Lev Loseff is a poet’s poet – or at least a lover of poetry’s poet. While some of his poems exhibit a playful quality, with their punning and humorous observations, his writing tends on the whole to be complex in its imagery, rich in literary allusion, and abundant in formal experiment. A highly intellectual poetry, it reflects his immersion in Russian culture as a young man growing up in Soviet Russia, but also the distance and range of experience provided by emigration: having turned to poetry in 1974, he left for the United States two years later. Thus the vast majority of his work was written abroad as he contemplated his native land from both a literal and a figurative distance, while at the same time casting a sometimes jaundiced eye on the alien culture in which he spent the final thirty-three years of his life.
Virtually every biographical note on Lev Loseff begins by pointing out that he began to write serious poetry only at age 37, both a very late age for any poet to start and also the age at which Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet, died following a duel. Since he was born in the fateful year 1937, when Stalin’s purges were to attain their full intensity, that means he began to write when he had attained the age of his birth year in the century. Possibly, then, the very symbolism of “37” was as important a factor in his deciding to write poetry as others that he cited – recovery from an illness that had caused him to reflect on life, the departure of his close friend Joseph Brodsky to the West in 1972, and a sense that the acquaintances of his younger years were growing more distant.
Be that as it may, there was much in his surroundings to draw him to literature. He not only had a well-known poet for a father, but his circle of close friends when he attended Leningrad University included Mikhail Yeremin, Sergei Kulle, Vladimir Ufliand, and Leonid Vinogradov, all of whom were to become writers. They, along with Aleksandr Kondratov (who was not at the university), and the slightly older Mikhail Krasilnikov and Yuri Mikhailov, comprised what eventually became known as the “philological school” of Russian poets. The name seems to derive from Leningrad University’s Philology Faculty, where the majority of them studied. However, other than their mutual friendship and a penchant for experimentation in their verse, little suggests that they ever formed a unified group. As it turns out, Kulle’s free verse, Vinogradov’s brief aphoristic poems and Kondratov’s conceptual poetry all are further from the mainstream literary traditions than is Loseff, who has also referred to Gleb Gorbovskii, Yevgeny Rein and, of course, Joseph Brodsky as poets whom he knew well in his younger years. However accurate the name or even the notion that the eight writers comprised a school, the term “philological poet” seems appropriate for Lev Loseff. He achieved an intimate familiarity with the whole of the Russian poetic tradition to which he refers regularly in his verse. If he feels any “anxiety of influence,” he does not show it, except perhaps in relation to Brodsky. As he notes in his introduction to the collection Afterword, which appears in this volume (see ‘Notes’), for many years he consciously avoided allowing any Brodskian elements into his own writing. Then the floodgates opened after Brodsky’s death in 1996, when he wrote an entire cycle of poems linked to the memory of his close friend. Ten of the sixteen works in that cycle are included here. Other acquaintances from his youth turn up in his poetry as well: the poem ‘In Memory of Mikhail Krasilnikov’ recalls the figure whom Loseff and his friends regarded as their inspiration, while many of his poet friends are referred to in dedications or make cameo appearances within the bodies of poems. But he hardly limits himself to authors from that narrow circle. Within the generous sampling of his verse included in this volume, Loseff mentions other poets of his day – Yevtushenko, Glazkov, Okudzhava – and refers to several from earlier in the twentieth century: Blok, Gumilev, Pasternak. Among nineteenth-century poets, Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Lermontov, Fedor Glinka and Polonsky (in the epigraph to ‘Heartbeat’) are all cited. And his range of interests extends beyond Russia: Marianne Moore appears in ‘Right Now’ while ‘The Parisian Note’ quotes Verlaine. And, not limiting himself to poetry, Loseff has a poem (‘Out of Bunin’) inspired by Bunin’s powerful story ‘Light Breathing’ and another lyric on Dostoevsky. Nor do these names exhaust the list of those who were important to him. When Brodsky first read Loseff’s verse he was most of all reminded of the early nineteenth-century poet Konstantin Batiushkov, while others have noted similarities between his work and that of an earlier émigré writer, Vladislav Khodasevich. The early poem ‘Lefloseff’ refers to several figures he admired, including Tsvetaeva, Mandelshtam, and Khlebnikov. (This is one of the works that G. S. Smith has in mind in his introduction when he speaks of poems defying translation; Loseff refers to each of the three poets by words derived from their first names, for instance calling himself a “marinist,” which in Russian literally means a painter of seascapes, but in this instance refers to a person who studies Marina [Tsvetaeva]).
In short, Lev Loseff was profoundly absorbed in the world of literature, but at the same time the inspiration for individual works arose from real-life experiences. He was, first of all, a poet of Leningrad, and referred to himself as a native of that city, not of the St. Petersburg that came before and after his time there. Indeed, the longer he lived in the United States, for all his attachment to Russian culture, he saw New England as his home and, even when it became politically possible, never returned to his birth city, which for him no longer existed outside his mind’s eye. Thus in many of his poems he evokes the Soviet era, most often recalling the Leningrad of his youth as in his early ‘The Tram’, where that fateful conjunction of 3 and 7 appears once again, or in the more recent and if anything even darker ‘An Excursion’ which revisits the district in which he grew up.
Much of his most compelling poetry coalesces from the detritus of memory, which he scrutinizes and prods with all the determination of an archaeologist exploring the remnants of a dead civilization. ‘Kazan, July 1957’, another of his newer poems, is typical in this regard: the recollection of a crippled soldier, begging for bread, emerges from something “yellowy-violet,” at first indeterminate, perhaps a flower, but later, after the unseeing left eye comes to mind, transformed into the yellowy-violet left cheek of the invalid’s face. There is something unflinching and merciless in the way that Loseff displays that which most would prefer to keep forgotten or hidden away. Brodsky, in saying that Loseff’s poetry reminded him of Batiushkov’s, said that it did so because both were poets of restraint. No doubt Brodsky had in mind the relatively emotionless effect of the lyric narrator and the classical forms to which Loseff adhered in most of his poetry. However, the seemingly quiet manner only served to mask the ultimate power of his verse. Whether resurrecting his own past, casting a cold eye on the present or musing on more abstract topics, Loseff would conjure up a restless and frequently disturbing universe.
