Friday, December 31, 2010

Hollywood Versifier: Soviet Edition

The greatest New Year's film of all time is a 1975 Russian movie called The Irony of Fate or Enjoy Your Bath!


So maybe this post should be Mosfilm Versifier?





The movie is a romantic comedy, I guess: there are mistaken identities and drunken misunderstandings, a lopsided love triangle, witty one-liners and lots and lots of music. So it's part of a long tradition that goes back to Shakespeare and then stretching way back at least to Aristophanes.

But the plot and characters are utterly and unmistakably Soviet: specifically, mid-seventies Moscow and St. Petersburg Soviet. The entire plot of the film is centered around the fact that in the '50s all of the skyscrapers were huge, hulking, identical monoliths that architects call the Brutalist School. 

The story goes like this: on New Year's Eve a guy gets drunk with some buddies in a Moscow public bath, they go to the airport to see one of them off, and the wrong guy gets on the plane to St. Petersburg. Dead drunk, he gives a cab the address, goes to what he thinks is his building and his apartment, uses his key to get in, and falls asleep on the couch. Unbeknownst to him, the owner of the St. Petersburg apartment is a lovely woman waiting for her fiancée to arrive. And it goes on from there.

It's completely implausible even for the USSR, but it's a lot easier to suspend disbelief when the lock makers all work in the same factory, the architects all go to the same Party meetings and the city planners are working from identical blueprints. 

Basically, the film is It's a Wonderful Life for people my age in Eastern Europe. It's just not the New Year without it, so every station (all four of them!) play it at least twice that night. It's got drama, heartbreak, sarcasm, hilarity, showers with clothes on, songs performed by the characters and lots and lots of poetry.

We're not talking greeting card verse, either: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmadulina. It's like a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movie with lyrics provided by Robert Frost, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich. And it's what introduced me to the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko: a broad, stereotypical writer, almost a parody of a contemporary poet. He's egotistical, self-aggrandizing, always scheming for the next speaking gig or international edition of his work.


Look at this pretentious douchebag here...
He's also insanely talented, a provocateur with real depth along with real mastery of his craft. Unfortunately, he tends to auto-translate, the raging egomaniac. So most of the translations are terrible, which I think might account for why he's not as well known to English-speaking audiences as some of his contemporaries with better translators.

But this is the song from the opening credits, in a clumsy and barely passable translation. There's a lot of nuance missing, but it gives the basic gist of things.


"Here is what..."
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, trans. Albert C. Todd

To B. Akhmadulina

Here is what is happening to me:
my old friend doesn't come to visit,
and in idle vanity
come various folk, not those who should.
And he
      goes about somewhere not with those he should
and he understands that too,
and our dischord is not cleared up,
and both of us suffer from this.
Here is what is happening to me:
Not the right girl at all comes to visit,
she puts her hands on my shoulders
and steals me from another.
And that one--
              tell me for God's sake,
on whose shoulders does she put her hands?
That one
        from whom I was stolen
in vengeance also will begin to steal.
She won't respond immediately this way,
but will live in a struggle with herself
and unaware will select
someone superfluous for her.
Oh, how many nervous
                    and unhealthy,
unnecessary involvements,
                         unnecessary friendships!
Something rabidly desperate in me!
Oh, somebody,
             come,
                  break up
the conjunction
               of people alien to one another
and the estrangement
                    of souls that are kindred.






You've definitely got the love triangle, some of the torture and torment and confusion. But you're missing the touches, words like "осатаненность" ("Satan" is the root word) instead of "rabidly desperate" and even simple things like "Oh, anyone come" versus "Oh, someone come." But maybe it's possible to catch some of the meaning from the music in the above video.

So although it's kind of sad to have such a buffoon as my favorite Russian poet, there's something both accessible and hidden in his work that catches me. You could do better, but you could do a lot worse, too. I think that might be the story of my life in literature, actually.

__________________________

On that note, this ends my big experiment — sorry to finish with a fair-to-poor translation, but I figured in true Eliotic tradition I'd finish with a whimper.

The blog started on a whim and continued through many a whining, resentful night, but it's been really gratifying to have your participation. I've done what I could to keep myself entertained, hopefully it wasn't too annoying or at least not impossible to ignore when it was. Thanks for coming along for the ride, it's been great to have your votes, comments, poems, ideas.

I'll have wrap-up and off-color commentary tomorrow, but for now, Happy Old Year 2010, Happy New Year 2011! 

And always remember: "I'm not your flowerpot."


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