Poetry by Larissa Miller

Translated from the Russian by Richard McKane

Published in Words Without Borders' April 2011 collection: Writing from Russia.

for An Uncoincidence, A Noncoincidence
https://wwb-campus.org/literature/an-uncoincidence-a-noncoincidence

Larissa Miller

Born in 1940, Larissa Miller was educated at the Foreign Languages Institute in Moscow and later taught at Moscow University. A major lyrical poet, she is the author of ten books, including Nameless Day; My Land and Home; Let's Talk about the Paradoxes of Love; Holidays, Holidays; and Between the Cloud and the Pit. Dim and Distant Days (English translation published by Glas) is her book of memoirs, looking back over nearly five decades of Soviet history to her hungry but happy childhood in postwar Moscow; her coming of age as a Jewish girl in an anti-Semitic regime; and her encounters with the KGB as an English interpreter in the 1960s and again in the 1980s as the wife of the famous human rights activist Boris Altshuler. Her poems have been translated into English, French, Polish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish. Guests of Eternity, Richard McKane's translation of Between the Cloud and the Pit, was published in 2008 and received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The winner of several literary prizes, Miller was short-listed for the State Prize in 2000. You can read more about her on her bilingual website.

Richard McKane (translator)

Richard McKane was born in 1947 and earned a degree in Russian from Oxford University. Based in London, he was a poet and translator of Russian and Turkish poetry. He died in 2016.

Несовпадение, несовпадение

Несовпадение, несовпадение.
О, как обширны земные владения,
О, как немыслима здесь благодать.
Как ненавязчиво Божье радение,
Сколько причин безутешно рыдать.
Жаждешь общения – время немотное.
Жаждешь полёта – погода нелётная.
Жаждешь ответа – глухая стена,
Воды стоячие, ряска болотная,
Да равнодушная чья-то спина.
Что ж остаётся? Смириться да маяться,
Поздно прозреть, с опозданьем раскаяться…
Вечный зазор меж тогда и теперь…
Кто-то к снесённому дому кидается,
Ищет в отчаянье старую дверь.

1989

Links available online only

Meet Larissa Miller

Poet Larissa Miller. By Victor Pogadaev, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Find out more about Larissa Miller in this interview that spans her childhood, her work as a teacher of English, and her thoughts on politics.

Translator Richard McKane wrote, "There is a sensibility in Larissa Miller's poetry that is arresting." Read Miller's biography, and find out what other critics and poets have said about her work, on this page from her website.

Meet Translator Richard McKane

Find out more about Richard McKane in an obituary written by his brother and a collection of reminiscences from the writers and staff at English PEN.

Hear the Poem

Listen to a reading of the poem in Russian, from Dmitry Kurmanov.

(Listen on SoundCloud.)

A Scholar's Notes

Photo by Vladimir Efroimson.

Read scholar Julia Trubikhina's comments on this poem:

Two poems in the section entitled “Leaving Home,” “An Uncoincidence, A Noncoincidence” by Larissa Miller and “Soul, you are a street” by Aleksey Porvin (two poets of very different generations and poetics), “leave home” only in order to come back, to organically claim the territory of Russia’s rich poetic tradition. Miller, a well-known poet and author of many books of essays and memoirs, writes poetry of exquisite simplicity, as if she were intentionally bypassing postmodern obscurity and complexity and harking back to the transparent yet metaphysical verse of Tiutchev or Georgy Ivanov. Existential tragedy mirrors the tragic times (“the time is mute,” “the weather unflyable”), as man is trying to fill “the gap between then and now” and recapture the past that has been irretrievably lost.

Read more in Trubikhina's introduction to the collection of Russian literature on WWB Campus.

Links available online only

More from Larissa Miller

Read more work from Larissa Miller, published in Words Without Borders.

(Watch the entire video, with additional poems and translations, on YouTube.)

Or, listen to a few of Miller's Russian readings while reading the English translations on her website.

Three collections of her poems, also translated by Richard McKane, are available from Arc Publications.

For other books and the poems they contain, visit Miller's page on PEN Russia.

For Russian speakers: In an essay also published on this website, Dmitry Kuzmin suggests that "the role of prisons and prison camps in shaping the post-Soviet mentality is enormous." It certainly had an influence on Miller; watch a video in which she discusses the family history behind a different poem ("То облава, то потрава,") which she read at the GULAG History Museum.

More from Translator Richard McKane

Richard McKane's other translations include Russian-language poetry from:

Hamid Ismailov, whose short story "The Stone Guest" appears elsewhere on this website. Here is McKane's translation of Ismailov's poem "Untitled," published in Modern Poetry in Translation.
Anna Akhmatova, a preeminent poet of Russia's Silver Age. This video pairs images with McKane's translation of Akhmatova's "I taught myself to live simply."

(Watch the video on YouTube.)

You can also read McKane's translation of Akhmatova's "In the Evening," described as a "love-deprived love poem" in the Guardian. An essay below the poem comments on the translation and includes some thoughts from McKane.
Akhmatova's husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, also a poet: The Pillar of Fire.

McKane's translations from Turkish include:

Beyond the Walls by Nâzim Hikmet
Poems of Oktay Rifat; a video of McKane's translation of the short poem "Destiny" is below.
(Watch on YouTube).

To read McKane's own poetry, try Poet for Poet, which also includes translations; or Out of the Cold Blue: Poems 1967–1999.

