After
Five Words Englished from the Russian
This is the second collaboration
between John Matthias and Jean
Dibble to appear in
X-Peri. The first, The HIJ, was published in X-Peri in
January, 2016. “After Five Words Englished From the Russian” first appeared as
text in the inaugural edition of the Huffington
Post Literary Supplement and, after that, in Matthias’s Collected Longer Poems (Shearsman Books). Jean Dibble’s
new poster poems will join the first set as part of a three-way book-length collaboration
between herself, Matthias, and Robert Archambeau. The “five words” in question come
from Osip Mandelstam's great poem “He Who Finds a
Horseshoe,” written in Moscow in 1923. In his note for the Huffington Post printing of the text, Matthias wrote, “I cannot
read the poem in Russian, but I have loved it in English for many years
(favoring first one translation, then another.) Mandelstam is the source of the horseshoe. The dingbats [sometimes now
obscured in the poster version] come from “Insert/Symbol” at the top of my
MacBook Pro. I think of them as sucking-stones. Demosthenes sucked stones, but
so did Beckett’s Malloy: Watt
concludes: ‘parole non ci appulcro _ _ _ Threne heard by Watt in ditch on way from
station. The soprano sang:’ followed by four and a half inches of white space
in my old Calder and Boyars edition, followed in turn by “no symbols where none
intended.” That last statement is, I
suppose, the memory trace leading to my lines about codes, modes, allusions,
mimesis, and thesis in part V. Anyone who has read my book called Trigons will know that I have, in my
layman’s way, been reading neurology for many years, especially where it
connects with musical composition and comprehension. Have a Google at Aplysia Californica and see what pops up. If you’re
feeling ambitious, read Eric R. Kandel’s In Search of Memory: The Emergence
of a New Science of the Mind
instead. Section II draws heavily on a short story by Isaac Babel. There’s a
pun, of course, on his name. There are lots of puns. I was forced to attend a
summer camp once as a child and had to deal with a sadistic counselor, a
professional wrestler recovering from double hernia surgery. To associate this
with Soviet era “camps” and their guards in the Gulag may seem outrageously
wrong, but I’ve been unable not to. (Auden said that his best reason to oppose
Fascism was that at school he lived in a Fascist state.) Stalin had lots of noms de guerre, most famously Koba.” Jean Dibble’s imagery derives
mostly from a photograph of Osip Mandelstam, but the poem is not “about”
Mandelstam in the way, for example, Gertrude Schnackenberg’s “A Moment in
Utopia” is in her book, A Gilded Lapse of Time. But the poem, widely
associational in many ways, is certainly haunted by Mandelstam’s life and work
throughout and, in its awkward way, elegiac.
—John Matthias
—John
Matthias, Jean Dibble & Robert Archambeau
