This passage from a long article by James Meek in the LRB about the London Underground curiously echoes some of the themes of Three Men. Or perhaps it's not so curious, as James and I were at school together in Broughty Ferry - maybe, in some subterranean manner, this gave us overlapping imaginative interests. Occasionally. Perhaps. Whichever, I trust this taster will send you to the LRB for the whole article - it's brilliantly written and researched, and highly recommended.
"One winter in the early 1990s I took an overnight train from Georgia to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. There were no planes: Armenia was at war with its neighbour Azerbaijan, and under blockade. Snow came through the ill-fitting windows of the sleeper as it trundled between steep little peaks. When we arrived in Yerevan the next morning it was still dark: the moon had set, and the city, starved of electricity, was blacked out. Only sparse dabs of kerosene light and the occasional brace of headlights showed a city was there at all.
Robert, an Armenian PE teacher who had befriended me in the coupé, took me through the frosty murk of Yerevan’s central station and into a doorway. In an instant there was light, power, a swift transaction involving tokens, a set of escalators, and at their foot, the familiar declining whine of a clean, brightly lit underground train. We got in; the carriage was full of neatly dressed Armenians who were, in spite of everything, going somewhere – commuting. We travelled two stops, to the centre of town. I experienced the disorientating sense that the entire urban planet was connected by a single network of underground railways, functioning as a dependable back-up world rumbling away below, eternal and unchanging, whatever chaos reigned on the surface. Then we got out and climbed to the street, where there was still no power. Robert took me by the arm in the pitch darkness and led me, like a blind man, to a hotel.
Like all Soviet-era metro systems – most big cities had them – Yerevan’s is patterned on the one in Moscow, which owes much, in turn, to the London Underground. Frank Pick, one of the guiding geniuses of the glory days of the Tube between the wars, was given a medal by Stalin in 1932 (although he did not, as Wolmar romantically suggests, meet the dictator in person). When work began on the Moscow metro in 1931, it was with the possibility of
cities being attacked from the air, and of citizens finding not merely shelter underground but a whole lit-up, powered, alternative, subterranean city, invulnerable to bombs. The use of the London Underground as an air-raid shelter in the Second World War has become part of Britons’ mental slide show of the Blitz. Although few Londoners used it – 4 per cent, Wolmar reckons – some slept on Tube station platforms every night for three years, nourished by tea and buns delivered in refreshment trains, which each evening hauled tons of food around the network.
It was still earlier that London’s Underground turned from being a mere means of transport into a skeleton city-in-reserve beneath the earth’s skin. Londoners began to seek shelter in the Tube in earnest after the Zeppelin raids in 1915, and after 1917, when German bombers struck heavily, citizens poured into the 86 stations which the Underground, then privately owned, made available. At one point in 1918 some 300,000 Londoners took shelter there, when there was supposed to be room for only 250,000. During the First World War, passenger numbers on the Underground went up by two-thirds. From 1914, Tube advertising played to people’s fears. ‘It is bomb proof down below,’ one ad read. ‘Underground for safety; plenty of bright trains, business as usual.’ Another read like a sinister piece of verse:
Never mind the dark and dangerous streets
Underground
It is warm and bright
Be comfortable in well-lit trains and read the latest war news.
Two decades earlier, there had been a different attitude towards the world of the Underground. In The Time Machine (1895), H.G. Wells portrayed the beautiful, degenerate, soft-headed heirs of the aristocracy frolicking in the sunlight, prey, on dark nights, to the cannibalistic attentions of an underground-dwelling industrial proletariat. ‘There is a tendency to utilise underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilisation; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance,’ Wells’s narrator says. ‘In the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.’"
Showing posts with label Stalin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stalin. Show all posts
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Zinovy Zinik's article, translated
Andy has now done a translation of most of ZZ's top article (he says he's missed out the paragraphs he doesn't understand). I've very lightly dusted this with the brush of what I think makes sense. (The original is available for comparison in my comments to the previous entry.)
On Three Men (Not Forgetting the Dog)
All Londoners complain that the underground is expensive and is in a condition of constant repairs because it was built in the middle of the 19th century and resembles a Victorian museum. There is an underground railway in the northern English city of Newcastle. It is also a museo-industrial construction. Three English poets from this industrial capital of the English north - Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers - decided to compare the underground with Moscow.
