Arseny Tarkovsky (also known as Arseny Tarkovsky, 1907–1989) was a Russian poet and translator of oriental languages. Influenced by Russian Silver Age literature in his early years, he studied at the Advanced Literary Seminar of the Poets' Association from 1925 to 1929. He fought in the war during World War II and was wounded and lost a leg. He died in 1989. After his death, he won the Usser State Prize for his poetry collection "From Youth to Full of White Hair". As a translator, Tarkovsky translated many works of Soviet minority poetry. Another important identity of Arseny Tarkovsky is the father of the famous director Andrei Tarkovsky, whose poems have appeared in his son's films many times.
This article is from the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's August 13 feature "Reflection in the Mirror - The Continuation of Tarkovsky's Father and Son". Related articles can be found in:
Theme B01 | Reflection in the Mirror – A Continuation of Tarkovsky's Father and Son
Theme B02-03 | Without his father, Arseny, there would have been no Andrei Tarkovsky
"Theme" B04 丨 Arseny Tarkovsky lagged behind the poets of his own time
"Theme" B05 丨 Arseny's poem Life is like a piece of glass held up in the hand
"Theme" B06-07 丨 Andrei Tarkovsky "God of Cinema" and the Myth of Sculpting Time
"Interview" B08 丨 He Guimei: Using "women" as a method
Successor to the Silver Age
"The soil is as heavy as the earth, and the sky is as light as the sky." This is what Russian researchers have said about Arseny Tarkovsky's poetry, which sounds extreme. In fact, it is indeed difficult to equate his writing with his time. He was too "classical" than other Soviet poets, and any attempt to find traces of collectivism and statism in his poetry would ultimately fail. "Post-Akmerian", "Neo-Traditionalist Poet", "Successor of Russian Cosmology", these titles imposed on him by the researchers made him more like a poet who lagged behind his own time; in terms of spiritual temperament, he was the successor of the "Silver Age".
Tarkovsky grew up in a traditional Russian literary environment. Although his father worked in a bank, he was a literary activist who spoke 8 languages and published poetry and novels. As a child, he followed his father frequently to participate in literary evenings organized by Balmont, Sologub, and Chevyrianin; at the beginning of his creative activities, he even called himself a futurist, imitating the style of Sologogubo, Kruchonech, Severianin and others, and wrote many "strange" poems, so that whenever he later recalled this past, he would feel ashamed of his heart.
Arseny Tarkovsky in his youth.
Despite benefiting from the literary soil of the Silver Age, the young Tarkovsky was not recognized by the poets of this circle. In 1926, he met the once-idol, symbolist poet Sologub in Leningrad. Presumably, Tarkovsky was full of anticipation when he handed over his work to his idol. But After reading them, Sologub commented that they were terrible, but that "hope should not be completely lost." The more venomous evaluation comes from the important poet osip Mandelstam of the Akmé school. He jokingly uttered a sentence that had driven Tarkovsky out of the poet's circle: "If you divide the earth in half, you are in one half and I will be in the other half." ”
We don't know what kind of blow these feedbacks have dealt to the hardened Tarkovsky. But if we read it, in 1926, at the age of 19, his first poem published, "Candles," we will find that the evaluation of his predecessors was not fair.
The little yellow tongue dodged around,
The tears of the candle flowed more and more.
It's a lot like me and your life—
The mind is burning hot, and the body is getting weaker and weaker.
To interject, Mandelstam also wrote this verse in 1912: "At bleak noon, we burn like candles", but Tarkovsky extended the analogy between candles and life. This clear and precise metaphor adds many bright colors to the poem. Later, however, his poetry ceased to be so clear; the syllables were still lively and precise, but the style began to become solemn, with insightful transparency. The social context was stripped to the point of minimalism, and like most Silver Age poets, he often borrowed characters and allusions from world cultures to "pour the blocks of the heart":
In the winter fatigue of my mother's house
Sleep, like a grain of rye in the black soil,
No longer caring about the outcome of death.
