Just when our pandemic-dulled imaginations most needed a jolt of energy, the beautifully laid out, bilingual volume Life in Space arrived in the winter of 2020. Galina Rymbu is the acknowledged leader of the new wave of Russian feminist poets, and a brilliant poet. She has been translated before into English, mostly by Joan Brooks, whose work is featured here along with a few poems translated by others. All are exemplary translations, attentive not just to the semantics but also to the texture of the verse, to its speech rhythms and its layout on the page. The sound play is hardest to replicate, but even that can be heard in some poems. They lift off the page in English with the same energy and sharp-wittedness radiated by Rymbu's Russian lines.
A daunting changeability and density of metaphor marks her work, which frequently relies on long lines, long poems, and admixture of poems lineated as prose. These are familiar signatures of Arkady Dragomoshchenko's pioneering work, but Rymbu's poetry is more charged by political thinking, more shot through with the utopian ambitions and imaginative rearrangements we would expect from a deeply committed feminist and activist for LGBT rights. Where Dragomoshchenko's poems give us dust as a recurring image, Rymbu's shoot out fire.
Her work presses us to rethink the political in poetry, and happily Life in Space opens with an astute introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky that does just that. Rymbu has transformed Russia's tradition of grazhdanskaia lirika (civic verse) into an engagement with the politics of the body, and with philosophy and theory. Ostashevsky begins by quoting Rymbu as she explains her attempt “to work with something like phenomenology of perception of the political” (vii). The poet is setting forth a pathway to understand the imagistic, affective, and emotional complexity of her work, its disjunctive energies and its apocalyptic vision.
For readers of American poetry, the constant breaks in the verse and the deflected subjectivity may also recall the work of Lyn Hejinian (Dragomoshchenko's friend and translator, not coincidentally): a huge cognitive space can open up from one line to the next, from one image to the next, but rhetorical patterns and terms keep reappearing as signs of unity and connection. Early in the volume, animal life swarms as if from one poem to the next—never the same animal twice, ever-changing, from transparent beetles to screaming cows, from dog to wolf. The beasts paradoxically show how alive this (deeply urban) poetry is, even if some are dead and on display (one poem has rat bodies in formaldehyde). Verbal motifs also perform this work of knitting poems together. Will readers sense that the “book of decay” (kniga upadka) in one late cycle is the same as the “book of decline” in another? Perhaps those translated phrases are close enough to forge the connection, and certainly both those metaphors (animate matter decaying, civilization declining) are pertinent.
As a poet, Rymbu pursues interior contemplation, bodily experience, and an apprehension of public life with equal intensity. Her agile jumps among discourses and speech registers thus pose another challenge for translation, but the translators uniformly manage the disharmonies in diction with impressive ease. The approaches are somewhat different (Brooks is slangier than Helena Kernan and Anastasiya Osipova; Charles Bernstein and Kevin M.F. Platt take more liberties with semantics to convey Rymbu's unusually terse tone in Vremia mira (Timeworld)—note the compression in their English title). But all the translations work extremely well, and they convey the tremendous range in this work.
This splendid volume will appeal to anyone interested in feminist and queer activism, in political thinking at its most rigorous, and in contemporary Russian poetry more generally. Life in Space is a natural for the classroom. The facing Russian is ideal for students learning the language, and the poems—in turns difficult, beautiful, tactile, abstract, headlong, and hopeful—will electrify any setting where poetry, gender studies, and political theory is studied. Read it alongside F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (2020), the anthology assembled by Rymbu, Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse. Just out from Isolarii Press, F Letter has two more extraordinary long poems by Rymbu, plus her Introduction. In Moscow, Rymbu has also just published a new volume of Russian poems (Ty, budushchee, Tsentr Voznesenskogo, 2020). If we're very lucky, more translations of her work into English will come our way.
