Copyright © 2001 by Olga Sedakova
Translation copyright © 2014 by Caroline Clark, Ksenia Golubovich, and Stephanie Sandler
First edition, 2014
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available upon request.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-06-9 / ISBN-10: 1-940953-06-5
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This publication was made possible with the support of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature.
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION by Stephanie Sandler
1 OLD SONGS translated by Stephanie Sandler
2 TRISTAN AND ISOLDE translated by Ksenia Golubovich and Caroline Clark
3 IN PRAISE OF POETRY translated by Caroline Clark
4 AN INTERVIEW WITH OLGA SEDAKOVA January, 2012, translated by Caroline Clark
5 AN AFTERWORD Olga Sedakova, Acceptance Speech, The Masters Translation Prize, 2011, translated by Caroline Clark
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION
by Stephanie Sandler
Olga Sedakova stands out among contemporary Russian poets as a poet blessed with the talents of musicality, verbal agility, and insights into the workings of soul and mind. An erudite writer who wears her knowledge lightly, she deftly draws other poetic traditions into her work, balancing openness to European and American cultural traditions with a profound knowledge of Russian cultural and religious traditions. In presenting a new translation of her work into English, our book aims to show Sedakova as a Russian poet and as a creator of world poetry.
We offer here two poetic cycles: one based on Slavic folk traditions (“Old Songs,” her shimmering sequence that mixes folk and biblical wisdom), and one that emerges from European myths (“Tristan and Isolde,” perhaps her most mysterious long poem). Sedakova’s capacious account in prose of her own poetic development (“In Praise of Poetry”) follows. Alongside these three major texts, we have included our interview with the poet conducted in 2012 and, as a coda, the poetic credo she presented when she was presented with The Masters Translation Prize in Moscow in 2011, awarded by the Masters of Literary Translation Guild. All of these texts appear in English in full for the first time.
BECOMING A POET
Olga Sedakova was born in Moscow in 1949 into an educated family; her father was an engineer, and her sister Irina is a highly regarded linguist. She studied at the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University and the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies, where she completed a graduate degree in 1983 in ethnography and ancient studies with a dissertation on ancient Slavic funeral rituals (published in 2004). Sedakova learned multiple European languages, and she worked for nearly a decade as a reader of foreign scholarship for a major Moscow library, INION. At a relatively early moment in her training as a scholar, her teachers agreed that her destiny was to be a poet. But this poetry did not appear in mainstream publications save for a very few poems she wrote as a young girl. A Russian-language volume was published in Paris in 1986, and her work soon began to reach an audience within Russia beyond the underground circles of intellectuals and poets in Moscow, Leningrad, and Tartu. The first substantial publication of her poetry in Russia was in 1988, during Glasnost. These poems were a stunning departure from the mostly politicized, even sensational work of the late 1980s. They seemed an uncanny reminder of deeply dormant spiritual traditions and a joyous re-imagining of formal, rhythmic, and lexical possibilities in the Russian language.
It would have been impossible to know, in 1988, how the public stature of Sedakova would, by the start of the twenty-first century, match up to her formidable gifts. It is fair to say that her reputation has risen to make her first among equals. Sedakova’s achievements have now been recognized in Europe and in Russia by many awards: the 1983 Andrei Bely Prize; Paris Prize for a Russian Poet, 1991; the Alfred Toepfer Pushkin Prize, awarded in Hamburg, 1994; the European Poetry Prize, Rome, 1995; the Solovyov Literary Prize, awarded in the Vatican, 1998; the Solzhenitsyn Literary Prize, Moscow, 2003; the Chevalier d’honneur d’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République Française, 2005 (and Officer status in 2012); the Dante Alighieri Prize, 2011, awarded in Italy; and many more besides. This kind of recognition has been made possible by her ability to reach readers in multiple languages. Excellent translations of her work now exist in Italian, French, Hebrew, Ukrainian, German, Albanian, and Danish. Most important, the work has now appeared in Russian in Russia, and extensively so. A handsome two-volume set of her poetry and prose appeared in 2001, and in 2010 a four-volume edition was published, including the full range of her essays on philology, philosophy, theology, cultural and literary studies, as well as her translations from nearly a dozen languages. Along the way, individual volumes offered collections of her poetry, her travel writings, her philosophical-political essays, and even two books of children’s poetry. A signal achievement was the publication in 2005 of her dictionary of “difficult words”—words whose meanings had changed across the centuries, words still in use in contemporary Russian but with meanings different from that of the Slavic Orthodox ritual and in the biblical tradition. Sedakova had long collected these words, and published the dictionary so that people could understand what it was they were saying in church (she has been told by grateful priests that for the first time they understood prayers they had chanted for decades; the dictionary is now in its third edition). Such is this poet’s knowledge of the Russian language, and of its many layers.
In her own poetry, Sedakova’s facility in using the many meanings of words became the foundation on which her creative work as preserver of ancient meanings and seer into the new would be placed. Is there another poet in any language who is as perfectly balanced between profound knowledge of the poetic, philosophical, and theological tradition and fearless invention of a new word? The repeated image in her poems of an entity balanced on a needle’s tip conveys this sense of precarious bodily awareness, and we often feel ourselves teetering between worlds when reading her