Text 114

The book has come to an end, so it's about time I confess. It's been seven and twenty years since I began to teach English professionally. I cannot say I am a full-time poeteacher now. But I am trying to be one, trying hard.

My first contacts with the subject matter of the present book were with the help of translations. I remember well a thick volume, a valuable part of my home library in the north of Russia. Something in me reached out to those poems. I remember experiencing a peculiar feeling reading nursery rhymes in Marshak's translations, and his version of Stevenson's Heather Ale, and other poems. I never thought them to be translations. They were pure poetry.

Poetry in English came later. Like millions of other children, I began to study the language in the fifth grade. I must have been a good student. So good that my teacher once commissioned me to participate in some English show. My task was to pose as would-be Soviet Spaceman, spacesuit and all, and voice a young one's dream with the help of an ingenious poem.

I want to be a spaceman

And journey to the Moon

In our Soviet rocket

I'll make this journey soon!

Oh, rock it, Rocket – do I remember these lines today! But I couldn't do it then. With the spaceman's attire I had no trouble at all, having produced a monstrous-looking helmet. The latter, though resembling not a helmet but rather a revolution-time Red Army cap, gave me confidence. But what gave me no confidence at all was the recitation. I couldn't beat the words into my head properly. The result was that when I stood there, as weak and trembling as a spaceman after a 300-day orbital flight, I could only mumble the beginning, I want to be a spaceman, and then I stopped short. Panting, lost, humiliated, I didn't manage to cope with stage fright and simply ran away. I didn't even want to go to school the next day.

I never thought about poetry for a very long time.

To my teacher's credit, she tried her best to reconcile me with my failure. Things do happened, she cooed, and it was not your fault, it was the stress. But she was too motherly, perhaps. Probably I needed tougher treatment.

Frankly, I remember no more poetry at my regular school lessons. Simply cannot do that. All the poems I came to know when at school were read or learned during my studentship with a tutor. Private lessons were my mother's design for she wanted a glamorous international career for me. That was something she herself could have obtained but sacrificed for the sake of romantic love for my father. So she wanted me to think better of my own future. English was to become instrumental in this.

Whatever those lessons were, they were not boring because I mostly studied by myself. The tutor was a teacher at a local school with extensive English learning, but otherwise traditional in her methods. Yet we used the textbooks that were read in her school. Those were intolerably difficult books overpacked with unreadable texts. The authors were all tested and tried, patented "reds" in the disguise of Western names. The choice of poems had also been made accordingly, with a clear-cut bias in mind. But sometimes it worked, miraculously.

I remember one such moment when I read Henry Longfellow's Slave's Dream. The ringing rhymes of that ballad-like poem are as fresh in my memory today as they were on the evening when I was learning them by heart. I was in the 7^th grade.

Beside the ungathered rice he lay,

His sickle in his hand.

His breast was bare, his matted hair

Was buried in the sand...

The "dark-eyed queen" was there too, and it added an unfamiliar touch to the whole business of learning. Something dark and alien stirred deep, very deep in my heart, but I didn't have any name then to categorize the emotion.

Longfellow's роеtry caught on. In the 9^th grade I took part in the city English Olympiad. The closing ceremony, held at the local teacher training institute, was the responsibility of the seniors from the English Department. Those girls, who seemed to be no less than grannies to us, did try their best to entertain greenhorn boys and girls. They wanted to impress. How one can do her best to impress another person? By reciting poetry, of course! Their best option was, unfailingly, Longfellow's verses, declamatory gems as they are. And the dead sure choice came again, The Arrow and the Song. One of the students recited it, overemphasizing every word which was there to be emphasized. I liked the poem but never the way it was recited. Had I been your teacher, I thought, I should have thought better of it! Today, more than thirty years later, I understand my big mistake. I should not have mentioned teaching then!

That vague feeling of discontent with the recital lingered. Had I had the words to express it then, I'd have said that poetry should not be profaned. Moreover, the recitation offended my feelings due to the fact that by that time I'd begin to treat myself as an accomplished author.

The previous year, I had had a minute inspiration, enough to create a simplistic 8-liner. Not only was it a why-my-dear-why sort of love song but it was also written in two languages. I am not sure in which language I actually composed the verse. Poor doggerel as it was, it was presented with due pomp to the girl I was desperately in love with, on the heartbreaking day of parting.

The heroine of my poem snatched the copybook sheet, quickly scanned the content, and hid it in the mysterious warm depths of her stylish overcoat. She never spoke about it again. My first attempt to imitate Nabokov – the name I heard about but years later – was a total disaster.

In the meantime, I read more poetry in English, carefully sorted out for the purposes of indoctrination. The only poem I came to remember was about Joe Hill, written by Alfred Hayes.

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night alive as you or me.

"But Joe, you're ten years dead."

"I never died", says he.

"In Salt Lake, Joe," I said tyo him, standing by my bed,

"They framed you on a murder charge.

" Said Joe, "But I ain 't dead."

"The Copper Bosses shot you, Joe, they killed you, Joe, "says I.

"Takes more than guns to kill a man, "says Joe,

"I didn't die."

And standing there as big as life and smiling with his eyes,

Joe says, "what they could never kill

Went on to organize."

From San Diego up to Maine in every mine and mill

Where workers stand up for their rights

It's there you'll find Joe Hill.

So this was how it went, writing sloppy love poems in private and learning high-sounding proletarian ones in class. The way of all reasoning flesh, huh? Now I understand there should be less discord between the private and the public. The teacher's job is to provide that.

Yet I still had full ten years to wait before Joe the Revolutionary could turn into Jonathan Jo with the wheelbarrow full of surprises.

All through university poetry in English was somewhere near, but not quite within my grasp. Actually, I was not concerned. I worked at my language, did a hundred other things, wrote doggerels from time to time, but never worked seriously with, or at, poems in English. I must have read quite a number of them, but they all left almost no trace. I only marveled at the ability of some of my fellow students to translate them into Russian. My friends prepared themselves for international careers. I somehow didn't fit. So they dumped me. Someone had to go to school in the end. In November 1981 I duly reported at the principal's office at School № 7 based in Baranovichi City.

This is the end, I kept repeating to myself then, this is truly and really the end. There was not a single spark of prospect for me. Power was corrupt, and I didn't want to have anything in common with it. What remained was poetry, of course. Probably, it was just a way to defend myself. So when suddenly poetry flowed, as if some dam was broken, it came as no surprise. It was simply bound to happen.

I began to write copiously: parodies (some good), my own verses (poor stuff). Parodies were sent to newspapers, and were duly rejected. Then all of a sudden I took up translation, just as an exercise first. My first choice was Alan Milne's poetry discovered in a Raduga Publishers collection.

Jonathan Joe

Has a mouth like an "0"

And a wheelbarrow full of surprises...

I brought my first-ever translation to Valery Ignatenko, my newly-acquired friend and mentor. He was to pronounce judgement. Anticipating a failure, I read the translation timidly:

У старьевщика Джо

Рот как буковка "О",

И тележку толкает он перед собой...

My mentor's face suddenly brightened. Great, said he, this one looks like the real thing! As I always took his opinions as holy commandments, I was happy. I thought that I had found my niche at last. In high spirits, I rushed home and sat at table to translate another children's poem at once. It took two years to complete the translation.

I was not ready. However hard I tried, I simply couldn't work it out. I needed more experience. Teaching at school took most of my energy then. I befriended some of the older students who were very creative. Our mutual gravitation is easy to explain for poetry was in the center of the universe we inhabited. Some of those students wrote great poetry in Russian. From time to time, I gave them tasks to translate something from English. Thank God, I worked at a school with extensive English learning. Otherwise all my attempts would have crushed against my students' inability to simply understand the message of a poem in English.

At Hat time I was method-blind, trying to get the result by a hit-or-miss process. It was rarely a hit, much more often it was a miss. We used the lessons of technical translation in the ninth grade for literary exercise. The pretext was there, in the form of Symons' poem. Once, in a lesson, I declared an open competition. The poem, The Fisher's Widow, was to be translated by any student individually or in collaboration during the two classes we had. I said I was going to do the same task too. The moment I said it I regretted having done so. But what was done couldn't be undone, and off we went. Probably, the most hard-working of them all was the teacher himself.

Two girls, Marina B. and Natasha S., did come up with a nice variant. When they read it to the eager class, their classmates had their mouths open in awe.

Уходят лодки в море и приходят,

И серость неба слита с цветом моря.

И плачут чайки, белые как пена,

Передавая в крике всплески горя.

А дни идут усталой чередою,

И сковывает сердце боль разлуки.

А дождь сечет нещадно волны моря,

Передавая волнам сердца муки.

А ветер всё крепчает, и трепещет

На дальнм горизонте парус рваный.

А лодки всё приходят и уходят,

Но нет одной, особенно желанной.

Could I know then, reading that sad poem of theirs, that both girls would become students of the teacher training college, and one of then would die, by accident, several weeks before graduation?

Yet it was after that classroom episode perhaps that I came to understand that poetry should be introduced on a regular basis. Marvellously creative things do happen, I said to myself, and they should happen within classroom walls. If one wants to teach creatively, poetry should be welcome at any given moment, but never avoided. In neither language, I might add today.

Many of my students wrote poetry. The above poem was written by 16-year-old authors. When I was that age, I couldn't even dream about writing such stuff. It was (and, sadly said, is now) beyond my reach.

НАУЛИЦЕ

Вот сидит человек. И каждый

Приласкает его взором...

Чей-то взгляд впивается, словно

Позолоченный зуб – в горло.

Он не смотрит кругом. И всё же

Вдруг царапнет колючее слово.

Для него даже смерть – не новость.

И сидит он – без ног – гордо.

But I played a good mentor to those gifted boys and girls. We used to compose together. We even self-published books of poetry and prose. They must have learnt some tricks from me. But on the other hand, it is me, the teacher, who owes them a lot. Somehow those brilliant young people, however hard their lives might become later, saved me from ruin. They helped me preserve my enthusiasm. Having developed a close relationship with the gifted, I simply had to carry on somehow. Despite the ever-growing cost of living and meager teacher's salary.

In 1989, Elf Magazine was born. The philosophy of the publication, if there is any, should not look very complicated. It is just going on teaching English using other media. The magazine helps bring English classroom activities farther, beyond classroom walls, transcending the limits of everyday experience. And poetry in the first aid here. Originally, the framework of Elf activities involved elfin teens only who were my students aged 10-13. These kids are the most exciting to teach.

No other age group can compare with them in terms of eagerness, inquisitiveness, and craving for knowledge. In the 1990s, I had at least three groups of such teens, teaching each group for three years and more, and it was great fun. Once, a 12-year-old schooler made a funny mistake while speaking. Said he, "I am twelf..." Well, it is not much of a mistake, really, if you come to think of it. Elf is a speaking title, no doubt.

Young Teacher, if you want to educate ELFs, that is Friends of the English Language, pay special attention to what you say or do in front of fifth-graders. You shoud be a real Poetacher! Then the things you do will stay as long as the students live. It is hard, very hard to go the distance. Yet there's something worthy in the attempt. Poetry is the thing that gives us, teachers, power to survive. And however hard you might try, you won't find another thing which can give you as much understanding, dedication, and sense.

But enough, for what the present writer expects from all those who might benefit from reading this book is very simple. Don't fear to enter your classroooms and stay there as long as you are able. But however short the period might be, brighten it with poetry. It will give you something.

And it'll give you more, much more than that.

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CONTENTS

Учебное издание

Маслов Юрий Всеволодович