Hunchback

...and, like a cupola, the ceiling swelled up...

- Anna Akhmatova

He's ambassador and bishop of the twisted backbone,

Crazed as antique crockery, he's a bird-bud,

A flower-fledgling, a mum mediator between

This world and a miracle, swollen at their thoracic battlefront.

Hugging, so to speak, his own hump, he gusts

Across the apocryphal steppe of some Scyth-written Bible,

And maybe in that book he bends stoop-backed

Like a hawk-beaked Judith over Holofernes' head.

Embracing his treasure-chest backpack of a hump,

Pursued by breast-thumping zealots who would exclude him,

Already he arrives, as foretold: one-bag postman who

In their two-humped desert dreams alone in his room.

Translated from the Russian by

Reginald Gibbons and the author

Translator's Note

To work with Ilya Kutik on a translation of this early poem (1980),

which he chose, was to be given lessons in modern and contemporary

Russian poetry, even though I know no Russian. Thematically, Kutik's

"Hunchback" links the swelling of a human hump to the development

of an artistic gift, to the possibility of miracle, of freedom (those

Scyths), and even of a triumph over what dominates us (the unhal-

lowed unhollow dome of the hump; or Holofernes). The hunchback

carries, and is, the distortion of his own being. To me it seems that it's

not themes, however, but the poem's fast-moving train of association

that is its subject (as well as its method).

Kutik holds that the differences between Russian and American

poetry are really between two kinds of poetic speech in general, and

two different poetic impulses. I take him to mean two very different

sets of permissions and prohibitions, goals and achievements, in our

ways of talking and writing - two different ways of poetic thinking.

In the Russian poem rhyme and metaphor are inextricably linked, and

essentially are the discovering gestures of poetic thinking. Rhyme, Kutik

tells me, is a kind of edge that one looks past not for the next but rather

for the farthest thing in sight. Or rhyme is "centrifugal" - that is, when

one word attracts the unexpected rhyme word for itself, the rhyme word

throws the poem outward from itself as it is, up to that point. (It's inter-

esting that ancient Greek ballein, from which we derive our word

"symbol," means "to throw.") Or in rhyming, one word evokes its

rhyme word by a kind of phonetic magnetism.

But attraction is only interesting, is only justified artistically, if the

rhyme word creates a leap to a new image. Yet in evoking or attracting

the unexpected second word, rhyming is not primarily for the sake of

finding the image; rather, rhyming is a search for metaphor. The

rhyme word comes with a "click," suddenly in creating a new image,

in search of metaphor, but at the same time an image must always be

more than a metaphor; it must be "meta" to be worth putting into the

poem. According to Kutik:

"Meta" is what is after or behind or beyond the gap between

one metaphor and the next. Metaphor, like a car with its lights

on, starts seeing by itself through the darkness of the "meta."

Visual metaphors, however striking they may be, are not

"meta" in themselves: they justify what we already know about

the object or subject but haven't noticed. The "meta" is not

about what is possible in reality, but about what happens in the

realm of the imaginary, the non-material.

Needless to say, my translation of the "Hunchback" is neither cen-

trifugal nor "meta" enough-even though, as Kutik told me, the

metaphors in this poem are comparatively "pure," "without much

'meta' beyond them." The original poem rhymes ABAB, CDCD, EFEF;

my translation does not rhyme, but it has as many phonetic figures

as I could discover, and at least a hint, I hope, of the considerable

metaphoric density of the original. To represent the clicking discoveries

of metaphor produced by rhyme in Russian, I have tried to achieve a

certain "boldness" (as it is sometimes called with reference to ancient

Greek poetry) of metaphorizing, by pushing the literal meaning of

the Russian lines toward figures that leap a bit farther because of what

the particular English words make possible in sound and association.

Inevitably, I have had to make the translation somewhat interpretive

of matters that would need no further hints for a Russian audience:

Akhmatova had a famously hawkish nose, which she often showed in

profile; the figure of the prophet is well known in Russian poetry,

beginning with Pushkin. Kutik's prophet's difference resides not in his

spirituality or fanaticism but in his hump - it is physical and real, yet

at the same time as metaphor it becomes meta-real; a Russian proverb

says that the hunchback (or humpback- how odd that English has

two words for this) can be cured (or corrected) only by the grave; the

Scythians (who of course had no Bible) are the nomadic peoples of

Russia's remote past; in the Bible, or rather, outside it, the apocryphal

book of Judith relates the story of this woman of violent heroism and

the tyrant Holofernes. In Russian, these leaping associations arise out

of the echoed sounds, so the rhymes make the resulting metaphors and

meta seem very right while also pleasurably zigzag. -R.G.