No dreams, like Lazarus in a coffin,
Sleeping in the mother's womb until spring,
A green garland is born from the coffin.
Arseny Tarkovsky's family of four.
Deviate from the main road of the development of Soviet poetry
The period of Arseny Tarkovsky's high-spirited creativity coincided with the rise of socialist realism. Among all the living poets, he fell in love with Anna Akhmatova and received her admiration and adulation. Akhmatova's friendship lasted until the poetess's death, and many Russian scholars considered her to be "Akhmatova's student," but Akhmatova once said that Tarkovsky had his own characteristics. His words and sentences are obviously much more complicated than Akhmatova's, not only the plot content pursues a strong dramatic effect, but also full of various semantics, dazzling; into his writing, the sense of picture is very strong, like the film lens, frequently replacing the image, color, emotion. No wonder the poet Semyon Lipkin once commented: "Tarkovsky deviated far from the main path of the development of Soviet poetry. Far away not only from Mayakovsky, but even from Pasternak, he immersed himself in a corner of the Silver Age. ”
Looking at Tarkovsky's biography, he is not a typical example of the criticism of the dragon scales of that era; even during his excellent translation career, he received an official invitation to translate into Russian the Georgian poetry he wrote in stalin's youth (this plan was later stopped by Stalin). However, it was for a series of reasons, including politics, that it was not until 1962 that his first collection of poems, "Before the Snow Falls," was published with a few lines of small print: the price was 14 kopecks, and the number of copies printed was 6,000. He was 55 years old.
For most of the time, Tarkovsky in the poetry world was like a guest who could not interject at the dinner table, and the long silence made him rarely existent, and the "Tarkovsky" family was famous in Russia and even the world only because of his son as a director - in the same year that the elder Tarkovsky published his first collection of poems, Andrey Tarkovsky won the "Golden Lion" in Venice for "Ivan's Childhood". In the case of Arseny Tarkovsky, he is best known as a translator of poetry, translating Turkmenistan, Armenian, Georgian and Arabic poetry into Russian on a daily basis. The energy occupied by translation undoubtedly squeezed out the time of creation, but Tarkovsky could do nothing, "I need to support my family, and my family is quite large." ”
Behind this "huge family" are Tarkovsky's three marriages. In his personal emotional life, he also "lagged behind" the moral norms of the same era, in addition to the marriage relationship, there are many women in life who have had emotional entanglements with him. We have no intention of evaluating the right and wrong of these emotions, but it must be mentioned that the old Tarkovsky, both in terms of speech and appearance, is clearly different from most of the Soviet poets from the toiling masses. His yellowed face from illness, the legs that had been fought over by war, and the eyes that never seemed to smile not only aroused the emotions of love and pity in the hearts of many contemporaries, but also added to the intellectual color of his poetry: behind his words, there was always a troubled, thinking and repentant image standing on one leg.
All things have a beginning and an end,
Anyway, I've been loved:
The first one said, "Goodbye!" "Second,
Wearing a crown on his head and sleeping in a coffin,
The third one stays with the other mind
In faint tears and laughter
Collect and store sighs,
I am a debtor, not a plaintiff.
The tone of repentance and reflection appears in many of his lyric poems, but of course this reflection does not all point to love.
Arseny and Andrei Tarkovsky.
Give everyday life a mythical character
In the stage of studying writing, Tarkovsky studied the State Higher Literature Course offered by the All-Russian Poets' Association, with the writer Georgy Senggery as his tutor. In Tarkovsky's memoir essay My Senggery, he mentions the view of literature taught by his teacher: "First of all, he taught me modernity. As I climbed too high toward the classical mountain, he grabbed my leg and dragged me to the ground. He said, 'Why don't you write a poem like this —for example, a poem about the police?' This profession has an unparalleled and important function: he exercises the power of the state at the crossroads..."
Perhaps it was this teaching that, in a way, injected new life into Tarkovsky's writing as a pure intellectual. In his writing, he does not shy away from everyday life, but they are naturally different from the objects of our conversation after dinner. Culture-centered writing ensures that Tarkovsky's poetry is not directed towards the "social context" but toward the heart. In other words, the poet gives mythology to everyday life, just as we make specimens of leaves, and he hopes to explore the essence of existence by "mythologizing" everyday affairs.
