Olga Livshin’s A Life Replaced

The poet and translator Olga Livshin has published a new book, A Life Replaced, that includes both her original writing, and new translations of the work of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, as well as writing by a more recent poet, Vladimir Gandelsman. 

What makes this collection unique is that Livshin, who spent her childhood in the former Soviet Union and has since lived in the United States, engages energetically and creatively with the two poets she translates and with the countries she has lived in, asking thought-provoking questions about a range of topics.

Olga Livshin

Here is an example of one poem in the book where Livshin directly addresses the Akhmatova poem that comes before it in the collection, and uses that as a springboard to talk about history, Livshin’s own life, motherhood, and her reaction to the status quo in both the land of her birth and her adopted country.

Olga Livshin

Newscast Akhmatova

Always the same question. What makes this century worse than any before it?—the twenty-year-old Anna asks in a poem.

Her century swelled with the inequities of all the previous ones.—I grew up there—at the end of the revolution that overflowed by seventy years—was rocked with her tight-lipped grief of her poems—quoted by my mother, who had her face—whose face I now wear.

What news for her would make an adequate reply?

*

News: I have now lived most of my life in a country that, as Akhmatova would say, is relatively vegetarian.—People aren’t the main staple of its diet.—Immigrants the world over say, We didn’t come to this country, that country, or that country—any country but—to mourn our lives.

But the country where I went to high school, college, and grad school, where I later taught at my alma mater—school is one of the favorite dishes.—Routine cannibalism.—Bomb threats: we were evacuated into the parking-lot sunshine.—Spit three times over the shoulder: you and you, but not you, will avoid being eaten.

*

News: After three days in labor, I saw my son. Warmth rushed through me as I lay cut up, belly-up.—I said: We’ll have so much fun together, you and I.

The word fun thus entered my overcast Russian worldview.—Every day I meet him after school: he colors the world cerulean.

*

Anna Andreyevna’s son spent most of his life in a prison camp.—Because of his origins.—She could not rescue him even by writing odes to Stalin.—Most Russian readers do not know, or else cannot remember, whether she wrote such odes.—She did.

*

Old news: Russia is carnivorous.—New news: now carnivorous beyond its borders.

Sort-of-new news: this country never stopped being carnivorous.—America’s eye, more technologically avian, looks into every home.—News: we might need a different word than home.

*

In the home of her poetry, Akhmatova has found room for her whole country.—Found a chronology: from lush turn-of-the-century eroticism to imprisonment—to oblivion, intended—but not accomplished—by the state.—In her stance of the memory keeper, she stood immovable.—Like a steppe baba statue: Paleolithic, gray; huge.

*

At the end of her life, Akhmatova said: My life had been replaced.

*

News: A few years back, a young woman in Moscow founded the first hospice for children in Russia.—This woman, a friend of mine, is now in her early thirties, a seasoned administrator for the hospice, somewhat cynical.—Her hospice, that colorful refuge, is still alive.—

*

Because my replies are like light touch, their comfort cool and faithless, each fingertip a raindrop.—I refuse to be separated from her: to sum her up.—She is needed.

*

Who, me? you ask. You seem amused.

Your rhetorical questions are needed, for they demand a specific integrity from each of us.—Your stone house of womanhood is needed, a house of protest.

You are the one with the news for this next century: This century is worse than those before it. Change something.

Poem © 2019 Olga Livshin

Zack Rogow’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack Rogow’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

George Orwell’s Response to “Alternative Facts”

On January 22, 2017, two days after the inauguration of Donald Trump, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” as a way of describing lies. She was referring to the White House press secretary’s providing false estimates for the crowd that attended the inauguration.

This idea of “alternative facts” is actually not unique to the Trump administration. Although that term is new, the dictatorships that dominated Europe in the mid-twentieth century, the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler and the Soviet government of Josef Stalin, were no strangers to “alternative facts.” Those two authoritarian states regularly issued pronouncements and provided information that they knew were not true.

One of the greatest literary champions of truth in the face of these threats was George Orwell, who died all too soon at age 46 in 1950. 

