Chinese Sun
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Evgeny Pavlov
Language: English
Pages: 332
ISBN: 2:00247849
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This is my scan, not a retail ebook. I don't think there is one available.
--
Fiction. Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Evgeny Pavlov. Arkadii Dragomoschenko came to us first as a samizdat/underground poet, his lines & gestures signaling an opening to new discoveries & freedoms in what had been the closed world of the Soviet superstate. That freedom as a poet resided squarely in the heart of his poetry--its language & form serving as the conduits for thoughts & realities previously obscured. Now, in CHINESE SUN, he launches a fresh assault, this time on the world of prose--a poet's reconfiguration (transformation) of the novel & a work that crosses open borders as a gift to all of us.
--
From Publishers Weekly:
"The sum total is invariably perplexing," writes the narrator of Dragomoshchenko's novel, his first fiction to be translated into English. Known as an experimental poet in his native Russia, Dragomoshchenko twists, tweaks and pummels the novel into an unrecognizable, but not unappealing, form in which stream-of-consciousness ramblings, semi-autobiographical vignettes and meditations on art, time, silence and memory supersede any traditional iterations of plot. Like language poetry, this work self-reflexively obsesses over issues of writing and words while espousing crafty aphorisms: the narrator wonders, "Do we know that we know?" Elsewhere, a character describes God as looking "like a pronoun and all letters at once." But other cunningly brainy dictums become murkier upon reflection: "there is no book in that book." There is a book in this novel, however, waiting for patient readers to puzzle it out.
--
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko is a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Potsdam, Germany in 1946 and grew up in Vinnitsa, Ukraine. He has lived and worked in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Russia since 1969. His writing has earned him a reputation as the representative figure of Language poetry in Russia.
Dragomoshchenko's poetry was first introduced to American audiences in the volumes Description and Xenia, translated by Lyn Hejinian and published by Sun & Moon Press in the 1990s. He has since authored Chinese Sun, published in 2005 by Ugly Duckling Presse, and the prose collection Dust (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).
C.D. Wright has said of his work, "This is poetry. Immodest. Magisterial. More or less impenetrable. The relation of language is potential but not improvisational.” About Dust, Lyn Hejinian wrote, “Full of vitality as well as profundity, and resonating with something I can only term friendship, these meditations/memoirs belong to the great tradition of metaphysical prose, alongside the works of Nietzsche, Shklovsky, Kierkegaard, and Toufic.”
--
Ugly Duckling Presse is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit publisher based in Brooklyn, NY, which specializes in poetry, translation, lost literature, and books by artists.
Russians: The People behind the Power
The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York Review Books Classics)
Siberia: Worlds Apart (Westview Series on the Post-Soviet Republics)
The Master and Margarita (Penguin Classics)
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings FOCUS Book)
located)-i.e., onto some detached future. In other words, we were adding the very project of the yet incomplete exchange to the same set of reminiscences. AND NEITHER OF US SPOKE OF BIBLIOMANCY-OR OF THAT WEIRD FORM OF IT THAT MAKES A BOOK, OPENED AT DRAGOMOSHCHENKO 181 RANDOM, SEEM TO BE SPEAKING OF JUST THAT IDEA OR So, FOR l OPEN A BOOK HERE ON MY DESK. IT'S "ERROR 404", A TEXT l AM TO TEACH THIS WEEK, AND THIS MORNING l OPENED IT AT RANDOM (AND, AS IT HAPPENED, AT PAGE 93), WHERE THE
foam, wet locks of water in the wind's sharp crest, and the slow, shimmering dissipation of the noise. On the banks-squint, every time!-there are sunny fields of daisies. And our learning to kiss each other in every place, beginning with the toes? Let's keep turning the pages: when you touched your breast with a razor-no, everything could of course be described-"your pupils contracted (this is how one describes it), your breathing stopped for a second, and with a gentle force, slowly, very
positive, no one needs this. Above all, me. I'm a busi- DRAGOMOSHCHENKO 125 nessman, you see. I like things you don't. I like, let's say, to add one thing to another. You, no doubt, prefer something else." His voice took on a somber, operatic note. "Although you may like, for example, to steal... Not that I have anything against stealing! But to me that too definitely seems an exemplary case-granted, a pathetic one-of something that doesn't exclude gathering-right?-or, if you like, fullness,
of fingerprints on a glass, like the whiff of a wind that changes nothing, akin to a shift in the spectrum of meaning, touching flowers, rocks, diminution, tree-bark, disintegration, an amazing flap of a bird's wing that never approached eyelashes, like the weight of a drop and its fall, like the mathematical body of wine. Washed, stiffened linen, flapping in the wind. The borders of a diminutive figure intricately smolder by the line of a nameless space, of its endlessly destroyed equilibrium.
meaning is placed in the hollow shell of events? Yes, an onion undeniably consists of the same onion (the sting of an arrow is withdrawn from the custom of description, yet what matters in many projections is not the arrow's completion in its 1761 CHINESE SUN coming-to-naught, negation-bearing point but its vectorial growth); death consists of its presentiment, removed, layer by layer, in an approach to a word-any word that by definition can't be captured: every understanding turns out to be