The poem tells a simple enough story, one with which virtually anyone who has visited Russia over the past 15 years will identify. A man is walking down a Moscow Street when he sees a group of young men approaching, “apparently drunk, shouting a song.” His immediate response – to run – is thwarted by the logistics of the situation. Then he realizes that this is not a gang of skinheads who are about to beat him unconscious (or worse) precisely because they are singing in Yiddish. The recognition transforms the event itself as well as the broader set of implications & questions for the speaker. These young men, he imagines, are likely not to stay in Russia, but to move elsewhere – Israel, the U.S., Western Europe – leaving the streets of that nation to precisely the kinds of drunken young thugs the speaker fears most, those for whom there are no alternatives. The poem ends with a lengthy plea to the young people of Russia who might best represent its future to not abandon the country.

 

The title of the poem is “The Wasteland (A Translation)” & I found it over the weekend in At Andy’s, George Stanley’s book of poems from the late 1990s published by New Star Books. In spite of its title, I read the poem initially as a text of George Stanley’s, as surely it is. My first thought was that Stanley was presenting a parable that reflects back on the poem by T.S. Eliot, a poem whose role in American poetry was at once unique & oppressive at the time that Stanley, who will reach 70 next year, was coming into poetry in the late 1950s.

 

The title itself should have told me otherwise – Stanley would not intentionally conflate the three words of Eliot’s title into two.* Years ago, I recall a wonderful argument that Stanley had with Mark Linenthal at San Francisco State over whether or not the shift from an a to a the (or vice versa) “made a difference” in a poem. Stanley’s position, as I recall it, was that such a shift alone rendered the work a “totally different poem.” Linenthal’s position was that this wasn’t such a big deal. At least once I heard this ongoing debate carried out in raised voices in the corridor outside the Poetry Center. Students at the time took sides – as much as I’ve always liked Linenthal, a great deal indeed, then & now, I was clearly a Stanleyite. Or, more accurately, a Stanleyist.** In any event, nobody who ever took such a position is going to knowingly go hardcopy with a soggy version of Eliot’s hegemonic title.

 

Actually, I was through the poem before the title, which I merely glanced at, rather than read – an old habit I’ve discussed here before – sank in. Ignoring thus the obvious, I envisioned Stanley, a youthful looking gay man in his 60s, experiencing precisely the scenario depicted in the poem. As a narrative, it’s completely reasonable. So that it’s only when I get to the end of the poem and see it clearly marked “Adapted from the Russian of Arkadi Tcherkassov.” Slap of palm against forehead!

 

Just to exacerbate the point & to suggest just how much Stanley is not in any sense Tcherkassov, the poem was in fact translated not from the Russian as such but “through the French of Lionel Meney.” Like the samizdat version of Derrida’s Of Grammatology I once saw in Russia, translated not from the French but from Gayatri Spivak’s English, Stanley’s text functions like a literary version of Chinese whispers or telephone. I have no idea what might have been lost in this chain. Certainly any hint of the speaker as “Other” from the translator has been collapsed. “The Wasteland” is very visibly a poem by George Stanley, regardless of where & how he arrived at it.

 

I don’t know Tcherkassov as a poet &, when I hunt around for him on the Internet, trying out multiple possible variations of his names – Cyrillic doesn’t move smoothly into the Roman alphabet – I come across only a single mention, a characterization of him in French on Radio Canada from the year 2000 as a “canadologue marginalisé d’une Académie des sciences appauvrie,” a marginalized Canadoloist of an impoverished Academy of Science. The description is ironic, in that one can see Tcherkassov as a serious Russian patriot in this poem.

 

Reminders such as this are useful – always – at the gap between the “I” of the text & that of its author, whether we envision it here as being Stanley or Tcherkassov.*** Rereading the poem, it’s full of touches, such as the breaks in this opening stanza, that are identifiably Stanley:

 

I’m going to tell you a story –

but it’s not really a story –

it’s not all in the past –

it’s happening now.

 

Finally the poem settles into what I would characterize – in a literal, rather than “new age” sense – as a transpersonal space, the “I” ultimately serving as a shell inhabited by more than one person. There’s an irony in this, given that At Andy is presented as being very much a literature of referentiality, “reflecting,” as the anonymous jacket blurb puts it, “his idea that a poem after all about something” & quoting Stanley:

 

What’s wrong is somehow

          I think there’s something to write about – instead of writing.

 

That Stanley would characterize this as “wrong” comes very close to that crowded “I” in “The Wasteland.”

 

 

 

 

 

* One of those typos one sees far too often in the world of American poetry, like the misspelling of names, Ginsburg for Ginsberg, Olsen for Olson, Zukovsky for Zukofsky.

 

** Stalinists were forever calling Trotskyists “Trotskyites.” Trots rejected the label because of its parallel with the binary “socialist/socialite.”

 

*** I’m discounting Meney here not because he didn’t play a key role in the creation of this work – he clearly did – but because he sits at neither end of the chain, neither at the front with Tcherkassov, nor at the end with Stanley. Meney teaches in the language & linguistics department of the University of Laval in Quebec.