Monday, May 26, 2014

la Patrie · Родина


That novelists' publisher need not be concerned for the title of that author's most recent novel being "Fatherland"  — at least not in French and Russian translations.

Vladimir Kornilov's poem, спор, makes this very clear ( I think the title of that poem should be "Indisputable" ) in arguing ( after a fashion ) that the state is power, but the motherland is something quite other ... rather like the Lithuania imagined in the poems of the late Czesław Miłosz, I imagine.

cp: Batkivshchyna / Батьківщина as 'our native land' ( The Nfld equivalent for their 'race' ? )




Saturday, May 24, 2014

Brodsky Leningrad Visas


Nixon is coming to Moscow and a professor of Soviet Studies from Yale has been visiting  poet in Leningrad.

The Professor driven from Marburg is struggling to return and has come as far as Amsterdam.  But was this student of the logician also smoking ?

Did Akhmatova's 1945 visitor ever stop at Bard ?

As Brodsky might have told Volkov, abstract from the circumstances.



Thursday, May 22, 2014

data imagined humour


I suspect that a survey of Tea Party activists would reveal that most believe that anti-gravity scooters will soon out-sell home-built aircraft kits, but that most of those do not believe in evolution and many do not believe that NASA sent astronauts to the moon, or if it did, those chumps never made it back DOWN to earth.