Article
PI’s Israel editor Lisa Katz meets the Russian-American poet in Rotterdam
Interview with Philip Nikolayev
June 24, 2015
Watch Lisa Katz and Philip Nikolayev’s full interview here, via Poetry International’s Vimeo channel.
I first met doubly hyphenated Russian-American poet-translator Philip Nikolayev online, on Facebook. His sinuous translation of an Osip Mandelstam poem addressing Homer made its way to me via a translators’ group. For years, completely Russianless, I’ve wondered about the oft-told beauty of Russian poetry, which except perhaps for Joseph Brodsky, hardly speaks to me in English translation. I was caught by the manipulation of sound and thought evident in the first line of Nikolayev’s translation: ‘Insomnia, Homer, taut sails: my lips have lisped’.
I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I wanted to read on. The line contained poetic qualities I admire: the absence of direct propositions, and a linguistic agility that draws the reader into multiple chains of meaning - the writer Homer/the sailors of the Odyssey/the anxious tautness of sails/ Odysseus’ anxiety & the speaker’s insomnia/his ironically melodic lisping (not as good as Homer?) and so on. It turned out that Nikolayev was a guest of the PI festival this year. The vagaries of scheduling allowed us to have this conversation in the theater garden. Language is perhaps ‘an extension of our nature’, Nikolayev suggested, and not only of culture. Translation takes ‘a leap of faith’, he said. ‘I don’t know how it happens’. The process, a sort of ‘illusionism’, is ‘not very different from writing a poem’. Well said.Watch Lisa Katz and Philip Nikolayev’s full interview here, via Poetry International’s Vimeo channel.
© Lisa Katz
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