Poetry: Through a transcendent ordinariness, Inna Lisnianskaya translates her own time and place to make something universally recognisable, writes Fiona Sampson
The publication of what may well serve as a selected poems by Inna Lisnianskaya is an occasion of some importance for Anglophone readers. Lisnianskaya, who was born in 1928, belongs to the generation of Russian women, as well as of poets, who had to bear witness to many of the 20th century's most profound horrors. When her father, the army doctor with "medal upon medal", dies "dreaming of/ The gas ovens" (My father was an army doctor), his Jewish daughter is left to memorialise "his precious/ Angry life" with a dream fiddler playing "Israel's lament".
This piece from 1975 is one of the earliest poems in Far From Sodom, Daniel Weissbort's selection of Lisnianskaya's work. Earlier still, 1968's The dress condenses a drama of post-coital regret - as the narrator lies in bed with "a stranger" - into the metaphor of a dress which, hanging on its nail, "was so weak-willed,/ So utterly null,/ I felt pity for it,/ For myself, none".
That shift - accomplished with the lightest of touches - from the kind of description which makes the world anew to harsh self-evaluation, is one of Lisnianskaya's trademarks.
At times it seems a trick; a trapdoor which, once our agreement on some aspect of daily life has been secured, opens abruptly to topple us into the range and imagination of, as Weissbort says in his Translator's Preface, a "truly tragic" vision.
At other times, the lucid wholeness of Lisnianskaya's diction, as Elaine Feinstein remarks in her introduction, seems to "transcend" any particular language. She also places Lisnianskaya in the tradition of Akhmatova - lets the poet display quasi-proverbial range:
Naked thoughts live unembellished.
That saying's a lie, you can't
Twice and so forth, whatever it is.
A thousandth time I enter the same river.
And I see the same grey stone on the bottom,
The same carp with its gristly fins [ . . .]
(Naked thoughts live unembellished)
Transcendent or not, such vocal integration is achieved by translators only through serious creative work. Lisnianskaya is fortunate to have the veteran poet-translator Daniel Weissbort as hers; as she is to have that other great poet and Russian specialist, Elaine Feinstein, to introduce her work.
Feinstein particularly commends Lisnianskaya's writing on old age, and in this collection only one poem was written before the poet was 40; the lion's share are from her 60s and 70s. Some of this is doubtless the result of her marriage to another great Russian Jewish poet, Semyon Lipkin, the book's dedicatee, who appears in several affectionate love-lyrics. Though even here, At the Jaffa Gate, the trapdoor opens: "I inhaled your speech, as a bee inhales pollen,/ [ . . . ]Only you grew old, and with this came vanity -". But, finally and overwhelmingly, the tenor of this in-some-ways-posthumous book (Lipkin died in 2003) is elegiac: "This scape/Receives the pine coffin, as a car slides into a garage".
Through a transcendent ordinariness, Lisnianskaya translates her own time and place to make something universally recognisable.
Fiona Sampson is the editor of Poetry Review. Her collection The Distance Between Us was recently published by Seren
Far From Sodom. By Inna Lisnianskaya, Translated by Daniel Weissbort, with an introduction by Elaine Feinstein Arc Publications, 105pp. £8.95