They re-read the comic travelogue by Jerome K Jerome Three Men in a Boat (Not to Mention the Dog) – which our grandfathers once became engrossed in reading - and have decided to repeat the feats of this unlucky trinity. But they have gone not up the Thames, but to the east, to Moscow and the underground of the Russian capital - they have immortalized their experience of navigating ‘the underground river’ in the form of a book of poems.
In conversation with Bill Herbert, one of the trinity of authors, I asked what seemed to me a little difficult to imagine: how three men could reach Moscow from Newcastle by boat? His reply? The logic in their collection Three Men on the Metro is absolutely poetic, based on coincidences and comic misunderstandings.
In Moscow our heroes felt as ridiculous as Jerome’s characters and as a result a poetic burlesque was born, not about the Moscow River, but about the Moscow Metro, where each station is an occasion for refined parody couplets about the history of Russia and its literature.
Notice that our English travellers quote as an epigraph not Three Men on a Boat, but another book less known to the wide reader, Three Men on the Bummel, about comic adventures of the same characters in Germany. [‘There will be no useful information in this book.’] That book’s narrator is surprised what strange mail boxes Germans seem to have, until he realises that he has mistaken bird-houses for mail boxes.
I especially didn’t envy foreigners who visited the underground several years ago. The names of stations on the underground – as well as streets in the city – were only in Russian, so Englishmen read words like ‘Moscow’ as though Latin letters and the city became ‘Mockba’, and the restaurants turned into the mysterious ‘Pectopan’.
I’ve learned a lot of entertaining facts from the book. For example, the legend that the Circle Line was built where Stalin's cup left circles on the plans given to the leader. Or that the word for the underground is derived from the Greek ‘metera’, meaning womb. So the world of Stalin’s underground for our Englishmen appears as the world of underground Freudian consciousness, in a parodic sense.
Mayakovskaya station, where mosaics represent the Soviet sky rising and then declining, becomes in this book a symbol of the turning world. Here is even Orpheus stuck on the escalator. Not without reason is one of the epigraphs to the book from Dostoevsky’s classic Notes from the Underground, ‘Long live the underground!’
Our trinity appeared in Moscow without a dog; but they, not forgetting about Jerome K Jerome's heroes, found dogs on the way as they closely examined the stations of the underground. A stone's throw away from Mayakovskaya station is the museum of Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita and The Heart of a Dog.
In the book there are also two poems devoted to the pig-iron sculptures at Revolution Square station, where the dogs have had their genitals removed so as not to confuse teenagers who to touch everything.
And at Taganskaya station with its cosmonauts, there is a poem about Laika. Not forgetting about Malchik, embodied by its adorers at Mendelevskaya station; both Iskander and Akmadulina, who lived in the neighbourhood, gave money for this monument.
Three Men on the Metro also includes literary parodies on classical and contemporary writers. Here is Byron (whom Pushkin translated) and TS Eliot. There are parodies not only of Akhmatova and Pasternak (who are more less familiar to the English reader), of Yesenin and Mandelstam (who also wrote about the underground), and also on the whole galaxy of authors who have appeared on literary horizon during our epoch – Elena Schvarts, and even Sergey Lukyanenko.
Let's quote (in my improvised translation) only one parody – of our friend, the legendary Moscow poet Lev Rubenstein. He was, as is known, by a trade a librarian, and wrote his poems in phrases on the numbered cards of a library card-index. Here is a typical scene on the Moscow underground – in the spirit of parodying Lev Rubenstein:
[There then follows Zinovy’s translation of ‘This is Us’. Here’s the English version:]
And This is Us
definitely not by Lev Rubenstein
1. This is us.
2. This is us again.
3. This is us outside the Metro.
4. And this is a dog, asleep.
5. Another dog, asleep.
6. And this is a drunk.
7. Sleeping like a dog outside the Metro.
8. Another drunk, also asleep.
9. This is a statue.
10. And this is another statue.
11. This is a dog and a drunk asleep by a statue.
12. This is a dog and a drunk. Asleep by a statue outside the Metro.
13. This is us with a dog and a drunk, asleep outside the Metro.
14. This is a statue of a dog.
15. This is the statue of a drunk.
16. This is us with a drunk by a statue of a dog.
17. This is us with a dog by a statue of a drunk.
18. This is us drunk with a dog by a statue, asleep outside the Metro.
19. This is us.
20. This is us.
21. This is us.
ЭК
On Three Men (Not Forgetting the Dog)
All Londoners complain that the underground is expensive and is in a condition of constant repairs because it was built in the middle of the 19th century and resembles a Victorian museum. There is an underground railway in the northern English city of Newcastle. It is also a museo-industrial construction. Three English poets from this industrial capital of the English north - Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers - decided to compare the underground with Moscow.
