Arlo Z. Graves, Black Rose, Graveside Press 2025
In this book Graves has created an alchemical alternative-history Wild West, in which metals—once they’ve been worked by humans into sophisticated machinery like locomotives and pistols—gradually become sentient and finally turn on their operators.
The nightmare world of metal is a recurrent feature of the SF landscape, necessarily so. It is a mythic echo of our lived experience. Our industrial-technological world is built mainly out of metal, if somewhat humanized by plastics. For most of us, organic nature is a trace element bracketed between cars and computers. It’s a pity that P. K. Dick’s (cyber) Gnosticism became the dominant paradigm here, instead of alchemy with its far more more positive glamor.
And SF/Fantasy westerns are a welcome change from the cape-clad light-saber wielding space operas and cape-clad named-blade medievalia which has become all too standard fare. To the best of our knowledge, the finest author of space westerns was the late great Mick Farren, whose DNA Cowboys Trilogy—and whose masterpiece Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Underworld (this last has Doc Holiday as a major character) —cannot be sufficiently admired.
Arlo Graves, despite their youth, has made a contribution to this literature one would not hesitate to shelve alongside the veteran author Farren. A more promising start to a literary career cannot be imagined than this book, which draws one in immediately with intriguing hints of its alternate world which are amply and satisfyingly realized throughout.(See the first chapter, reproduced in this issue.)
The overall design of this book, as of Graves’ stories which have appeared in 96, might be characterized as “the ghoul with the heart of gold”—or maybe “good ghouls win.” Graves’ monsters and banshees and wraiths always turn out to be misunderstood heroes—a surely gratifying read for those who feel themselves to be outsiders
But what really makes this book work is Graves’ poetic imagination, as in this instance of animate metallica,
A little black shape hops past his foot, so easily mistaken for a frog in the moonlight. The hairs raise up the back of Gabriel’s neck when he recognizes the shape as a telegraph key. It stops as it to sniff him. Lining up his boot, Gabirle gives the cursed little thing a kick, sending it bouncing off a nearby wall. “This place really is Hell, isnt’ it?”
or this characterization of a river of living silver,
One might think a river of silver would be quiet, smothering in its silence even. One would be wrong. The clamor of flowing silver fills Gabriel’s ears. It clatters, a roar and yet high-pitched and pinging, like if he shook a drawer of metal cutlery, only unending and deafening.
Such instances of splendid invention, and musical prose, enliven the whole story, making this a delightful as well as a compelling read. More might be said, but since the novel weighs in at only 127 (beautifully produced) pages, this shall suffice.
Diana Lewis Burgin, Five Hard Pieces, Translations and Readings of Five Long Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, Troy Book Makers 2018.
Marina Tsvetaeva is sort of the holy grail of modern Russian poetry. Akhmatova has been translated, almost adequately, by a parade of Slavicists, beginning with Judith Hemschemeyer who rendered her complete poetical works back in 1990. The prosaic efforts of Hemschemeyer and her successors to make English of Akhmatova produced poems that were at least readable, if not very interesting.
Though Akhmatova isn’t easy to translate well, she can be rendered to some extent by someone who isn’t a poet, because she wrote in a deliberately clear style, and favored images drawn from careful observation, in a style perhaps familiar from Pound, H. D., and Amy Lowell.
While Akhmatova thus distanced herself from Russian poetry’s then dominant Symbolist tradition, Tsvetaeva took Symbolist allusiveness and mysticism to new heights, in a style comparable to that of her friend and pen-pal Rilke. Academically correct translations of Tsvetaeva’s complexity, and this is all we’ve had so far, not only fail to deliver the feeling, but are unintelligible.
Diana Burgin has broken new ground with this book. Although her translation “aims at faithfulness to the (literal) meaning, syntax, and some of the rhyme of the original,” (introduction p. x) she succeeds in producing a version that is readable and intriguing. The translations are not masterpieces to swoon over—the aforementioned faithfulness would preclude that for anyone. But as an academically irreproachable rendering, it is comparable to David Hawkes’ translation of the 3rd century BCE homosexual shamanic poem Encountering Sorrow. Like Hawkes, Burgin makes it possible to read through the translation and gain a clear sense of what the original was like.
Burgin is actually a poet, author of a biography in verse of her father, and the author of the first (and only) biography of Sophia Parnok, Tsvetaeva’s lover. Thus she is able to bring skills and knowledge to the task no other translator can match.
What is most truly notable here is not Burgin’s admirable tight-rope walk between the disparate peaks of scholarly and poetic excellence, but her commentary, which explores the mystical resonance of these texts.
The undertaking calls to mind René Guénon’s 1925 The Esoterism of Dante, which found unsuspected, and partly imagined, hermetic depths in Dante. Though Guénon’s project was animated by a right-wing traditionalism, and Burgin’s researches are closer to the New Age end of the spectrum, both authors have the merit of bringing to light a hermetic milieu that unquestionably was known to the poets and accounts for part of their poetry’s resonance.
