Let's Bellyache!
A book review
By Matt Gonzalez
Suicide
Circus: Selected Poems by Alexei Kruchenykh (Copenhagen & Los
Angeles: Green Integer, 2001). Translated from the Russian by Jack
Hirschman, Alexander Kohav, and Venyamin Tseytlin, with an Introduction
by Jack Hirschman and a Preface and Notes by Guy Bennett.
Poet and translator Jack Hirschman brings us the first
single-volume poetry collection in English of one of the central figures
of Russian Futurism. Affectionately called the "bogeyman of Russian
literature," Alexei Kruchenykh (pronounced Crew-chon-ik) didn't so much
open the door of modern poetry as kick it off its hinges and toss it to
the side. Revered as a great experimenter and provocateur in his day,
Kruchenykh trail-blazed the early 20th century literary frontier like
some kind of Russian Magellan, charting a course into the poetry of
sound. A contemporary and Futurist colleague of Vladimir Mayakovsky and
Velimir Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh was hailed by Pasternak as "standing on
the edge – a living fragment of art's imaginable frontier."
Kruchenykh was, with Khlebnikov, the leading
practicioner of "zaum" poetry, that is, poetry comprised of made-up
words – an idea believed to have been suggested to him by the painter
David Burliuk in late 1912. Zaum, also known as transrational poetry,
was meant to go beyond express intelligibility without devolving into
nonsense – it was intelligible in an implied, innate way, because it
relied on the roots of words and their sounds to suggest meaning in the
poem. By liberating the poem from actual words which, standing alone,
were perhaps less relevant to the socio-political upheavals of the time,
the Futurists embarked on a radical poetics that complemented the events
of the day.
Kruchenykh and his colleagues anticipated Hugo Ball's
sound poetry (klanggedicht), first performed at the Caberet
Voltaire in 1916, which combined sounds whose meaning, or
meaninglessness, was equal in any language. Interestingly, it is
believed that the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky read Ball some of
Khlebnikov's poetry in Zurich in 1916. If true, this places Dada's
language experiments in a direct lineage from those of the Russian
Futurists. Kruchenykh's transrational language clearly was ahead of its
time – pushing the limits of understood poetics. Huddled between Cubism
and Dadaism (generally said to have been launched in 1907 and 1916,
respectively) the various strands of Russian Futurism made great strides
toward a modernist agenda by exploring color, sound, design, and
constructions.
The translation of Suicide Circus was begun by Hirschman
and Alexander Kohav in 1976. Hirschman, himself a poet who has
experimented with verbal-visual works and who comes out of a Russian
declamatory tradition, has a familiarity with the Russian language and
much in common with Kruchenykh. In addition to translating many books by
Russian authors (including Mayakovsky, Andrei Voznesensky, Robert
Rodzhdestvensky, and Natasha Belyaeva), he translated an essay on
Kazimir Malevich which appeared in the well-known Los Angeles County
Museum catalogue of the 1980 Russian Futurist show there. He is also the
subject of Henry Hills' short experimental film "Kino Da!" (4 min.,
16mm, 1981) which shows Hirschman reading a poem he composed in Russian
(which Hills has edited through a cut-up method to resemble a zaum
poem). Like Kruchenykh, Hirschman's books have experimented with
facsimiles of his own handwriting and with hand-written one-of-a-kind
works (i.e., Yod (London: Trigram Press, 1966) and Soledeth (Venice: Q
Press, 1971)). Hirschman has over 100 titles to his credit, many of them
self-published, and he has collaborated with many artists including
Wallace Berman, Dean Stockwell, George Herms, Russel Tamblyn, and Agneta
Falk. Likewise, Kruchenykh, who published 200 books during his lifetime
(though he preferred to use the term "productions" when describing his
works), hand-made many of them and collaborated with artists for cover
designs and illustrations. In fact, the list of artists Kruchenykh
worked with reads like a who's who of the Russian avant-garde: Natalia
Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Kliun, Kirill &
Ilya Zdanevich, Maria Sinyakova, Igor Terentiev, and Kruchenykh's own
wife Olga Rozanova.
Hirschman's introduction recalls fondly how he and Kohav,
a dissident poet from the Soviet Union, worked on the translations at
the Caffè Trieste and Vesuvio's Café in North Beach, and how they would
burst out in laughter at Kruchenykh's many puns and word games.
Subsequently, Hirschman solicited Venya Tseytlin, a young Russian poet
from Moscow, to translate some of the later poems of Kruchenykh that
comprise the last quarter of the book. At a March 20th reading at City
Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, Tseytlin rightfully observed that
Kruchenykh's use of invented words and phrasings resembles a kind of
Russian hip-hop or rap, when one considers how he crafted language.
The poem "Dir byl shchyl" is probably the best known
zaum poem. Guy Bennett, who supplied the notes to Suicide Circus, goes
so far as to call it the archetype zaum poem and notes that Kruchenykh
enjoyed stating that it was more Russian than all of Pushkin's poetry.
Such hyperbole was common among the Futurists. The first part begins in
a strictly zaum manner and is then followed by sections that fuse
"sound" elements with pre-dada/surrealist tendencies which together form
a new type of rationality in the poem. The following translation is by
Hirschman and Kohav:
Dir bul shchyl
three poems written
in my own language
deferring from others',
their words have no
definite meaning
1. Dir bul shchyl
ubeshshchur
skum
vy so bu
r l ez
2
Frot fron yt
I don't argue I'm in love
black language
the wild tribe had it
too
3
Ta sa mae
kha ra bau
saem siyu oke
rainoke mola
al
The flowing moon
Now looks out
Now hides
A quarrel – shhh!
Lustra's tearing the
stormclouds apart
that one's dressed flowing-cloudlike
bread's out on the table
cabbage soup
They say a nude woman's
beautiful in the moonlight
The voice is deaf faces are red
Snacking mushrooms drinking
Spattering saliva scurrying
Ah where can I skedaddle to get away from you
The sky cleverly covering
with dove-blue grey rags
the whole night Busy with caviar
the sky's choking and smelling of
the color of dove and udders
O love me pity
me
Eitherway I'm bleeding
me and you
Eitherway I'm already crucified
by the steppe and the willows
(First published in Kruchenykh's Pomade, 1913)
The year before "Dir bul shchyl" was published in
Pomade, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, and Burliuk published the
manifesto "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste." This essay gives insight
into what these young men believed they were doing. Though they
themselves were criticized for being unintelligible, the Futurists
struck back in kind, arguing that traditional poetics were irrelevant –
and yes – unintelligible: "The past is too tight. The Academy and
Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics. Throw Pushkin,
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity."
Specifically, they stated their intention "[t]o enlarge the scope of the
poet's vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (Word-novelty)."
Mayakovsky, in particular, later underscored the relevance of placing
Futurist poetics within the context of the modern city: "The poetry of
Futurism is the poetry of the city, of the contemporary city –
Feverishness is what characterizes the tempo of the contemporary world.
In the city there are no flowing, measured lines of curvature: angles,
fractures, zig-zags are what make up the profile of the city.
In his introduction to Roman Jakobson's memoir, My
Futurist Years, Stephen Rudy notes that the Futurists generally worked
to free language in the poem from referentiality, preferring to focus on
the form of the composition in much the way Cubism focused on the medium
itself. Kruchenykh said as much himself in a 1913 essay: "Futurist
painters like to use parts of the body, cross-sections; futurist poets
use chopped words, half-words, and their whimsical, intricate
combinations." This approach is evident in poems such as "Dir bul shchyl."
