Miroslav Nemirov. All about Poetry 43

All about Poetry 43
Miroslav Nemirov

Publication date: May 29, 2001

Ugliness

And his cult, thriving in the avant-garde.

It follows, as shown above, from the requirement of “Immeasurability” .

Also see in "A.S. Ter-Oganyan: Life, Fate and Contemporary Art" .

Madness

Also another one of the mandatory qualities that was required of a poet in the 20th century. Throughout the 20th century, all its artistic movements - symbolists, futurists, dadaists, surrealists, oberiuts - cultivated the Cult of Madness as best they could. Even the most rational Bryusov tried to portray himself in poetry as either a necrophiliac or a bestiality; no less rational in their mentality, Zabolotsky , Prigov , Sorokin , Nemirov M., that is, me, pretended with all their might to be crazy graphomaniacs, and sometimes quite successfully. Why this was necessary is difficult to say. Probably - again the Archetype: for the same thing flourished among the Greeks, and among the ancient Jews, and in the East - dervishes, in Rus' - holy fools, etc.

Well, as already said, you can’t argue against the Archetype.

Beck, Tatiana

Get used to it - unfold it - cut it -
Have a blast - melt away - don't disturb...
I'm tired of your dispatches.
I'll cause trouble.

It was not enough for the spirit to fawn!
And - like I’m drunk, trembling -
I'll throw a cobblestone at the limousine,
A homeless person driving past.

I love this city
In front of strangers, beloved a hundredfold.
... In memory of a child, like in a kennel,
Like a mongrel, I’ll beat myself up and die.

Poems by Tatyana Bek, Soviet poetess.

And here is my answer:

Head of the poetry department of the magazine "Znamya"

How does this happen, Olga Yuryevna ?
Why did you cheat me with a bonus?
This is such a bad piece of humor!
You treated me, Olga Yuryevna, like just faggots!

I read, Olga Yuryevna, a message in the newspaper,
At the end of the year, you awarded awards
In his “Banner” for the best former poem in it for the year.
I didn’t find my last name among the prize winners, Olga Yuryevna!

This is what it looks like, Olga Yuryevna, a slap in the face!
It turns out you only printed me as a mockery!
But in fact, it turns out that you don’t respect me one bit!
You consider it shit, not the writer!

I wouldn’t like, Olga Yuryevna, to say something offensive to you,
But the example of the classics teaches us,
How to react to such meanness -
What would Catullus even write in such a case?

“Valent rubbish,” he wrote to the publisher, “give back the signs!”
- Ridentem catuli ore Galicani!
That’s what he wrote directly, and then, Olga Yurievna, it was completely indecent,
There is lutum, and moecha putida, and lupanar, and all similar words!

However, I, Olga Yuryevna, still have respect for you,
I will limit myself to the above moderate for now.
In case of repetition of the indicated phenomena -
I will be forced to put the previous stanza in translation.

January - June 1998

The Latin strong expressions are taken directly from the said poem of Catullus.

That’s why there is such a date under the poem, because it turned out that I actually wrote it for six months.

Because I had to work hard.

I had to go to Ohanyan, who lives at the end of the world, to convince him to convince his students , so that one of them, who is studying at the university, would find Catullus in Latin in the university library, and rewrite the poem I needed, and then wait, when they do all this, and then, comparing the original with the translation, I chose those places from the original where, apparently, there were curses.

So here it is.

2. In Catullus, if anyone knows, the matter is as follows.

In Rome, there were real publishing houses that published “books” with the aim of enriching both the authors and the publishers themselves.

The demand for literary works was great, and enterprising people bought literate slaves (and slaves in the time of Catullus, that is, during the late Republic, were extremely cheap, Rome waged continuous and victorious wars in the East, the prey of which was the peaceful - and educated! - population those regions), they put them in a barn, forced them to rewrite new poems, and then they were sold on all corners.

The business was profitable and prestigious, publishers hovered around writers like flies around sugar (if anyone is in a misanthropic mood, let them read “around shit”), any couplet that came out of the mouth of a popular author immediately spread throughout Rome and the provinces in the hundreds and thousands of copies of wax tablets, artistically decorated. The publishers paid the poets a fee for this.

This is the essence of Catullus’s poem: he gave his new poems to read to one of his fans - she took them, and gave them away - for free! - text to all your friends. Thus depriving Catullus of his legal income! He wrote her a poetic letter, in which he tried to express his bewilderment at her similar behavior. But the times were wild, the Romans did not yet have the ability to express their thoughts coherently - much less in poetry, so what turned out was just a stream of incoherent and very dirty curses, attributing to the indicated all possible physical and moral vices and deformities.

The best thing about this poem is, of course, the quotes from Catullus.

The rest, of course, is also nothing, but the quotes - wow! Precisely because of their incomprehensibility.

- Ridentem catuli ore Galicani!

Horror! Frost on the skin! It is the incomprehensibility that makes the reader assume that there are some curses here that are so terrible that the author did not even dare to translate them. Spells and incantations!

As for T. Beck, announced in the title, she was the person who was given the prize instead of me - and precisely for the poem cited in the title.

What can I say about him? Yes, so... Well, nothing.

One might expect something - - -.

* * *

To complete the picture, here is a poem by the second prize-winner, M. Sinelnikov:

Memories of Parajanov

Only in chaos is Parajanov beautiful,
At exhibitions he is an average collagist...
Sometimes, looking sweetly at visitors,
He became affectionate and talkative.

With sinfully majestic sadness
He was foolish, deadened, fooled, delirious with glory,

He rushed about, driving the simpletons crazy.
Speaking favorably about hard labor,
Suddenly he came to life like a black icon...
But the prison left a terrible mark.

Some kind of dried wound...
He was alone in a crowded place,
And a torn screen
The ceiling seemed to be hanging down.

What integrity and what a heap!
Debris, jewelry, flowers,
Carpets, garnets, bronze dish,
A look guilty of generous poverty.

What can I say?

There’s nothing to say at all: poetry, sir...

T. Beck will still be further away.

And that, alas, is all I can say about this one. Because I know absolutely nothing more.

That is, I write here not just the truth, but the WHOLE TRUTH - absolutely everything I know, without hiding anything.

* * *

Yes!

Just in case, I’ll explain about Olga Yuryevna. There in the poem it is written “having respect for you” - and this is completely true: I really do. There will be more detail about this in the appropriate place. And the poem is nothing more than a parody of figures like Limonov, who demonstratively elevate their own dishonesty and ingratitude to a virtue. Olga Yuryevna, being an intelligent person, understood it (the poem) and was not offended.