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

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.

Interim Report

We have just returned from Moscow where we spent 10 days exploring the city and its underground railway network. We visited over a third of the 176 stations on the Moscow Metro, went to the Moscow Metro Museum, interviewed the Director of the Museum and the grandson of one of the original Metro architects.

We watched the Communist Party demonstration in Revolution Square on May Day, supporters at a football game (Lokomotiv Moscow nil, Spartak Nalchik nil), worshippers celebrating Orthodox Easter, old men in a Banya (bath-house) and boat trippers on the Moscow River. We also visited the Bulgakov Museum, the Patriarch Ponds, Tsaritsino Park, Red Square, the VDNK Park, the Vernissage, the Gagarin Monument, the Sparrow Hills and the OGI collective. We met with artists Dima Topolsky and Aleksandra Paperno, with Tanya Ilyina from the British Council, and with the publisher and editor Tom Birchenough.

We have returned with copious notes and books, hundreds of photographs and many hours of audio recording. The next stage is to write the poems over the next six months. Even if we only write half what we have planned, we are confident that it is going to be a very strong book indeed.