By distorting language through the infusion of unfinished words, or
sounds and roots of words, and by promoting the fragment, the Futurists
challenged the normal way language was understood. Sound and
understanding, or sense, was essentially recast. The resulting product
was at times so estranged from normal language that words and phrasings
lost their common or habitual meanings and created a new sensation out
of the collective fragments of sounds. The reconfiguration of language
then is what Kruchenykh was pursuing. It was not nonsense, but rather a
different sense created out of the same base habitual language comes out
of. Zaum, which means literally "beyond sense," disrupted traditional
grammar and became nothing less than the vehicle for the pursuit of a
new language and hence a new poetics.
The Green Integer imprint, of Sun & Moon books, is
illustrated with reproductions of the various ephemeral book covers
published in early editions of Kruchenykh's work. These illustrations
make apparent how Kruchenykh's works were first presented and the full
nature of his experimentation. The series itself is impressive. It
includes hard-to-find and never-before-published shorter works in
English translation by such writers as Garcia Lorca, Huidobro, Celine,
and Gellu Naum. Although small in size (6 x 4 in.), each packs a punch.
Publisher Douglas Messerli deserves credit for launching this series.
Reading Kruchenykh today, one is struck by how his
legacy differs from that of other "avant-garde-ists." As a general
matter, it can be said that avant-garde movements don't age well. That
is to say, with the passing of years, once these movements have been
canonized, it is often hard to conjure up what was so radical about them
in the first place. The photomontage work of John Heartfield or the
abstract canvases of Franz Kline are good examples. Each dramatically
changed our culture and yet today one can hardly look at a magazine
without seeing commercialized examples of each. But Kruchenykh's work is
different. He was "so out there" that the label of ordinariness or
normalcy never attaches to his work. And this will likely remain true as
we approach the centennial of his first zaum experiments.
Kruchenykh is relevant to a 21st-century
audience because his spirit reached back to the primitive, though he hid
his efforts in the discourse of modernity. He has been called Futurist,
Neocubist, pre-Dadaist, but ultimately his language experiments and the
appeal to sound within his poems were about how to find the base of what
language is, and in that manner they were no less about examining what
it is to be human and what it means to communicate in a society. If
Kruchenykh's poetry is sometimes crude, it can be said that he made up
for it in daring. Whoever explores this volume will see that he
fulfilled the spirit of the avant-garde many times over. Nevertheless,
Kruchenykh himself cautioned against a diet of only the zaum: "Transrational
poetry is a good thing, but it's like mustard – one's appetite can't be
satisfied with mustard alone."
This small volume will usher in a new appraisal of
Kruchenykh's work. Who can say what impact the Russian Futurist really
made? Mayakovsky's remark about how the group got its name could just as
easily speak to their legacy: "It was the newspapers that gave us the
name ‘Futurists.’ Anyway, why get all worked up. It's funny! If Vavila
had shouted: ‘Why am I not Eugene?’ what difference would it make?"
Matt Gonzalez is a member of the SF Board of
Supervisors. He received a B.A. from Columbia College in Comparative
Literature and Political Theory.
Other Poems from Suicide Circus, Translated by
Hirschman & Kohav:
[Untitled poem]
for the leading Petrograd artist O. Rozanova
took a needle the length of three streets
it penetrated without pain
imperceptibly killed
mankind felt forgetfulness sort-of
that's a glass needle once connected benares and
jerusalem asses and people walked on it
but brought to us on the way it lost its features
only its causticity
spasmodic proprietors didn't hope to profit by
remained
ABANDONED ON THE STREET NOT CARING
ABOUT THE REST
and the damage was extensive and lean people changed
their direction
passing by the gate they didn't stop going
RIGHT ON FURTHER ON DOWN and flat backs
all seemed solemn and in fact the signboards and
backs were alike some KIND OF HOLIDAY
WALKED ON
THE BACKS THE SHOULDERS CARESSINGLY
then uliana rose and began begging from the passing
streets
wheels so that they didn't go straight reminding that the
needle
wounds in whatever field house
I sketched the light ways the street I knew cer-
tainty in nothing is so bored as in getting the day
going to hurry back
yet still the backs came back and the broken legs didn't
recognize since my eyes flew away and uliana was called
although they received ivans that was hullabaloo
WHO GOT UNDER THE WET CURTAINS
covering the windows who
got lost among the footprints of the runners
then they brought into an alien house where the
familiar was
like a wild beast flashing by
with four legs
a paunch
lilyfeathers outlined on a yellowing bottom
the meaning reminding everyone of yesterday and be-
fore that of
what muscovites have forgotten here
they brought along but the river melted and her track was
white-blue the steppes of deserts and a pal piped below...