Tsvetava’s Russia was beset by Spiritists, Theosophists, Freemasons and Hermeticists. This was, after all, the Russia of Blavatsky, Gudjieff, Blavatsky, Steiner and Rasputin! So when Burgin sees the alchemical “red tincture” in the poem Astride a Red Steed, and the Kabbalah in Air Poem, she is plausible if not always persuasive.
The analysis of these five poems, as a ballet of the four elements and quintessence, owes something to Jung, and more to Burgin’s indisputable insight into lesbian psychology. But the most compelling arguments come from Burgin’s appreciation of the formal musical structure of the poems. Music was paradigmatic for the Russian Symbolists: Bely thought that all art forms gained in holiness to the extent that they approached the imageless evocative power of music. Scriabin claimed to “hear” colors. For the creatives of Silver Age Russia, the art forms were seen as fusing into a kind of synaesthetic music. When Burgin, (whose father was Richard Burgin, violinist and conductor for the Boston Symphony Orchestra ) analyzes the Tsvetaeva poems as musical compositions, she is on the firmest of firm ground.
This volume is by no means light reading, nor suitable for a first exposure to Tsvetaeva’s poetry, but it is a fascinating and daring exploration of both the erotic and esoteric depths of Tsvetaeva’s psyche, and so a valuable contribution to both literary and occult studies. It is also the only readable rendering of Tsvetaeva into English, with enough genuine poetic sensibility to balance the opacity that is the usurious price of scholarly correctness. Burgin negotiates the poetic terrain like Milton’s Satan soaring through Chaos, “half on foot, half flying.”
Three Generations, Tcherepnin, David Witten.
David Witten has been both practical and generous in his recording choices. He has not added to the CD stacks of over-recorded masterpieces, but made available remarkable but little known and sometimes unrecorded work by composers who are not always of Chopin’s stature, but who did compose masterpieces which are well worth rescuing from oblivion.
Performance is at best a perilous undertaking, if not an impossible one. If one interprets well known work—the market is saturated. If one promotes the little known—who’s going to be interested? The latter is of course the nobler action, and the persons who will be interested are persons who are interesting.
This recording sets forth chamber music by the Tcherepnins, whose family business, composing, is now entering its second century. I lack the musical background to discuss in technical terms the styles and stratagems of these composers: David Witten has done that with elegance and concision in the accompanying pamphlet, which is to be reckoned among the very few sets of liner notes worth reading. Instead, I will consider these pieces more in the light of history and poetry.
The CD opens with three composition by Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977) He grew up in haunted, surreal, avant-garde St. Petersburg—the Petersburg of Andrei Bely’s novel, a James Joyce-like Symbolist meditation on the city on the brink of revolutionary apocalypse. Thus Alexander was ideally placed to compose in the newer style exemplified by his friend Prokofiev (who had studied with Alexander’s father.)
The Tcherepnins left Russia in 1921, at the end of the Civil War. Stalin’s dictatorship would not begin till 1927, but things were already bad enough to send all the artists of aristocratic sensibility running for cover to Berlin and Paris. Marina Tsvetaeva, whose Disciple poems are featured in this issue , admirable expressed the mood of the time. The dissonance in the best Russian music written then paralleled in compositions by modernists such as Bartok or the early Schoenberg, but one feels in the work of Tcherepnin and his contemporaries a recognizably Russian flavor. It’s at the same time more and less European than his peers from other countries.
Tsvetaeva’s poetry is perhaps the handiest key to the odd, conflicted relation of Russian to to European culture. Tsvetaeva is in many ways comparable to her friend Rilke, but she possesses a fervor and earnestness which her German peer lacks. Tsvetaeva and Tcherepnin fils, though very different in temperament and emphases, are recognizably, audibly, members of the same milieu. This passage from his Violin Sonata in F Major gives a splendid example of his genius, and of Witten’s playing at its most riveting:
Alexander’s father Nikolai (1873-1945) composed and conducted for the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev and Nijinsky. His Poème Lyrique from 1900 is probably the most beautiful composition on this CD. It references a poem by Tyutchev, and captures the classical beauty and poignance of Russian Golden Age Poetry. We have reviewed David Witten’s recordings before, and interviewed him about his recording of Nikolai’s Tcherepin’s dazzling Music of the Russian Alphabet, Tcherepnin’s song cycles of poems by Balmont and Tyutchev. While his Balmont settings show his s great dramatic gifts and versatility, the Tyutchev poems are those that called forth his most poignant melodies. The Poème Lyrique linked here breathes the same exalting spirit.
The compositions by the grandson, Ivan, are virtuoso modern compositions. Born in France, ending his life in Boston, he is very much a third generation emigré. It is difficult not to listen for atavisms. The placement of his work after his father’s and grandfather’s entail his achievement appearing as a kind of epilogue. Ivan is of a different world and a different age. His modernism is unalloyed by the Romanticism of his predecessors. His work, of obvious excellence, will seem abstract or pure, bare or spacious, depending on one’s feelings about modernism.
This CD is a spellbinding tour of musical history, compellingly linked by family resemblance. Witten is a splendid ensemble player. He joins to flawless performances a gift for bringing out the best in his fellows. His partners, here clearly enjoy every moment —a mood the listener will share.