They re-read the comic travelogue by Jerome K Jerome Three Men in a Boat (Not to Mention the Dog) – which our grandfathers once became engrossed in reading - and have decided to repeat the feats of this unlucky trinity. But they have gone not up the Thames, but to the east, to Moscow and the underground of the Russian capital - they have immortalized their experience of navigating ‘the underground river’ in the form of a book of poems.
In conversation with Bill Herbert, one of the trinity of authors, I asked what seemed to me a little difficult to imagine: how three men could reach Moscow from Newcastle by boat? His reply? The logic in their collection Three Men on the Metro is absolutely poetic, based on coincidences and comic misunderstandings.
In Moscow our heroes felt as ridiculous as Jerome’s characters and as a result a poetic burlesque was born, not about the Moscow River, but about the Moscow Metro, where each station is an occasion for refined parody couplets about the history of Russia and its literature.
Notice that our English travellers quote as an epigraph not Three Men on a Boat, but another book less known to the wide reader, Three Men on the Bummel, about comic adventures of the same characters in Germany. [‘There will be no useful information in this book.’] That book’s narrator is surprised what strange mail boxes Germans seem to have, until he realises that he has mistaken bird-houses for mail boxes.
I especially didn’t envy foreigners who visited the underground several years ago. The names of stations on the underground – as well as streets in the city – were only in Russian, so Englishmen read words like ‘Moscow’ as though Latin letters and the city became ‘Mockba’, and the restaurants turned into the mysterious ‘Pectopan’.
I’ve learned a lot of entertaining facts from the book. For example, the legend that the Circle Line was built where Stalin's cup left circles on the plans given to the leader. Or that the word for the underground is derived from the Greek ‘metera’, meaning womb. So the world of Stalin’s underground for our Englishmen appears as the world of underground Freudian consciousness, in a parodic sense.
Mayakovskaya station, where mosaics represent the Soviet sky rising and then declining, becomes in this book a symbol of the turning world. Here is even Orpheus stuck on the escalator. Not without reason is one of the epigraphs to the book from Dostoevsky’s classic Notes from the Underground, ‘Long live the underground!’
Our trinity appeared in Moscow without a dog; but they, not forgetting about Jerome K Jerome's heroes, found dogs on the way as they closely examined the stations of the underground. A stone's throw away from Mayakovskaya station is the museum of Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita and The Heart of a Dog.
In the book there are also two poems devoted to the pig-iron sculptures at Revolution Square station, where the dogs have had their genitals removed so as not to confuse teenagers who to touch everything.
And at Taganskaya station with its cosmonauts, there is a poem about Laika. Not forgetting about Malchik, embodied by its adorers at Mendelevskaya station; both Iskander and Akmadulina, who lived in the neighbourhood, gave money for this monument.
Three Men on the Metro also includes literary parodies on classical and contemporary writers. Here is Byron (whom Pushkin translated) and TS Eliot. There are parodies not only of Akhmatova and Pasternak (who are more less familiar to the English reader), of Yesenin and Mandelstam (who also wrote about the underground), and also on the whole galaxy of authors who have appeared on literary horizon during our epoch – Elena Schvarts, and even Sergey Lukyanenko.
Let's quote (in my improvised translation) only one parody – of our friend, the legendary Moscow poet Lev Rubenstein. He was, as is known, by a trade a librarian, and wrote his poems in phrases on the numbered cards of a library card-index. Here is a typical scene on the Moscow underground – in the spirit of parodying Lev Rubenstein:
[There then follows Zinovy’s translation of ‘This is Us’. Here’s the English version:]