and the locomotive running by trampled everything and
the lake
volatillywhite
R L M K T ZH G R B V M P M SH
(First published in Kruchenykh's Let's Bellyache,
1913)
[Untitled poem]
Dine on art,
the beef
of Reubens –
Eat the loaf
Of Cezan!
Watch out,
Don't hog,
You
Won't be satisfied!
(First published in Kruchenykh's Learn Art, 1917)
Hum of Hillclimbing Locomotive
boro
choro
two
one
hubb
sham
ga
gish!
Boro sorko ba
(First published in Kruchenykh's Learn Art, 1917)
Immortality
Mtsekh
Khitsi
Mukh
Ts l
Lam
Ma
Ts k e
(First published in Kruchenykh's Learn Art, 1917)
Belching
Like a gander
kasha-stuffed
I'm funked out
a goose is nearby
Masha
with a red snout
whispering of love
(First published in Kruchenykh's Learn Art, 1917)
Suicide Circus
SARDINIAN's benefit night in a horseman's fur cap
who straddled the gentle-bodied colt
up to the spine of the arm and spurs dug in
with a dead-o-DADO
the horse sighs and running waits for the finish
SMOORG
MOORGLA
HUP-LA!
HUP-LA!
A whip for the bored
animals
hung in the artist's hand,
the tumble of Sapphire,
the pedal of CLEOPATRA growing husky
damp sawdust's flowing from behind the wall
SMOORGLA
MOOERE
KER-FLOP!
KER-FLOP!
The circus got boring as well with screaming and
whirling
he savored its bowels like a spongerag
the planks of corset are sawn, the lame lioness is mooing
green rubbish flying in the air
like a little sardine from a
SUICIDED COCK
KRA-ASH!
KRUM-BL!
(First published in the "Melnikova anthology,"
compiled by Zdanevich, 1919)
[Untitled]
They fondled me
They loved me up
– The chainerruppers –
In Brazil
the DAMES
in a green car
. . . . . . . . .
. . . .
. .
and I went slack
oilslickenny
oilsli . . . . . . . . .
. .
ilsli!
riken. . . . . . . .
.
. .
(First published in the "Melnikova anthology,"
compiled by Zdanevich, 1919)
[Untitled]
Clearly in femininese tenderly and kindlY
She convinces that I'm a talent
They'll serve me with menues at table
And everyone will siplap as if the finest supper
A gang of elegant masticators
Will attack my little vealy leg
I'll toss them a bunch of goldfish smiles
They'll dance till morning, astonished, to the clattering
of spoons, no joke
Sopping up the booze of my blossoming shirt
From which suspenders a redwood sofa is hanging
And I'll stand in the corner wailing with admiration
and gratitude
and the WHOLE CAFE-RESTAURANT
will join in...
(First published in the "Melnikova anthology" compiled
by Zdanevich, 1919)
City Summer
Anticyclone...
SW(el)terr-ing...
Africa–
Moscow.
The messianic little lemon
's dried
Pussycats are withering
On the sourturned asphalt...
I'm hardly crawling...
costume tur-n-ed
into a pancake!
Exploded,
a
watermelon's burned up!
littlefish
turn into crumbs,
the fountain's gone dry
dust! dust! dust!
