Well, then, it's a tribute to the poem that I was entirely ignorant of who Blok was. The name rang a bell....but no one was home.... Hmmmm.
Do you have a translation of "The Twelve"?
Joanna
Paul wrote:
> Thanks to Joanna for the lift. A poem by Blok on LBO (!) .... for
> sure I would have guessed it was "The Twelve" :-)
>
> Paul
>
> [For people who don't follow this subject: Blok was one of Russia's
> most famous pre-revolutionary poets, from an aristrocratic background,
> of the Symbolist school, lyrical, steeped in mysticism, etc - a
> darling of the cultural elite of the ancien regime whose aesthete he
> epitomized. But in the first year of the Revolution he wrote a poem
> "The Twelve" that endorsed the Bolsheviks (albeit, with great
> ambiguity). Russian poets are Hollywood and Rock stars combined so
> this apparent "flip" was a major political and cultural event at a
> time when everything was in the balance. The Communist Party remained
> recognizant to the end (and, besides, Blok died before Stalin ruled).
>
> But except for this poem, and despite it, the left has had little
> interaction with Blok's work - his thoughts and style were so far from
> what they were trying to create (I know this is true for Europe, but I
> think it is also true for the U.S.). Akhmatova, to whom the the poem
> is dedicated, has gotten more interaction: perhaps because she wrote
> in a clear neo-classical style that was amenable to the realists among
> the left.]
>
>
> Bilingual translations of Blok:
> http://zhurnal.lib.ru/w/wagapow_a/blok.shtml
>
>
>
> Joanna writes:
>
>> I thought the New Yorker was incapable of printing a good poem, but I
>> was wrong. Here's one from this week. Chris will tell us how good a
>> translation it is. I think it would be better if "Gypsies" were not
>> capitalized.
>>
>> To Anna Akhmatova
>> ........
>> [by] Alexander Blok
>>
>
>
>
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