Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, Ainsley Morse, Alex Karsavin, Helena Kernan, Kit Egington, Valzhyna Mort, Kevin Mf Platt
Review by Olga Livshin
edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky and Ainsley Morse.
ISBN: 9781735075013
isolarii, 2020,
221 pages, $19.95
F Letter is a sampling of contemporary Russian and Russophone feminist and LGBTQIA+ poets. F stands for feminism, but it also echoes the idea of an “f-word”: the title implies a provocative art action. Published in isolarii’s uniquely tiny format–a blazingly orange book that is less than the size of one’s palm—it protests against Russian patriarchy, as well as Putin’s state that endorses patriarchy. The collection is bilingual, English translations facing the originals; the translations, clear and eloquent.
Domestic and sexual violence against women in Russophone countries is the dominant theme of many poems in F Letter. These are trailblazing poems in the post-Soviet world, carving out space for topics that people do not discuss. Daria Serenko writes about a molested young girl:
b is for bestiary
glossary: mother means a beast
who doesn’t exist,
a serpent swallowing her own tail, a food chain,
daughter — that one, there at the end.
What stands out to me about these lines is the supreme vulnerability of the daughter in these lines. The daughter’s isolation is complete; help is not on the way. As a reader who has access to both Russian and English, I can’t help looking at this poem through a dual lens, through two traditions: Russian and Anglo-American. This treatment of the subject is consistent with the Russian tradition of intense lyrical pathos. This treatment is very different from American feminist poetry, which revolves around imagery of female empowerment and the fight for social justice. Audre Lorde famously defined herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” (emphasis mine). And Gloria Anzaldua proclaimed, in Borderlands, that she deserves recognition in all of her various identities—Chicana, female, lesbian—saying: “I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing.”
In Serenko’s poem, the daughter’s circumstances might seem hopeless, the poem may seem to channel a dejected mood, a surrender. Yet F-Letter is not at all about giving up; the lyrical pathos of the poem quoted above is too intense. This poem was written in a cultural space where grass-roots movements are squelched, and it is literature that becomes the forum for protest. “Russian literature has always been on the side of the victim,” wrote Lidiya Chukovskaya, the writer and literary scholar whose life included several decades of Stalin’s time. Serenko’s voice awakens us out of complicity. Like many Russian realist novel written in the tradition of social commentary, it implores the reader to intervene, and, when witnessing the next episode of oppression, to intercede.
When F Letter poets speak about queer lives, victimhood also comes to the fore. Ekaterina Simonova writes about two elderly women on the trolley who look like “[t]wo ridiculous camel colts,” both because of their age and because they are together: “these things just aren’t supposed to happen.” The poem elicits intense sorrow about the erasure of LGBTQ+ individuals in post-Soviet society; it asks us for help. If we envision English as a bridge from a variety of cultures to a large percentage of readers around the world, then translation into English makes these requests for assistance and care a larger dialogue.
And the poems reach broadly, transcending the boundaries of language and ethnicity. When Egana Djabbarova writes about arranged marriage and forced sex work, she appeals to male readers with a refrain that means variations on “do not hurt us”—in Russian, Azeri, and Turkish.
F-Letter even transcends one crucial boundary—gender lines—to speak of men’s suffering as well as women’s. In Yusupova’s poems, men are victims to abuse by state institutions such as the army and the police, and they pass their shame on to women in the form of humiliation or rape. Reading these statements here, in Philadelphia suburbs, I feel shaken out of my familiar circumstances of American life, and I begin to wonder: Do men in certain parts of our society internalize certain discourses of disempowerment of shame? Is this why they seek out hateful forms of nationalism and misogyny? If so, what is the role of poetry written by a woman vis-a-vis these men?
For any feminist reader, F Letter will be a balm; and for anyone seeking a fresh set of lenses to try on when thinking about gender, it will be a gorgeously wrought poetic bomb.
—Readers can purchase F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry directly from the publisher’s website.—
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 6.
Olga Livshin is a poet and translator from Russian, and holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literature. Her essays, poetry, and translations appear in Poetry International, KR Online, and other journals. In 2019, her poetry collection A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman appeared from Poets & Traitors Press.
Galina Rymbu was born in 1990 in the city of Omsk (Siberia, Russia) and lives in Lviv, Ukraine. She edits F-Pis’mo, an online magazine for feminist literature and theory, as well as Gryoza, a website for contemporary poetry. She is the co-founder and co-curator of the Arkadii Dragomoshchenko Prize for emerging Russian-language poets. She has published three books of poems in Russia: Moving Space of the Revolution (Argo-Risk), Time of the Earth (kntxt), and Life in Space (NLO). Her essays on cinema, literature, and sexuality have appeared on Séance, Colta, Your Art, and other journals. English translations of her work have appeared in The White Review, Arc Poetry, Berlin Quarterly, Music & Literature, n+1, Asymptote, Powder Keg, and Cosmonauts Avenue, as well as in the chapbook White Bread (After Hours Editions). Her poetry has been translated into thirteen languages and stand-alone collections of her work have been published in Latvian, Dutch, Swedish, and Romanian
Eugene Ostashevsky’s books of poetry include The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB/Poets) and The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (UDP). His translations of Russian experimental literature include OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern UP), Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB) and The Fire Horse: Children’s Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Daniil Kharms (NYRB). He is the winner of the International Poetry Prize of the City of Muenster, the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellowship, the National Translation Award by the American Literary Translators Association, and other prizes.
Ainsley Morse is a scholar, teacher and translator of Russian and former Yugoslav literatures, with a particular interest in the aesthetic and social peculiarities of Soviet-era unofficial literature, as well as contemporary Russian prose and poetry. Her book Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature will be published by Northwestern UP. Recent translation publications include the 1931 farcical “Soviet pastoral” Beyond Tula, by Andrei Egunov-Nikolev (ASP 2019) and Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems by Igor Kholin (UDP 2017, with Bela Shayevich) and Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See (UDP 2013, also with Shayevich).
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