Seven pigeons – seven days of the week
After pecking at the grain, it flew away,
As the successor of these pigeons
Some of the others flew towards us.
We live, counting sevens one by one,
The last group consisted of only five,
And our dilapidated backyard
What a shame it would be if it were changed to the sky:
Here our grey pigeons grunt,
Pacing around in circles, with remorse,
Peck at the fragments of asphalt
Sip the rainwater from the ground at the funeral feast.
The pigeons pecking at the courtyard, the occasional number "seven", due to the words in the Bible, are given a role similar to god's messenger. From here, the reader once again enters the world created by the circle of poets of the Silver Age—reaching spiritual heights that are beyond the reach of the flesh through the divinity that occasionally appears in everyday life.
Tarkovsky is indeed a man behind the times, a widow of a bygone era. Still, the poet whom Akhmatova called the "latecomer" does not seem to be confused by this identity that is not commensurate with the times, writing in a poem: "I will summon any age, / Enter it, build a house in it ... I am content with my own immortality so that my blood will flow through the centuries. / For a reliable corner of lasting warmth / I am willing to pay for my life, / When the flying needle of life is no longer / Lead this thread of mine in the world. ”
Arseny's poems + Andrea's photography
Bright day
The stone lay next to a jasmine plant.
Under this stone is a treasure.
Father stood on a path.
It was such a bright day.
Silver poplar blossoms,
Rose, behind it —
Vines of roses,
Juicy grass.
I never did that again
That kind of happiness.
There is no way back there
Tell those who can't say it,
The garden in that paradise
Filled with what a satisfying heart. Bright day
Filled with what a satisfying heart.
vertical
We are perpendicular to each other,
One is the opposite of the other,
It was as if we were not used to this room
Living on different planes of it,
We lost each other in the crowd
Each came out in a different direction
Carefully held, like a dream,
Window glass bought from shops.
We reflect everything
Half a sentence can understand the other party,
But that's just understanding, not understanding each other.
Life, like a piece of glass, is held up in the hand.
When we squander time, quarrel
In two hostile languages,
Those rainbow wheels in the dark
Walk along the wall in the hallway.
Just like forty years ago...
As it was forty years ago,
That hears footsteps when the heart is heard
Tremor, the window facing the garden of the house,
Candles and myopic eyes,
No guarantees, no guarantees
oath. Ringing bells in the city.
It's getting dark. The rain is falling, dark
Wet wild grapes
Against the wall, like a homeless man,
Like forty years ago.
Small red lights stand in the snow...
Small red lights stand in the snow.
Inexplicably, I don't remember much about it.
Maybe it's a lonely leaf.
Maybe, it's some fragment of a bandage,
Perhaps, it was a red-bellied gray finch
Fly to the white wilderness to spread joy,
Perhaps, it was a cursed day
The misty sunset teased me.
actor
It's all over, the bell rings,
On the stage of a dilapidated theater
Dull lilac
Along the upward slats took away my sorrows.
I stood drunk and lonely,
Like a beggar holding his own hat,
And my dear one uses a rag of oil
Wipe the color of the poppy from your cheeks.
I despised your art.
You say, what else can I compare to my life?
If someone is on the wheel of a fatal event
Played my part?
Where are you, my happy twin?
It seems that you have taken me away,
Because here is a different old man
Argue with fate in front of the mirror.
The stars dance in front of the constellation...
The stars dance in front of the constellations,
Water droplets dancing on bells,
Wasps danced and played the flute,
David danced in front of the Holy Temple.
The birds weep for a piece of their wings,
Those who have been caught in the fire weep on the ashes,
The mother wept above the empty cradle,
Hard stones wept under the soles of their feet.
Written and translated | Zhang Meng
Edited | Gongzi Zhang Jin Liu Yaguang
Proofreading | Xue Jingning