Translator’s Note: “Ithaca” by Grigori Dashevsky

Grigori Dashevsky and I discussed my translation of his poem “Ithaca” in May of 2013. In July, having reviewed fresh corrections, he signed a publication contract with Poetry. In December, after a long illness, he was dead.

Dashevsky, a much-admired Russian poet, classicist by education and occupation, was himself a brilliant translator of Greek, German, French, and English. If one can be judged by the company she keeps, perhaps the authors one translates can speak for her, too. In Dashevsky’s case it’s Catullus, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Frost, Truman Capote, as well as his award-winning translations — René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred and Francis Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.

I was incredibly lucky to get his comments on my drafts of a few of his poems on classical subjects — comments that were as illuminating as poetry itself because all of them had to do with the anthropology 
of language. He turned to the ancients quite often, as a source not only of mythological stories, but also of poetry as a genre. Yet his highly referential poems communicate before we decipher their chemistry, before we even know what it was that was asked of us.

“Ithaca” is the final poem in the Odysseus series. As its title suggests, it’s the poem about a return home. Penelope’s suitors appear as clouds, while the sun — the seer — foresees their deaths. While reading this poem for the first time I was struck by how intimate, despite its well-known subject, Dashevsky’s return to Ithaca is. His Odysseus is not a literary monument. In fact, his Odysseus is not Odysseus at all. He’s a stranger, a traveler, homeless in his own home because, after all, it’s also his final home. His breathing, that shapes the rhythm of the poem, is heavy and sporadic, yet calm. Ice appears in Dashevsky’s other classical poems as a symbol of a shining trail of a slowing-down life. A window frame, as he pointed out to me is not “ancient” but “permanent, constant”; it’s a meeting place of life and art.