The street's a suffocating oven,
the sidewalk a hotpipeline,
Greases sizzling in the little alley
–y–y–y...
No, kvass won't quench it,
cockroaches everywhere!
waffles from Akhrika!
– soapywhite
innertubulules
climb...
Icecream!
...ughborn
–
a poison!
From the shopwindow to the stoop
one can't hardly craw-el.
Hot griddles turn into fingers,
the microbsparrowwings of a consumptive,
cabbagestumps...
The aftomobile the
bubbleshafter
burliukspputts
with yellow jitters
I–'m g-gasping...
A blastfurnace
in the
head!
House
bom-m...
BOM-M
A solar NOONDAY bomb
At the brow
B-Y-KH!
ZH-ZHY' ZH'-ZH'!
A roisted eggplant
the leftovers!
(First published in Kruchenykh's Calendar, 1926)
Armenian Summer
Air-evany
Su-et-tyhot...
On the rawd
they're drilling
kellosiz,
zornz,
stones...
Hey, sparrao, sparrao
lowan me 100 rubles
to buyee a truck ov
Sne-ohw...
Tree naggies're
in the square
in de middl
an ess
catalebzee–
laow-ing!
The ovven
the pott
a steamy, fedderquilt–
My paad!
–I'm ranning
onto de yalley!
Vv-a-a!... Tavern!
Gulim-djan
wineskins!
Orman organ
Hariman-cha
...Vye-ye-ye!
An oronj with mustard
The wine's bittear
ink!
Shashlik
oglplant
poniard
the throat.
Play
the Lute
the argan
mourning...
My soul
An overdone hen
wollowz under the benches,
the cross become a rustyyowl!
Ai,ai, look at my eye, Khachitoor
fyer above
fyer aside,
fyer all araound...
in the middi: boots!
Where'll you go?
Whom woll you say?
The sea's faroff,
Ararat alooft,
The droshkydriva'z zeeting on the coachbox
duzzen zaying anyzing
tung iz blaaack
az
eggdplant.
(First published in Kruchenykh's Calendar, 1926)
Autumn (Landscape)
A black highway came together with the asphalt of the
sky
And the rain rose fence-like
Noway out of the planks' watery captivity
–S-s-s-s-sh-sh-sh
Houses are draughting
And a steel huskyvoicing grin's spreading!
And a horseman silently comes down from the sky
(The cold of a metallic soul will pressure)
And is swaddled by slushy love
The world blows deadly
Spasms with him
Bubbles–
(Gurgle) pulse... bulldz... bulldzbubbles.
(First published in Kruchenykh's Calendar, 1926)
References
The Avant-garde in Russia, 1910-1930. Ed. Stephanie
Barron & Maurice Tuchman. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
1980.
Burliuk, David, Alexey Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky,
and Velimir Khlebnikov. "Slap in the Face of Public Taste," 1912, in
Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestos, 1912-1918. Trans. Anna
Lawton & Herbert Eagle, ed. Anna Lawton. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1988.
Gurianova, Nina. Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and
the Early Russian Avant-garde, 1910-1918. Trans. Charles Rougle.
Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2000).
Jakobson, Roman. My Futurist Years. Trans.
Stephen Rudy & ed. Bengt Jangfeldt. NY: Marsilio, 1992.
Janecek, Gerald. "Zaum" & "Futurism." In
Dictionary of the Avant-gardes, by Richard Kostelanetz. Chicago: a
cappella books, 1993.
Khlebnikov, Velimir. Collected Works, Vol. 1:
Letters and Theoretical Writings. Trans. Paul Schmidt & ed.
Charlotte Douglas. Cambridge and London: Harvard University, 1987.
Markov, Vladimir. Russian Futurism: A History.
Berkeley & London: Univ. of California Press, 1968.
Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Listen! Early Poems, 1913-1918.
Trans & intro. Maria Enzensberger. San Francisco: City Lights
Books, 1991.
