, and an ever present literary subtext.... _The Goat Song_
>is a pun on the etymology of Greek _tragoidia_. The novel itself draws on
>a nightmarish picture of Leningrad as a cultural necropolis, populated by
>ex-intellectuals, and with the city's great heritage relegated to the
>novel's subtext."
> The novel is a lament for and satire of the Symbolist circle as
>well as a satire of the new Soviet society. The novel also contains a
>prominent system of subtexts drawing on the the Classical and Renaissance
>worlds.
>
>D. Barton Johnson
>Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
>Phelps Hall
>University of California at Santa Barbara
>Santa Barbara, CA 93106
>Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
>Home Phone: (805) 682-4618
>
>
>