And This is Us
definitely not by Lev Rubenstein
1. This is us.
2. This is us again.
3. This is us outside the Metro.
4. And this is a dog, asleep.
5. Another dog, asleep.
6. And this is a drunk.
7. Sleeping like a dog outside the Metro.
8. Another drunk, also asleep.
9. This is a statue.
10. And this is another statue.
11. This is a dog and a drunk asleep by a statue.
12. This is a dog and a drunk. Asleep by a statue outside the Metro.
13. This is us with a dog and a drunk, asleep outside the Metro.
14. This is a statue of a dog.
15. This is the statue of a drunk.
16. This is us with a drunk by a statue of a dog.
17. This is us with a dog by a statue of a drunk.
18. This is us drunk with a dog by a statue, asleep outside the Metro.
19. This is us.
20. This is us.
21. This is us.
ЭК
Thursday, 8 May 2008
Tri coincidentals
Everyone knows creativity warps the space-time continuum or at least makes you pay attention to coincidences in a slightly more obsessive way than usual. Everyone, even dogs. When you're very focussed on a project, quite often little reinforcements will show up suggesting you're on the right track (excuse gratuitous rail-based punning), and this project has been no exception. Here are the three surviving members of The Coincidences, a super-smooth soul combo you may remember from 70s TOTP.
1. Three Men on a Boat: one of our initial impulses was to echo the famous comic novel, not just because we were going to bumble (or 'bummel' as J would put it) around in a vagon much as they did on a lodka, but also because we knew that this particular novel was translated into Russian because of its innocuous content, and well read during the Soviet period.
Therefore we were delighted, in our search through the underpass booths of Moscow for Soviet musicals and film versions of Bulgakov's novels, to happen upon, in the booth by Ploshchad Revolutsii, a Russian adaptation of the JKJ book which was also a musical. We were, however, a little disturbed when Andy switched on his TV that very evening and found the same film just happened to be playing. Unless they show it every night, freaky.
2. One of the analogies we'd been playing with since our arrival was the Morlock/Eloi dichotomy in Wells' Time Machine, not just to describe the underground/overground bumbling free aspect of our trip, but, as Wells intended, to replay the sharp division of industrialised society into mob and aristos, unter- and ubermensch, workers and bosses, that the Metro subverts and inverts with its buried palaces for the people.
Therefore I was a little astonished, on arriving at Sheremetevo Airport for the return flight, to wander into the DVD shop and find, not only was The Time Machine playing (unfortunately the Guy Pierce rather than the Rod Taylor version), but it was conveniently at that point in the movie when the Elois were raided by the Morlocks. Even more appropriately, I'd been the one having Morlock dreams. Freaky and deaky.
3. One of the recurrent fascinations of our trip was the story of Metro 2, the shadowy second system that served the Politburo and the KGB and, it was rumoured, was still in use and still being extended. I remember ten years ago being told a line ran from the Party bosses' dachas by Sparrow Hills, straight to the Kremlin. We'd grilled a few enthusiasts about this, scanned the fan site, and discovered there was a computer game called Metro 2.
Therefore we were delighted to discover through further 'research', that Metro 2 the game features a plot to assassinate Stalin which is supposed to take place around... where else but where we had ended up staying, quite by chance of course: Ismailovo. Freaky, deaky and their younger brother, Zekey.
1. Three Men on a Boat: one of our initial impulses was to echo the famous comic novel, not just because we were going to bumble (or 'bummel' as J would put it) around in a vagon much as they did on a lodka, but also because we knew that this particular novel was translated into Russian because of its innocuous content, and well read during the Soviet period.
Therefore we were delighted, in our search through the underpass booths of Moscow for Soviet musicals and film versions of Bulgakov's novels, to happen upon, in the booth by Ploshchad Revolutsii, a Russian adaptation of the JKJ book which was also a musical. We were, however, a little disturbed when Andy switched on his TV that very evening and found the same film just happened to be playing. Unless they show it every night, freaky.
2. One of the analogies we'd been playing with since our arrival was the Morlock/Eloi dichotomy in Wells' Time Machine, not just to describe the underground/overground bumbling free aspect of our trip, but, as Wells intended, to replay the sharp division of industrialised society into mob and aristos, unter- and ubermensch, workers and bosses, that the Metro subverts and inverts with its buried palaces for the people.
Therefore I was a little astonished, on arriving at Sheremetevo Airport for the return flight, to wander into the DVD shop and find, not only was The Time Machine playing (unfortunately the Guy Pierce rather than the Rod Taylor version), but it was conveniently at that point in the movie when the Elois were raided by the Morlocks. Even more appropriately, I'd been the one having Morlock dreams. Freaky and deaky.
