Sample story: “Now, one day a man went to work and on the way he met another man, who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from. And that’s it, more or less.”
I stumbled upon Kharms two weeks ago in a New York Times piece about Russian poetry. This on a day when I continued to wrestle with what to name my little boy. All along, I'd loved his given Russian name, written on translated documents: "Danil." Problem was, everyone here in the States mispronounced the name as Dan'-il, stress on the first syllable, so it came out soundling like the name "Dan," never one of my favorites, with the second, less stressed syllable sounding a lot like the word "ill."
What to do? I considered changing his name to Samuel and dropping the Russian altogether. "Samuel Sjostrom" has such an air of certainty and solidity about it. But after several weeks, Samuel wasn't sitting right, much as I loved the name. My son remained Danil to me (correctly pronounced Da-neal', stress on second syllable, with the first syllable sounding like the Russian word for "yes" that sounds like "dah.") This is how I continued to reference him in conversation and in my mind. And Danil he remained to Mom, who met him in February, and to everyone else who'd been hearing of him from the very start, back in December when I was sent two little photos and a rather disconcerting medical history.
Friends suggested changing the spelling to reflect the correct phonetic pronunciation: Daneal or Daneil or Daneel. But something got lost in each of these "Anglicized/ Americanized" versions, what I can only describe as a surrender of Russian spirit. What to do? Name my boy "Danil" and wind up with his being called "Dan" with that very nasal, unpleasant sounding "a"? Or change the spelling, but sacrifice a bit of Russian soul? Or give my son a solid, pronounceable American name that reflected the solid American life opening in front of him?
It was driving me nuts. Each option left me feeling unsettled. So as a last resort, I did what I always come around to doing as a last resort. I prayed. "God, this is taking up too much of my energy, energy that could be better spent serving you and readying my heart for my boy's arrival and our life together. If there's any way you can lend a hand with his name, I'd be so appreciative. I give up. I turn this over to you."
Time: Next morning. Place: My office, Chatham Middle School. Scene: Lisa allows herself to read one, just one, New York Times article after broadcasting the morning announcements and before diving into the whirlwind of the day.
On the front page of the Arts section, I spied the article about Russian poetry. It held my attention through to the continuation on page 3. And there it was. Second column, middle of the third paragraph, there was a reference to "early Soviet-era poet Daniil Kharms." Daniil. With not one, but two i's. That was it! A little more sleuthing on the Internet quickly revealed that this spelling, the one with the double ii's, is the more common translation into English. I don't know how often a Russian "Daniil" gets referenced in an American newspaper, perhaps more often than I've ever stopped to notice, but I'm sure grateful that it was referenced on that particular morning, and that I was there to receive it. Thank you, Serendipity, God, Strong Intention, whatever hears and answers prayers.
So the spelling of the name was settled. Those back-to-back i's capture my boy's spirit and spunk, along with his Eastern European heritage. And I had another Daniil to investigate. It turns out that Kharms was one odd dude who lived through one odd (and brutal) time in Russian history. As described in a 2007 article by George Saunders,
Daniil Kharms starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad, having been put there by the Stalinist government for, among other reasons, his general strangeness. Kharms gave flamboyant poetry readings from the top of an armoire, did performance art on the Nevsky Prospect—by, for example, lying down on it, sometimes dressed as Sherlock Holmes. His brilliant, hilarious, violent little stories are now being discovered in the West.
...When [Kharms'] stories proceed — if they proceed at all — it is often by way of a kind of comic language-momentum. In “Blue Notebook #10,” for example, Kharms starts out conventionally enough (“There was a redheaded man ...”) but then, as if reacting against all the common ways a writer might further describe this redheaded man, veers off in a mini-critique of the descriptive tradition itself. This redheaded man, we learn, “had no eyes or ears.” Succumbing to a strange frequency in his underlying logic, Kharms begins Kharmsifying: “He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.” By the end of the story — a scant two paragraphs later — our poor redheaded man has also been shorn of his mouth, nose, arms, legs, stomach, back, spine and insides. “There was nothing!” Kharms crisply concludes. “So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about. We’d better not talk about him anymore.”
Exiting a Kharms story, we are newly aware of how hungry we are for rising action, and we have a fresh respect for, and (importantly) suspicion of, storytelling itself. We’re reminded that narrative is not life, but a trick a writer does with language, to make beauty.
Here is Kharms, standing, saw in hand, before the woman in the box. He thinks of all the other magicians who have worked so hard over the centuries to be appearing to saw her in half, then puts down the saw, mutters, “Well, I could do it, but I’m not sure it’s honest,” and leaves the stage.But wonderfully, even this refusal to saw constitutes a story of sorts. And it’s the kind of story Kharms writes again and again, until, having read too much Kharms at one sitting, you feel like saying: “Daniil, Daniil, you’re going to starve to death before you’re 38! Dude, get cracking! Write your masterwork!”
Then you realize he’s already done it.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment