Chinese Sun

by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Evgeny Pavlov (Translator)

Fiction. Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Evgeny Pavlov. Arkadii Dragomoschenko came to us first as a samizdat/underground poet, his lines & gestures signaling an opening to new discoveries & freedoms in what had been the closed world of the Soviet superstate. That freedom as a poet resided squarely in the heart of his poetry--its language & form serving as the conduits for thoughts & realities previously obscured. Now, in CHINESE SUN, he launches a fresh assault, this time on the world of prose--a poet's reconfiguration (transformation) of the novel & a work that crosses open borders as a gift to all of us.

Genres: Poetry

326 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Arkadii Trofimovich Dragomoshchenko (Russian: Аркадий Драгомощенко) was a Russian poet, writer, translator, and lecturer. He is considered the foremost representative of language poetry in contemporary Russian literature.

Dragomoshchenko fused elements of poetry, essay, philosophy, journalism and fictional prose. He "explores the way our perceived and conceptual worlds are constructed through language. Self-consciousness, mannerism and a degree of abstraction are inevitable hazards in this territory, they are also concomitants of an individual voice obstinately pursuing its own themes. The fundamental characteristics of his work remain constant and may be summarized in the title of his first American translations — Description.

Reviews

[Brian Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I was invited to talk about the secret laws of the alphabet, about five-year cycles of a gradual disappearance of letters from their positions -- a phenomenon known to no one because they who (for no apparent reason) use the alphabet for their own purposes obsessively continue to operate with non existing letters as though nothing happened and as though what wretched out before them wasn't a colourless, timeless, dimensionless desert, but instead what they call (resorting to supposedly known signs) a perfect silence where all meanings of future emergence and disappearance are simultaneously found, including the very meaning of the alphabet's endless, repeated vanishing."
One of the most fascinating and inventive of Russian postmodern writers, Dragomoshchenko's flight though the spray of language and dives into its phosphorescent benthic currents are astonishing and reveal his connection not only to Lyn Hejinian, his early American translator, but to the heritage of surrealism. His "books...[give] off hot fumes of premonition and impossibility”.

This book is an intermitent-continuous book; I’ve not finished it, but I’m beginning to think that it’s not meant to be “finished”.