The Twelve & Other Poems

by Alexander Blok, Anselm Hollo (Translator)

Translator's Note:
"Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) wrote The Twelve in 1918, after the Russian October Revolution, in four January days during the Civil War. In his diary he says he wrote it 'in harmony with the elements...perhaps all political sentiment is so unclean that a single drop of it poisons and renders worthless all the rest; but perhaps, again, it does not destroy the meaning of the poem; and, who knows, perhaps it will in the end prove a ferment, resurrecting The Twelve for another time than ours.' The poem is a unique work, even for Blok himself. The three shorter poems included here will give at least a faint idea (I hope) of the quiet, Symbolist-Romantic flavor of most of Blok's other work." - Anselm Hollo

Genres: Poetry, Russia, Russian Literature, Classics, 20th Century, Literature

148 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1968

About the author

Alexander Blok (Russian: Александр Александрович Блок) was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were men of letters, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg State University. After his parents' separation, Blok lived with aristocratic relatives at the Shakhmatovo manor near Moscow, where he discovered the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure 19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet. These influences would be fused and transformed into the harmonies of his early pieces, later collected in the book Ante Lucem.

He fell in love with Lyubov (Lyuba) Dmitrievna Mendeleeva (daughter of the renowned chemist Dmitri Mendeleev) and married her in 1903. Later, she would involve him in a complicated love-hate relationship with his fellow Symbolist Andrey Bely. To Lyuba he dedicated a cycle of poetry that brought him fame, Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame (Verses About the Beautiful Lady, 1904). In it, he transformed his humble wife into a vision of the feminine soul and eternal womanhood (The Greek Sophia of Solovyov's teaching). Blok's few relatives currently live in Moscow, Riga, Rome and England.

During the last period of his life, Blok concentrated primarily on political themes, pondering the messianic destiny of his country (Vozmezdie, 1910-21; Rodina, 1907-16; Skify, 1918). Influenced by Solovyov's doctrines, he was full of vague apocalyptic apprehensions and often vacillated between hope and despair. "I feel that a great event was coming, but what it was exactly was not revealed to me," he wrote in his diary during the summer of 1917. Quite unexpectedly for most of his admirers, he accepted the October Revolution as the final resolution of these apocalyptic yearnings.

By 1921 Blok had become disillusioned with the Russian Revolution. He did not write any poetry for three years. Blok complained to Maksim Gorky that he had given up his "faith in the wisdom of humanity". He explained to his friend Korney Chukovsky why he could not write poetry any more: "All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear that there are no longer any sounds?".[2]. Within a few days Blok became sick. His doctors requested him to be sent for medical treatment abroad, but he was not allowed to leave the country. Gorky pleaded for a visa. On 29 May 1921, he wrote to Anatoly Lunacharsky: "Blok is Russia's finest poet. If you forbid him to go abroad, and he dies, you and your comrades will be guilty of his death". Blok received permission only on 10 August, after his death.[2]

Several months earlier, Blok had delivered a celebrated lecture on Pushkin, whom he believed to be an iconic figure capable of uniting White and Red Russia. His death and the execution of his fellow poet Nikolai Gumilev by Cheka in 1921 were seen by many as the end of the entire generation of Russians [2]. Nina Berberova, then a young girl, recalled about the mood at his funeral: "I was suddenly and sharply orphaned... The end is coming. We are lost."

http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-r...

Reviews

[Steve]

Alexander Blok (1880-1921)


Alexander Blok, born into a well-to-do academic family,(*) is regarded by many experts as the most important Russian poet since Pushkin, and certainly the greats of the Silver Age of Russian poetry - Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak - were influenced by his work. But to my mind, the children were greater than the father.

Blok was a man of Absolutes, a deeply romantic Symbolist even after the mystic experiences of the entity he called the Beautiful Lady faded away. Though he was an archetypal St. Petersburg intellectual, he shared Tolstoy's romantic view of rural, agricultural life, a life he dabbled in every summer on his family's estate, and damned the "artificial Hell" of St. Petersburg, where he nonetheless spent most of his life.

At first, Blok's lyric poetry was dedicated to his mystic pursuits and experiences, to that which is beyond time and to that part of love which he considered to be beyond time.(**) The tone is ecstatic, and his first book of poetry is full of this sort of thing. But he lost his contact with the Beautiful Lady and replaced her with a series of more human figures whom he recognized as leading him away from the Eternal, as "poisoning his soul", and also with "limitless Russia." But there are a few more appealing poems, poems flavored with Russian folklore and song, and poems which drop the high-flying symbols and spend a moment in actual life:

She came in from the frost
with her cheeks glowing,
and she filled the room
with a scent of air and perfume,
with her voice ringing
and her utterly work-shattering
chatter.

Immediately she dropped on the carpet
the fat slab of an art magazine
and suddenly it seemed
that in my generous room
was a shortage of space.

This was all a little annoying
not to say silly.
What's more, all at once she wanted
me to read Macbeth to her.

