Translators’ Note: “Sea Sickness” by Ilya Kutik

Ilya Kutik is one of the founders of the Metarealist school of Russian poetry of the late twentieth century, along with Alexei Parshchikov, Ivan Zhdanov, and Aleksandr Eremenko. “Sea Sickness” is a meta-
poem in that out of the sound and morphology of one word, it extends vision in three directions. Translating the Russian verb vzbredyot (future tense vzbresti) requires several words in English: “will come up (will come to mind).” Kutik develops this verb into several threads of the poem. In Russian, “vz” or “dz” is the sound of sharpening, drilling, or rolling the film in a camera. (From this sound the film director David Kaufman produced his pseudonym, Dziga Vertov.) In Kutik’s poem, “vz” is the sound of the thugs sharpening their knives in the trees. In Russian, the sound “brrr” evokes feelings of disgust, and here also the sound of a horse blowing. Russian edet (pronounced “yedet”) means “here he comes” — which the thugs yell as they attack the man on horseback. In such ways, one word gives rise with its sounds to at least three distinct poetic moments, or situations, or micro-plots: what the poet hears becomes what the reader begins to see. It was Marina Tsvetaeva who invented this kind of poetic thinking; in her poem on the death of Rilke the sound of his given name, Rainer, leads to German Reim, “rhyme,” and then to Russian rai, “paradise” — to which Tsvetaeva goes, in the poem, to search for Rilke. Such “centripetal” inventiveness is at the heart of Metarealism. Translating this poem required us to invite English to move similarly in the poem’s several “situations.” “Sea Sickness” is from the eighties, and these micro-plots are moments in its meditation on life in the Soviet Union. The epigraph alludes to a famous epigraph by Pushkin in Eugene Onegin: “O rus [phonetically, this is a pun on “Horace”], O Rus!” (Rus is the ancient name for Russia, and rus is Latin for “countryside.”)