George Orwell

Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, spent the final years of his life revealing in those two novels how dictatorships contort the truth to achieve their ends. In his book England Your England, composed largely after the end of World War II and the fall of Hitler, Orwell analyzed the effects of how Nazism and Russian communism constantly used “alternative facts” to promote their ends:

“Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the war. [World War II] The calamities that were constantly being reported—battles, massacres, famines, revolutions—tended to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One had no way of verifying the facts, one was not even fully certain they had happened, and one was always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources….Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth…that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or for failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied.” (p. 54)

This analysis describes all-too accurately the state of truth in the current era of “alternative facts.” The Trump administration in Washington baldly denies even the most obvious facts—the existence of global warming and climate change, the size of a crowd on the Mall in DC, the effects of a bill that deprives millions of people of their health insurance, the absence of widespread voter fraud in the United States, etc.. It’s frightening that the other examples of governments that use these tactics are two of the worst dictatorships in history.

What does Orwell recommend that writers do in response to governments denying obvious truths? He advocates political action, but interestingly, he cautions that opposition to regimes that embrace falsehoods can also lead to fanaticism and dogmatic ideas if we embrace activism without reflection:

“To suggest that a creative writer, in a time of conflict, must split his life into two compartments, may seem defeatist or frivolous: yet in practice I do not see what else he can do. To lock yourself up in the ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that  every choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the less, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic. War, for example, may be necessary, but it is certainly not right or sane. Even a general election is not exactly a pleasant or edifying spectacle. If you have to take part in such things—and I think you do have to, unless you are armoured by old age or stupidity or hypocrisy—then you also have to keep part of yourself inviolate.” (p. 25)

In other words, writers have to curb the temptation to oppose fanatics with an equally fanatical ideology. We must act, and not be paralyzed by ethical dilemmas. But we must never let go of our critical and moral judgments, even if we have to bracket them in order to undo a terrible evil.

_______________________________________________________________

Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Praise and Lament, Part 4: Direct Lament—Akhmatova's "Requiem"

Now I’d like to talk about two very different approaches to lament. One is what I would call direct lament. In this sort of work, the author makes it very clear that she or he is mourning the defeat or loss of something. The writer describes the condition of that loss in clear terms and the reader is in no way unaware or confused about the emotion the author is expressing.

Anna Akhmatova as sketched by Amadeo Modigliani in Paris, 1911

A good example of direct lament is Anna Akhmatova’s classic poem “Requiem.” Akhmatova wrote this poem in several parts during the darkest stays of the Stalinist terror, when all of the Soviet Union was in horrible fear of the deportations to Siberian labor camps, executions, and internal exile that marked this period in Russian history when the Communist Party ruled with through a network of repressive institutions. Akhmatova and her family and friends suffered greatly during this persecution, when as many as 14 million people were sent to prison or forced labor camps. The Stalinist purges took the lives of two of her husbands and her son spent many years in forced labor camps.

Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem” about the Stalinist terror was written at great personal risk. The secret police had searched her house in surprise dawn visits and went through all her papers. She only was able to retain this long poem by having various friends memorize pieces of it, and then she reassembled the friends and the poem after Stalin’s death. One section was lost for years when she lost touch during World War II with one of the memorizers, and Akhmatova only was able to reconstruct that section years later when the two of them met accidentally on the street in Leningrad—there were no phone books allowed in the Soviet Union.

Here is the Prologue of “Requiem” in the English version by D.M. Thomas in his Akhmatova translation, Selected Poems:

In those years only the dead smiled,

Glad to be at rest:
And Leningrad city swayed like

A needless appendix to its prisons.

It was then that the railway-yards

Were asylums of the mad;

Short were the locomotives’

Farewell songs.

Stars of death stood

Above us, and innocent Russia

Writhed under bloodstained boots, and

Under the tyres of the Black Marias.

Black Marias were the vans that the secret police used to transport prisoners.

This is clearly a poem of direct lament. The reader knows that the writer is describing a terrible loss, and in deep mourning for that loss. One of the lines that haunts me is “Leningrad city swayed like/A needless appendix to its prisons.” The prisons have become the raison d’être, the reason for being of this great cultural capital, which Akhmatova describes as now mainly good for supplying inmates for the gulag.

“Requiem” is a masterpiece, and even more moving because Akhmatova somehow turned her country’s most terrible hour into something stately and, well—beautiful. That is an enormous victory, even while her family and her nation and justice suffered so many awful defeats. I recommend reading the whole poem to get a fuller sense of her enduring achievement.

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry