Russians Riffs

About the Author

 

Don Mager

Don Mager published his first poem in 1960 and since then has 7 books and chapbooks of original poems. He is the 2011 recipient of the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to the Literary Arts. In 2009, with an introduction by Richard Howard, University of New Orleans press released Us Four Plus Four: Eight Russian Poets Conversing--his translations of poems by Aleksandr Blok, Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Osip Mandel'shtam, Marina Tvestaeva and Igor' Severianin. Don's website www.dongmager.org includes the full libretto to the opera Akhmatova with music by Marc Satterwhite, as well as two large translation projects. Poem Without a Hero: Four Versions (1940-1962) with Prose About the Poema: Pro Domo Mea and From The Ballet "The Fortieth Year" is a variorum translation of Anna Akhmatova's longest poem, on which she worked over 20 years-a modernist classic. The four extant versions have never been fully presented in English. Beginnings and Fragments from the Thematic Material for the Elegies and Duino Elegies is Mager's translation of all the materials related to Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies--a work he took 15 years to achieve. This is the first compilation of these materials along with the final set of Elegies to be done in English. www.dongmager.org also has Don's cycle Akhmatova Odes--a cycle of 50 imaginary conversations between Mager, Akhmatova and Rilke. Don is retired Professor of English from Johnson C. Smith University and Dean Emeritus, partnered for 30 years to Bill McDowell, with two sons, two daughters-in-law and two granddaughters. He and his partner make their home in Charlotte.

 

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Comments

 

Deeply meditative, miraculously pragmatic, Don Mager's riffs on these Russian poems bring to readers his own insights, and then offer more--a way of reaching toward one's own strength of perception, by looking closely into language. We find here a particular blend that has always characterized Mager's work: unflinching truthfulness offered with a touch just light enough to allow us full access. We see that we can be better than we are, but we are led by love, not shame, on the journey the poems map out for us.

--Helen Frost,
winner of Michael L. Printz Honor, the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and the Mary Carolyn Davies Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America

 

Original and absorbing, the poems in Don Mager's eighth collection can be read both for their cleverness and for their insight. His two different starting points are his translations from the Russian of Feydor Tyutchev's brooding poems on nature and of Marina Tsvetaeva's remarkable diary reflections on the use of the seemingly ordinary "helping verbs." In his typically rich and persuasive vocabulary, Mager speaks (riffing on Tyutchev') of "our spiritual vortex of unwelcome apologies and restive willingness." When he elaborates on Tsvetaeva's "primordial I cannot", he contrasts I will not's "gorgeous plumes" with won't's imperiousness, don't want's arbitrariness, and cannot's necessity.We readers soon find ourselves examining our own lives and values, as we journey to the very core of humanness.

-- Blynn Field,
author of Whale Watch Cottage

 

Don Mager has once again executed a brilliant collection of poetry. In what I perceive as a spirit of Kierkegaard and Hannah Arendt, Mager explores the human condition through these poems in response to the somber and serious work of Russian poets Tyutchev and Tsvetaeva. For Mager though, the human condition is not all colored by misery and despair, by "austerity and abnegation," for there are glimmers of hope in this collection as we find "leaps and lopings of passion / suspirations of willful / defiance. Arcs of determination and withstand," as well as a "tense of the / future." This collection reads philosophically and linguistically, yet the poems are lyrical and imagistic. Reminiscent of the journey of the unknown Russian mendicant of The Way of a Pilgrim, I found my own self wandering internally as I read through these poems, wondering how best I can respond to this thoughtful collection.

-- Jonathan K. Rice,
Editor/Publisher Iodine Poetry Journal

Samples

Winter of Discontent: Ten Riffs on Poems by Fedor Tyutchev

 

See on the river's broad expanse
How water tends to come alive,
Out to the sea's wide openness
Ice floe on ice floe rides.

Whether brightly glinting in the sun
Or lying darkly late at night,
They all, inescapably thawing,
Float out to a common fate.

All together-large or small-
They lose their previous shapes,
And, as unfeeling as particles, all
Submerge in the fatal abyss! . .

Oh, how our thoughts delude us,
You, who are the human I,
Is not your meaning such as this,
And such your destiny?

<1851> Fedor Ivonovich Tyutchev

 

1
It is now the third dawn of outages,
ice broken limbs, downed lines and lashing wind.
All schools and half the city are cancelled--
so the old walkman radio announces.
To walk to the car is to sail a ship mast
in a tempest. Asphalt-backed shingles
strew the ice crust that once was grass.
Click click click click the death-watch
beetle of the ignition cannot arouse
a cough or faint whine. After nine
minutes of plaguing music wait-time,
the attendant says that road service
is running behind up to ten hours.
The cell phone's dwindled to the last two bars.

2

The dark of blankets and the restless bed
fail us as windows sieve the bitter
dregs of wind, piercing and pelting
a sort of hovering sleep that just rides
the icy surfaces of wakefulness
with erratic dreams. The wind drives
its massive fleet of flayed and shredded sails
across the tempest of the sky's merciless
black. It drives through panes of glass, through
mounds of covers, through the fleece of sweatpants
and the wool of socks; it penetrates
our flesh and lodges inside muscles to
twist and tense and knot their rubbery bands
into taut contorted cramps and spasms.

3

Solstice night is long and hideous.
The bottom day of the year is cramped and small
its hours shrinking, its light a pall
and what frailty of sun there is crouches
along the horizon. It stalks and creeps until its
own inertia draws its western gasp
down into feeble flashes like a doused
fire. Day gone, night spreads a hungry gullet
seeking to swallow in its foggy breath, cars,
roads, woods, apartment blocks and malls.
Our twilit sleep sinks to the horizon's edge
of its own feeble gasps and wreckage.
We know, on its bottom pole, as the year turns
in twelve months it will simply again turn.

 

 

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