The floordrobe endures
A few weeks ago, at an airport, I heard a lady instruct her kids over the phone to not use a floordrobe the coming night. A much-needed word! The next moment, I thought of a 101-year-old Russian poem: Truly, at…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
Fragments of a blog
Tag Khodasevich
“Until very recently Poles had never given much thought to Islam”?
The Polish historian Jan Gross, the longtime target of nasty attacks by right-wing populists for his work on the Jedbawne massacre, is comparing the Warsaw marchers to the pre-WWII fascists from the anti-Semitic parties led or inspired by Roman Dmowski:…
Poets as players 2
More from Khodasevich’s 1924 memoir on Bryusov quoted in the previous post. Card players inadvertently reveal their deeper selves to discerning eyes: I have played cards a lot in my day; I have seen many players, both occasional and professional. I believe that…
Poets as players
Language Hat has a post on the card game played by Grandma Lausch and her Hungarian friend Mr. Kreindl in The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. It’s called klabyash in the book while clobyosh seems to be the…
“It’s just the wasted years so close behind”
In one of his bitterest poems, In Front of the Looking Glass, Vladislav Khodasevich wondered how he, once a young dancer at summer balls in Ostankino, near Moscow, had mutated into a critic whose every riposte induces “revulsion, animus and fear”…
Khodasevich again
While I’m pondering upon Political Philosophie, here’s a translation attempt. [Edited in 2017.] The original poem dates back to the early 1920s. A half-forgotten comfort, The blessing of a night carouse! A sip — and you need nothing, A sip…
Heart vs. Soul
And thus the evil heart is tempting Psyche’s pure dreams – And Psyche, in response: “O the earthly, “Of the celestial what do you know?” Khodasevich, in the times of the New Economic Policy, which he couldn’t stand.
The beaming monad
A literal, but not quite, prosaic translation of a poem by Vladislav Khodasevich (1887, Moscow–1939, Paris) that must have something to do with Leibnitz’s monads. The Soul My soul is like a full moon: It’s cold and clear. On high,…
To the iambic tetrameter
It is the iambic tetrameter, known as the “four-foot iambus” in Russian. The author is Vladislav Khodasevich (Wladyslaw Chodasiewicz in Polish, his father’s mother tongue, with the l’s crossed), whom Nabokov rated the best Russian poet of the 20th century.…