Literature in Translation |

“The Wasp of Time,” “A Glass Dress” & “Peephole”

Translator’s Note 

Ilya Kutik was born in Lviv, Ukraine and moved to Moscow in 1977. His poetic mentor was the poet Arsenii Tarkovsky (father of the filmmaker, Andrey).  In 1990, Kutik was brought to the U.S. by Allen Ginsberg for his first reading tour in North America and was supported by Joseph Brodsky for a professorship at Northwestern University (1993), where he is a professor of Russian poetry and film.

Kutik’s poems have been translated into 19 languages (including volumes published in Danish, Swedish, German, English, and Japanese) and are included in the major Russian and translated anthologies of Russian poetry of the 20thcentury. He is one of the founders of the Russian Metarealist group/school of poets. With audacity, wit and allusiveness, the Metarealists have explored a variety of metaphor that defies reality yet can be understood and even visualized — such as “it’s not the driver’s eyes, but rather the car’s headlights that see the road at night.” (For a brief account of meta realism, click here.

He is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry in Russian: Pentathlon of the Senses (Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 1990); Swedish Poets: Translations and Variations (Moscow: Mir Kultury, MP Fortuna LTD, 1992); Odysseus’ Bow (St. Petersburg: Sovetskii Pisatel, 1993); Ode on Visiting the Belosaraisk Spit on the Sea of Azov (bilingual edition, New York: Alef, 1995); Death of Tragedy, in 2 volumes: Persian Letters (vol. 1) and Civil Wars (vol. 2) (Moscow: Kommentarii, 2003); and Epos (Moscow: Russkii Gulliver, 2011).

Kutik also published three collections of essays in English — The Ode and the Odic: Essays on Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Mayakovsky (Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1994); Hieroglyphs of Another World: On Poetry, Swedenborg, and Other Matters (2000), and Writing as Exorcism: The Personal Codes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol (2004; the latter two both published by Northwestern University Press); and a monograph on the contemporary Russian artist duo Igor & Marina (Skira, 2016).  — Reginald Gibbons

 

 

/     /     /

 

 

The Wasp of Time

 

1

 

Wasp — you polisher of window-panes —

what’s gotten into you to make you jail

yourself under Time’s puppet-cupola

and vituperate there, buzzing in your cell?

 

You’re stinging like a radioactive

hour, as the idea of a reluctant cuckoo

erratically pecks the luminescent digits

into the night-face of the clock.

 

You’re trembling like the O-contour of a nil,

in the cuckoo’s tiny slit of a beak —

tweezed between clock-hands that blindly cake-

slice the round face as they recall

 

their terminus: according to the scheme,

they both attain the final fraction of the clock

and in their sixty-second clasp

they warm up an ice-cold seed of Time.

 

Tell me, wasp — aren’t you the one so keen

to keep the clock-hands on their bee-line,

the one who got their implicit Latin going

with your buzzing winding-key?

 

No, not that Latin (in which bronze shields

have clanged in battle, or even when Horace

dropped his and fled the field

and it rang like a tintinnabulary chorus),

 

not like the sound of a shield, but this one:

as unearthly as the hoplite shield itself,

an aspis where the light has made little pocks —

a clock-hand backstitch of the minute marks.

 

 

 

2

 

And what’s the name of the moist thread

that can easily penetrate from above

an ancient Greek roof of wood,

and the heavy joists thereof?

 

O how Danaë sighs and moans

when between her chaste thighs

that doubled thread slips in

and the tiny knot catches, holds and vivifies!

 

How could she have understood

for whose semen she’d provided a reception?

For what she thought she’d heard

at the instant of conception

 

was a faraway wasp that had languished

as the captive of Time, and now was sweetly,

pitifully zinging on the axis of its eager wishes

till it unraveled completely:

 

it’s the humming spindle of Zeus!

And the thick gold thread still wants

a hundredfold revenge on Kronos

for having given the son offense.

 

Finally there’s no more clock-face — no oodles

of hours; only the hands remain —

like knitting needles

poking out of a big ball of Time.

 

 

      Ah! tout est bu! Bathylle, as-tu fini de rire?

                                                —Paul Verlaine

 

The wasp’s soccer-striped sock,

footed inside a stray kick — now watch! —

could never boot a hot leaden semen-sphere back

out of Time’s mandrake-crotch.

 

This ball will answer each kick with a clink,

since, the way the future sees it,

the past is chained by its craving for drink

to a hangover-goblet of zero.

 

We’re all drinking now from gaping O’s,

and when a clock strikes midnight, hour of the lifer,

the glass, like gala La Scala sopranos,

shapes its mouth in an elliptical cypher.

 

We drink from the gaping goblets,

from naughts poured full.

Bathylle, here come the Gauls!

Give us more alcohol!

 

Latin — we don’t have a clue!

But contradicting evil and threats of funerals,

at this ticking round table we rule

like golden knights of the numerals.