Translation and Human Rights

In addition being a literary translator, Richard McKane was also a human rights interpreter, translating the testimonials of survivors of torture for Freedom from Torture and other organizations.

This article delves into the connections between literature and human rights, in the work of McKane and others: "Poetry and Politics: Richard McKane and the Poetry of the Taliban."

Emotions in Translation

How is grief related to anxiety? Is there a connection between love and pity?

This article from Quartz explains how the language we speak may affect our understanding of emotions. It also includes a chart that maps out how different emotions are related in Indo-European languages like English and Russian.

Miller's Poetic Ancestors

Portrait of poet Fyodor Tyutchev. By Russian painter Stepan Aleksandrovsky, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the introduction to Russian literature on WWB Campus, Julia Trubikhina writes that Miller's work is reminiscent of "the transparent yet metaphysical verse of Tiutchev or Georgy Ivanov."

Read some translations of Tyutchev from Alexander Cigale, including the frequently quoted lines, "Russia cannot be known by the mind . . ."

For Tyutchev's famous poem "Last Love," and the Björk song it inspired, see "More Music Inspired by Poetry" at the bottom of this page.

Then, read Georgy Ivanov's "With this inhuman fate . . . ," translated by Ian Probstein. The poem has some parallels to Miller's "Uncoincidence."

Then, find out why Georgy Ivanov "remains a divisive figure" in this article from translator and poet Boris Dralyuk, published in Molossus. Dralyuk's own poem to Ivanov is at the bottom of the page.

Read one of Dralyuk's translations of what he calls Ivanov's "elegant, despairing poems of exile."

Want more Ivanov? His work appears in the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Dralyuk and others; and Perceval Press has published a bilingual edition of Ivanov's collected poems, On the Border of Snow and Melt, translated, edited, and annotated by Jerome Katsell and Stanislav Shvabrin.

In Miller's poem, the line "The time is mute" may be a reference to a series of autobiographical sketches by the major Silver Age poet Osip Mandelstam, entitled The Noise of Time.

More Poems about Longing*

Egyptian poet Iman Mersal.

On WWB Campus:

"Riverwilt": another poem, from Japan, that also describes "the eternal gap between then and now"
"Things Elude Me": from Egypt, a poem that depicts a narrator's return to a familiar street and her sense of distance from the past
"A Failed Journey" from Mexico, a story of a young girl's attempted "flight" from her everyday reality

Miller's Influences:

In the introduction to the Russian collection on WWB Campus, Julia Trubikhina suggests that Miller's poetry "hark[ens] back to the transparent yet metaphysical verse of Tiutchev or Georgy Ivanov." An Ivanov poem, reflecting on his exile from Russia after the 1917 revolution, has thematic parallels to "An Uncoincidence."
Another translation from Richard McKane, Anna Akhmatova's "In the Evening," was described as a "love-deprived love poem" in the Guardian.
Like Miller's, the poetry of Emily Dickinson is "transparent yet metaphysical," especially in a poem like "Come Slowly—Eden."
Shirley Kaufman's contemporary poem "Longing for Prophets" evokes a barren world with parallels to the one in "An Uncoincidence."

*For Teaching Idea 1

More Music Inspired by Poetry, and Vice Versa*

The singer Björk at a concert. By ANNA SOLER CEPRIÁ, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Read Tyutchev's famous poem "Last love" in the Financial Times. Then, listen to a song inspired by the poem: Björk's "The Dull Flame Of Desire" (lyrics).

You can also listen to a different musical interpretation of "Last Love." The lyrics are the words to Tyutchev's poem in the original Russian. There's an English translation in the comments section.

Poetry inspired by music:

Also by Larissa Miller, a poem inspired by a song: "['La vie,' Edith Piaf sings]." Students can also view Edith Piaf's live performance of "La Vie en Rose" on YouTube.
"'To kiss a forehead is to erase worry.,'" by Marina Tsvetaeva, is influenced by folk songs.
"Sleepless Homeland," by Carmen Boullosa, is influenced by a very different kind of "folk music"—Mexico's narcocorridos.
"Nothing Remains Empty," by Juan Gregorio Regino, includes rhythms that echo indigenous Mazateco chants.
"Poem to the Tune 'Pure Peace,'" by Li Bai, is a Tang Dynasty era poem meant to be accompanied with music that has now been lost.
"Another Lullaby for Insomniacs," by A. E. Stallings

Poet-musicians—two American and two Russian "bards" (singer-songwriters):

Bob Dylan: "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" (lyrics)
Paul Simon: "The Cool, Cool River"
Alexander Galich: "Clouds," written from the perspective of a labor camp survivor watching clouds pass (audio of song in Russian at the bottom of the page)
Bulat Okudzhava: "The Last Blue Trolley"

*For Teaching Idea 2

An Uncoincidence, A Noncoincidence

An uncoincidence, a noncoincidence.
Oh, how broad are the earth’s estates,
oh, how unthinkable is grace here.
How unobtrusive is God's care,
how many reasons to sob inconsolably.
You thirst for communication—the time is mute.
You thirst for flight—unflyable weather.
You thirst for an answer—a blind wall,
stagnant water, swampy duckweed
and someone’s cold back.
What’s left then? To resign and to pine,
to comprehend too late, to repent with a delay . . .
the eternal gap between then and now . . .
Someone rushes to a house that’s been moved away,
searches desperately for the old door.

Related Reading

Soul, you are a street - Poetry

Riverwilt - Poetry

Things Elude Me - Poetry

A Failed Journey - Fiction