He was, ultimately, a poet of observation. His verse conveys emotion – fear, a sense of loss, bemusement – but it is emotion that arises from contemplating the world outside the poet, rather than the writer’s most intimate thoughts. Even when Loseff appears within his own works, he does so as an observer or as the observed, often with an ironic detachment on the part of the narrator. Nowhere is this clearer than in ‘At the Clinic’, one of his last poems, describing the moment when he receives the fatal prognosis from his doctor. It is almost as though the poet is standing outside himself, looking at and feeling sorry for the physician at the same time as scrutinizing his own surprisingly calm reaction. Given his penchant for looking at his subjects from without, he not surprisingly avoided writing directly about love or about his inner desires: perhaps this too is one of the qualities that caused Brodsky to emphasize his restraint.
This very quality leads to some of the difficulty in fully grasping his poetry. Emotions tend toward the universal; observation toward the specific and the exceptional. To follow his eye’s path and the reasoning to which his gaze gives rise requires an understanding of the context and the object. While his poems contain many minor biographical details, what is of far greater importance is the awareness of the Soviet society in which he grew up, of the history that turned St. Petersburg into Leningrad and back into St. Petersburg, and of the literary tradition that he knew intimately and that informed much of his work.
Striving to understand the meaning of his poems should not cause readers to neglect his technical virtuosity. He was a master of verse form, who managed to innovate even while displaying many of the classical features found in earlier Russian poetry. While some of his artistry comes through only in the Russian, the translations in this volume manage to convey much of the structural richness and variety. Take ‘Freeze-frame’, a poem from the collection Sisyphus Redux. Each group of three lines is connected by rhyme, creating an unusual stanza, rhyming a a a. But the stanza form is maintained only for the first two stanzas, and then is re-established for the final three lines of this fifteen-line poem. Lines 7-12 are divided into units of two, two-and-a-half, and one-and-a-half lines, so that there is a disjunction between the semantic structure of the poem and the units created by the rhyme. This lack of symmetry helps single out the passage describing the world that appears after the narrator’s Faustian encounter. The feeling of imbalance and asymmetry receives emphasis from the use of enjambement, particularly between lines 6 and 7, where the syntax leaps across the boundary between stanzas. Rich sound play occurs throughout the poem, with the English “hiss”, “hot” and “horrendous” in the sixth line offering a reflection of what takes place in the original. The Russian text turns out to be still more complex. The very long lines are composed in dactylic heptameter, with the fourth foot consistently “missing” a syllable at the point of the caesura. What is more, the last words in the fourth feet form triple “internal” rhymes themselves, though in this case the rhymes are feminine, with the rhyme vowel in the penultimate syllable. So it could be said that each seven-foot line consists of a dactylic tetrameter, with one syllable truncated, followed by a dactylic trimeter. In short, the poem is written in a highly complex and possibly unique metrical form, only a hint of which can be conveyed in English.
Of course, not all the poems attain this level of complexity, but time and again formal features will turn out to be notable, sometimes for their sheer inventiveness, but often as well for the way in which they help structure the work and help emphasize key images or ideas.
Take ‘An Excursion’, one of Loseff’s late poems, written in the familiar iambic pentameter, but in a seven-line stanza (less common in Russian than in English, where Chaucer and Byron both used it). The rhyme scheme is a a B c c a B, where the capital letters indicate feminine rhymes. The metre and the stanza form are conveyed precisely in the English, as is the play with non-Russian words in the first line of the last stanza. Some of the sound quality comes across as well: “Sodom” in line 1, followed by “So down” in line 2 imitates almost exactly what takes place in the Russian. Other effects are harder to get across. Line 2 in the second stanza consists entirely of very “Soviet” abbreviations (for example, narsud for narodnyyi sud or people’s court), which reflect a linguistic trait of the era in which this poem is set. A special effect marks the last line in each stanza: an extra foot, a highly symmetrical syntactical structure, and a near-rhyme of the two main nouns in line 7; extraordinary sound play in line 14 (with a stressed “u” in four consecutive words; “tr” beginning three words and “dr” two others); and in line 21 the Russian word for Hell appearing on a syllable that would normally be left unstressed, so that the occurrence of two consecutive stressed syllables (followed by an unstressed syllable where stress would be expected) leads to a disjointed rhythm and emphasizes “Hell” all the more strongly.
And sometimes it is simply worth noting one or two less elaborate features, such as in the much earlier ‘Ledger Entry’, where the last line is in trimeter, providing an effective closure to this iambic tetrameter poem, while the couplets in masculine rhyme throughout the work create a kind of lilting effect, which is in keeping with the work’s relatively light mood.
Perhaps the semantic and the formal intricacy of Lev Loseff’s verse explains why until now only a few poems have been published in English, and most of those by the same G. S. Smith who is responsible for this volume. Loseff was a challenging poet, not only for the would-be translator, but also for the reader in any language. Highly original in their structure as well as their content, the poems repay a careful study that brings to the surface the hidden meanings and effects. Over the years Lev Loseff gradually became recognized among Russians as one of the leading poets of his era; now, with the generous selection of his verse provided in As I Said, Anglophone readers will have the opportunity to discover for themselves his distinctive and ever inventive voice.
Barry P. Scherr