Hardly had we got to the 'earth's bubbles',
of which I cannot speak without emotion,
when I noticed that she too was moved
and staring out of the window.

And there was a big tabby cat
inching its way down the gable
in pursuit of some passionate pigeons.

I was annoyed most of all because
it was not us but the pigeons who were kissing
and that the times of Paolo and Francesca were over.

From around 1908 onward Blok tried to escape what he increasingly saw as the solipsism of his lyric poetry by turning to epic poetry (particularly the uncompleted "The Retribution" and the cycle “On the Field of Kulikovo”) and to drama. A few trips to Europe left him with the sense that Europe was only putrified past.

Die, Florence, Judas, disappear
in the twilight of long ago!
In the hour of love and in the hour
of death I'll not remember you.

Oh, laugh at yourself today, Bella,
for your features have fallen in.
Death's rotten wrinkles disfigure
that once miraculous skin.

The motorcars snort in your lanes,
your houses fill me with disgust;
you have given yourself to the stains
of Europe's bilious yellow dust.

(The first stanzas of "Florence".)

When the February Revolution arrived, Blok welcomed it, writing his most famous poem, "The Twelve," in January, 1918. What an unusual creation it is!

Some twenty pages long, it mixes scraps of direct speech, songs and prayers with onomatopoetic representations of firing rifles and machine guns to relate a strange story of twelve (the number is not arbitrary) Red Guards who are searching through a blizzard in St. Petersburg for a young woman who was spirited away by another young man in a cab. Finally finding them, the Red Guards fire a salvo to which only the young woman falls victim. After a brief lament the young men bluster and threaten the city with mayhem. And then the poem changes as the soldiers continue marching into the blizzard:

Abusing God's name as they go,
all twelve march onward into snow...
prepared for anything,
regretting nothing...

Their rifles at the ready
for the unseen enemy
in back streets, side roads
where only snow explodes
its shrapnel, and through quag-
mire drifts where the boots drag...

before their eyes
throbs a red flag.

Left, right,
the echo replies.

Keep your eyes skinned
lest the enemy strike!

It goes on like this to my increasing consternation until the poem closes with:

....So they march with sovereign tread...
Behind them limps the hungry dog,
and wrapped in wild snow at their head
carrying a blood-red flag -
soft-footed where the blizzard swirls,
invulnerable where the bullets crossed -
crowned with a crown of snowflake pearls,
a flowery diadem of frost,
ahead of them goes Jesus Christ.

(!!!) Trotsky is reported to have said with disgust: “What was the point in climbing our mountain in order to erect a medieval shrine on the top?” I should mention that Blok rejected Christianity for his particular flavor of mysticism. Asked to explain, Blok commented, “If you look into the snow along that road, you will see Jesus Christ.” OK then!

I expect it was not the rather confused sentiments of the poem which allowed it to last, but the remarkable mixture of voices and styles in which they are expressed, particularly remarkable in a Russian poetic tradition which was still in thrall to the 19th century. After writing "The Twelve" and the nearly equally curious "The Scythians," in which Blok presents the Russians as the bulwark of the West against the East, he stopped writing poetry and turned entirely to his efforts in the theater. Nonetheless, his musical and highly rhythmic idiom became one of the ingredients in the formation of the next, and truly great generation of Russian poets. In my humble and very incompletely informed opinion...

The Twelve and Other Poems (1970) is a collection of translations of fifty poems put together by the team of John Stallworthy and Peter France. They made a real effort to reflect the poetic nature of Blok's work, and write in their introduction that in the ever present translators' fidelity or beauty question they came down firmly on the side of beauty. As I now incline to think that Blok's greatness lies less in his ideas than in his technique, I think that Stallworthy/France made the right decision here.


(*) His grandfather was the Rector of St. Petersburg's university and his father was a law professor at the University of Warsaw.

(**) According to his biographer, Avril Pyman, Blok felt that love was eternal and sex was demonic, carrying this to the point that his was a white marriage until his wife finally succeeded in seducing him in the second year of their marriage.(!) She was too inexperienced for that to last, because he had already acquired a taste for the "demonic" and frequented prostitutes. (He died at the age of 40 of an unspecified venereal disease which was surely syphilis.) She eventually turned to Andrei Bely for solace, presenting Blok with a son he pretended was his own.

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/115...

[Magdalena en su sepulcro · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Por la galería del palacio
apenas iluminada por la luna
sigilosa entre las sombras pasa Salomé
llevando mi cabeza ensangrentada.

Todo duerme -palacios, canales, hombres-,
sólo se desliza el paso del fantasma,
sólo la cabeza desde el plato negro
mira con angustia la oscuridad en cerco."

