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
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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.
3
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!