3. One of the recurrent fascinations of our trip was the story of Metro 2, the shadowy second system that served the Politburo and the KGB and, it was rumoured, was still in use and still being extended. I remember ten years ago being told a line ran from the Party bosses' dachas by Sparrow Hills, straight to the Kremlin. We'd grilled a few enthusiasts about this, scanned the fan site, and discovered there was a computer game called Metro 2.
Therefore we were delighted to discover through further 'research', that Metro 2 the game features a plot to assassinate Stalin which is supposed to take place around... where else but where we had ended up staying, quite by chance of course: Ismailovo. Freaky, deaky and their younger brother, Zekey.
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Vichod
This year (2008), from St George's Day (April 23rd) through the Orthodox Easter(April 28th), May Day and up to the election of Putin's successor (May 3rd), three British poets went on a short trip round and round the underground. This blog charts the results: notes, photos, sounds, drafts, links and factoids.
*
The Moscow Metro offers a singular perspective on the Russian psyche. Constructed over thirty years, largely during the Stalinist period, to provide transport, shelter, warmth, and a peculiarly Soviet grandeur, these 'People's Palaces' are at once stunning feats of architecture - packed with the minutiae of period iconography to the point of kitsch - and fascinating temples to the quotidian, where all Muscovite life rushes before you.
Its stations are named after the central principles and events of Russian society; they are named after its great writers, artists and scientists. They are constructed using marbles and materials from all over the vast hinterland of Mother Russia. The Metro is at once a microcosm of Russia itself, and a symbol of the infernal and purgatorial circles through which the Russian people have passed.
In the year of yet another significant transition in Russian life, when Putin officially hands over the reins of power to his successor, Medvedov, this project by three British poets will attempt to circumnavigate not just Moscow, but the cycles of cultural history which the Metro represents and continues to evoke.
This is a project which, like the Metro itself, combines multiple levels and appeals to a broad audience. The structural principle of the journey allows for both individual vignette and continuing narrative. The successive layers of the Metro, floor beneath floor, is echoed in the transition between forms - history, non-fiction, drama and poetry are all represented.
Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers variously write, edit and translate poetry ; they make films and public art; they are reviewers and anthologists, critics and cultural historians. They are also completely out of their depth, idealists abroad, babes in the abyss. Like their predecessors in that boat on the Thames (Jerome K Jerome’s novel is known as трое в лодке in Russia), these three Brits are adrift in a very foreign medium, and their collective response - poetic, comic, political, dramatic - will offer a unique insight into a culture poised between retrenchment and convulsive change.
*
The Moscow Metro offers a singular perspective on the Russian psyche. Constructed over thirty years, largely during the Stalinist period, to provide transport, shelter, warmth, and a peculiarly Soviet grandeur, these 'People's Palaces' are at once stunning feats of architecture - packed with the minutiae of period iconography to the point of kitsch - and fascinating temples to the quotidian, where all Muscovite life rushes before you.
Its stations are named after the central principles and events of Russian society; they are named after its great writers, artists and scientists. They are constructed using marbles and materials from all over the vast hinterland of Mother Russia. The Metro is at once a microcosm of Russia itself, and a symbol of the infernal and purgatorial circles through which the Russian people have passed.
In the year of yet another significant transition in Russian life, when Putin officially hands over the reins of power to his successor, Medvedov, this project by three British poets will attempt to circumnavigate not just Moscow, but the cycles of cultural history which the Metro represents and continues to evoke.
This is a project which, like the Metro itself, combines multiple levels and appeals to a broad audience. The structural principle of the journey allows for both individual vignette and continuing narrative. The successive layers of the Metro, floor beneath floor, is echoed in the transition between forms - history, non-fiction, drama and poetry are all represented.
Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers variously write, edit and translate poetry ; they make films and public art; they are reviewers and anthologists, critics and cultural historians. They are also completely out of their depth, idealists abroad, babes in the abyss. Like their predecessors in that boat on the Thames (Jerome K Jerome’s novel is known as трое в лодке in Russia), these three Brits are adrift in a very foreign medium, and their collective response - poetic, comic, political, dramatic - will offer a unique insight into a culture poised between retrenchment and convulsive change.
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