[امیرمحمد حیدری · Rating 4 out of 5]

واقعا خوانش این کتاب برام سخت بود؛ اشعار سمبولیستی همیشه برام سخت بودن، سوای اینکه روس هم باشه! دیدگاه خوبی با خوندن شعر دوازده (که چندماه پیش خوندم) به بلوک داشتم، بعد پیش‌گفتار کتاب رو خوندم و دیدم عوض شد. چون انگار بیش از حد عرفانی و غیر قابل فهم جلوه کرد برام. اما وقتی خوندم، دنیایی برام متبادر شد که انگار نه مترجم تونسته بود برام شرحش بده، نه خودم تونسته بودم تصویر درستی ازش داشته باشم (با خوندنِ دوازده). سمبولیسم هم زیبایی‌های فراتر از تصوری داره که_با درسی که از اتمام کتاب گرفتم_نمی‌تونم براتون شرحش بدم. پیشنهادی.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

March all together, march to the Urals!
We clear the ground for when the armoured
juggernauts with murder in their sights
meet the charge of the mongol horde.

We shall ourselves be no longer your shield,
no longer launch our battlecries:
but study the convulsive battlefield
from far off through our narrow eyes!

We shall not stir when the murderous Huns
pillage to dead, turn towns to ash,
in country churches stable their squadrons,
and foul the air with roasting flesh.

Now, for the last time, see the light, old world!
To peace and brotherhood and labour—
our bright feast—for the last time you are called
by the strings of a Scythian lyre!

(30 January 1918)

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Late romantic, symbolist poet. A shadowy lady is a mystical absolute. She is hard to see in this decadent world. Art, nation, and revolution offer hope.

[Pooya]

it's so nice, i did translated it to persian

[Chet]

My second reading of what has to be one of the greatest yet most under-read poems of the 20th century. This is communist literature, brutal, torn, conflicted, ragged, proud, and it has nothing in common with what critic Max Eastman erroneously described as the work of "artists in uniform." If you want an easily grasped place to start with Soviet literature, this is it. 12 Bolshevik soldiers march through post-revolution Russia and witness devastation alongside rebirth alongside their hopes alongside their fears alongside their jaded indifference alongside their courage. A powerful and surprising cameo appearance is also found at the end. My favorite English translation can be read here: https://ruverses.com/alexander-blok/t...

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I will need to read this in Russian to get a full picture of Blok, but this was a nice place to start.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful poetry, interesting biography.

[Jimgosailing · Rating 5 out of 5]

From The Twelve
“…the wind
scouring God’s world.”

“so many yards of cloth!
How many children’s leggings it would make—
and they without shirts—without boots—without…”

“The wind rejoices,
mischievous and spry,
balooning dresses
and skittling passers-by…

and carries voices.

…Us girls had a session…
…in there on the right…
…had a discussion…
…carried a motion:”

January 1918

A lot of “dog” imagery: “with a hangdog air”; “the homeless mongrel runt”; “The shivering cur; the mongrel cur”

{The wind imagery in this poem reminded me of Hendrix’s “The Wind Cried Mary” But only that; themematically the two are miles apart}

FN for “The Stranger”: “Blok was indignant with the critics who saw in the Stranger simply a reincarnation of the Beautiful Lady. For all her heady charm she is in fact a vision induced by wine and the smoke of locomotives, a beautiful doll who impersonates the Beautiful Lady and mocks the poet’s inability to distinguish between dreams and reality, good and evil.”

FN for “I Am Nailed To A Bar”: “The troika image…inevitably evokes for Russian readers Gogol’s vision of Russia as a galloping troika.”

Very well written; very powerful, provocative, precise language - and poetic. Revisitation of some themes, but they also evolve.

See also The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader

[Lisa S · Rating 3 out of 5]

very weird and Russian

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished a collection of poems, THE TWELVE AND OTHER POEMS, by Alexander Blok (1880-1921), acclaimed by the translators as "one of Russia’s greatest poets.” The selected poems were written from 1900 to 1918. The earlier poems have a sense of optimism, appealing to a muse, “I wait for the Beautiful Lady / in the glimmer of icon light.” They become progressively darker, the poet gradually overcome with “Weltschmerz” (world-weariness)—“Better in this cold to burn! / There is no refuge, no peace, none”—reflecting Russia’s political descent into chaos. Blok’s most famous poem, “The Twelve” (1918) is a paradoxical celebration of the Bolshevik revolution. On one hand it expresses a naïve hope for change from the old order of things. On the other hand, the twelve, brutal Red Guard thugs randomly shooting and knifing people on the streets, represent the violence of the 1917 Revolution. The Beautiful Lady has turned into the prostitute Kate, “She’s dead! She’s dead! A bullet hole clean through her head.” The poem ends with a desperate allusion for hope that the Twelve, like the Christian disciples, will be harbingers of better days as “ahead of them goes Jesus Christ.” The poetic muse left Blok along with his ardor for the Revolution. The translators quote Trotsky: “[Blok] came towards us. And that is what broke him.”

[P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The twelve main poems have lovely moments, but, being written in four days (presumably) unedited? There are muddy points.

[shei · Rating 3 out of 5]

tiene unos simbolismos y una prosa bastante bonitos