 

There is no clock-face above us —

we ourselves are the cusp

of our heavens. And once you drink,

up floats the self-drowned, all-conquering wasp.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

A Glass Dress

 

 

Would you mind trying on this

                                    gown, my dear,

from the seventeenth century?  You see, my idea

                                    is this: the dress

complicates things, like armor —

                                    Lancelot’s mail:

 

intricate with lots of wires, it con-

                                    catenates the big deal

out of all the little parts to make the whole —

                                    which (as only

yesterday we happened to be

                                    reading) becomes

 

the one and the other: an even bigger deal —

                                    the glass of the dress

is something like the well-

                                    known slides

a microscope points to … and also pendants

                                    (for instance,

 

of this bedroom chandelier); and — finally —

                                    a pale body

should be translucent, among all bodies …

                                    and thus these female

bodies make what’s crystalline

                                    and what’s blurred agree …

 

Through glassfur like this, one can

                                    catch a sharp glimpse

of neither skin nor shape, for

                                    it fully wraps

the body — like white smoke that fumes

                                    from the crackling kindling

 

around those candid lower pendants:

                                    despite all decent

precautions they spark! —

                                    and begin to arc

and blaze yellow and blue–but not

                                    enough to flout

 

the rule of white smoke; and the corruscating colors

                                    do not conflate

this fruit of fashion with nature itself, even

                                    though it’s out

among trees that this fashion

                                    show occurs:

 

the willow (a microscope, a hunchback)

                                    can scrutinize

the dress of slides … but under it — what’s

                                    there? Our eyes

can only guess.  The eye — organ of

                                    the imagination, can theorize,

 

especially in autumn, the circlets

                                    of nipples, in aspect

rhyming them with aspen leaves: form and hue,

                                    pores and capillaries.  Yet

nipples aren’t leaves, even though

                                    they quiver,

 

and they’re beating against the glass.  But now

                                    the glass, philosophically,

is different: what sets up a boundary here

                                    is the one (so don’t forget:

on its own, the one exists already).

                                    All right — someone might hazard

 

asking: But what’s the dress for? Answer:

                                    Nothing!  Here’s Charles

the Brave of Burgundy striding into Lille,

                                    seeing three lily-

maidens, each in a glassdress — and only one red apple!

                                    A witness wrote in prose:

 

“This Judgment of Paris caused the public

                                    to go quite mad

with excitement at the idea that here,

                                    this time, not only he

but everyone was a bona fide Paris —

                                    comparing Athena, Hera,

 

and Aphrodite: yet our winner was decided

                                    not in advance

by Homer, but by everyone’s guessing at what

                                    was hidden

underneath … and each voted for his favorite!”

                                    In those days,

 

one who’s no virgin would go to the altar veiled

                                    in white, while

a virgin would be veilless and crowned with a bridal

                                    wreath.  But in a glassdress,

nothing is in fact transparent–Whose body is

                                    beautiful? —

 

since for the pupil in the chalk-white of the eye

                                    to guess virginity

through glasscloth is impossible: chalk

                                    only crumbles

under such strain …  Thus, you see, I

                                    am dressing you in exactly

 

the same way those men undressed the women!

                                    Glass always is

an obstacle, but you — you’re as slender as the straw

                                    in the center of a glass. On the axis

within each of us, and the great one out there, too,

                                    our futures are spinning.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Peephole

To T.K.

 

At the pinking of your left nipple,

I would look into your heart as if through a peephole.

 

But now what do I see?—

The old life-light of you shows

it’s occupied, your blinking heart keeps

descending downward to darkness.

Like pomegranate juice thickening in a glass

your left nipple keeps darkening with outrage.

Your heart slams its door and you clang

its keys as you lock yourself inside your cage.

 

I could stand on your landing all night —

but it doesn’t matter whether

I ring your bell.  There’s no more trust.

Beyond your door

I can just hear shuffling feet.

I can just see a distant shadow

through the darkened peephole.

It’s so hard to make out that it defeats

my glance — which, after a moment’s delay,

reflects back with a slight patina of decay.

 

A while ago I could observe you only from afar

but now in that very same nebulous ocular

I see the answering eye:

pressed to it, filling the peephole,

it joins my curious pupil

and we glare at each other, you and I.

 

At your door I’m tired, at your door I’m dazed —

through the peephole I still sense your heart’s gaze.

It won’t let me part, it won’t let me inside —

so we’ll stand here like this and we’ll look

at each other this way today, tomorrow, forever.

O my enemy, mirror-eye!

Contributor
Ilya Kutik

Ilya Kutik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Northwestern University. A founder of Russian Metarealism, he has also published seven full-length poetry collections that have been translated into 19 languages.

Contributor
Reginald Gibbons

Reginald Gibbons‘ most recent book of poems is Renditions (Four Way Books, 2021). In addition to 10 other poetry collections, he has published fiction, translations, literary criticism, creative nonfiction, and book reviews. He is a Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University.

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