Thomas J. Kitson
Photo courtesy of Thomas J. Kitson
Bio
Thomas J. Kitson is a freelance translator who lives in New York City. He grew up in Detroit AND graduated from Harvard College. He worked for many years in Columbus, Ohio, in the food co-op movement and at the Ohio State University Libraries before leaving to earn a PhD in Russian Literature from Columbia University. His translation of Iliazd’s Rapture: A Novel, published by Columbia University Press’s Russian Library series, was awarded a Special Mention citation by the Read Russia Prize jury in April 2018. He has taught Russian language, literature, and culture courses at Columbia University, Drew University, and Montclair State University.
I received the call from Mohamed at the National Endowment for the Arts after a day spent visiting Iliazd’s archive in Marseilles for the first time. I had been paging through the manuscript of Philosophia hours before and was now standing in a field of sunflowers in Provence, gazing into their faces, away from the sunset, watching the stars come out in the purpling sky above the distant Alpilles. My phone had just enough reception for Mohamed to get the news across on the second try through the broken-up signal. It was coincidence, but it felt like some kind of grand cosmic validation.
But of course, since I’ve only published one translation, the grant is also a professional vote of confidence with welcome practical consequences. I can replace my aging laptop. I can dedicate part of each day to work on the manuscript. I may even be able to travel to Iliazd’s archive again before the term of the grant runs out. One of the greatest gifts will be extra time for revising the first draft I’ve nearly completed—the sheer luxury of not moving on prematurely to another project.
And yet that initial sense of cosmic gratitude feels appropriate. I’m grateful for the community of translators and to be associated with the other NEA Fellows, for the continued existence of the NEA and its commitment to supporting writers of all sorts, and for the evidence that I’m not the only one who thinks the translated words of a stateless Russophone Georgian might give pleasure, or perplex, or resonate, or even inspire here, now, in the USA.
from Philosophia by Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd)
[Translated from the Russian]
Iliazd mechanically placed a coin into the extended hand, stepped onto the bridge, looked at the lights along the shore, wiped his hand across his brow, and said out loud: “Yes, I need to blow it up, it’s the only way out.” At once he recalled conversations about Hagia Sophia being mined and about clergy ready to send it into thin air in case the Greeks crept in during an attack on Constantinople. They didn’t do it then; we will now. And this conclusion, coming to him after so much delirious raving during a journey from home that had streamed by unremarked, fell on him like a revelation. An idea. Just think how this simplifies the situation! No Russian revolt, nor Ozilio’s foolishness, no Messiah coupling with Sophia, whom he, the Messiah, hated so much. Send the whole structure into thin air. God, what a thing to dream up! And all the same, what an incredible trip he’d completed before arriving at it! And how tired he was.
Unexpectedly, his existence was filled with new meaning. Just now he’d been walking along, not knowing where he was going or what for, and now he knew perfectly where and what for, now he had a goal, precise and simple, and his steps were firm and
his head sat differently on his shoulders, and he was overflowing with the consciousness of his destiny.
And just think what, in the end, had occasioned this incredibly tangled yarn. All on account of some structure, because of architecture, stones, a material object, as though you could sacrifice lives for the sake of anything but ideas. Then he stopped and asked: because of ideas? And he burst out laughing. As though ideas were not just screens. And he went his way.
And suddenly he thought of Hajji-Baba and his love for his own neighborhood, his love for Sophia, how he would have loved any other mosque as long as he lived alongside it and for it, about his pride in the lilac blooming beyond the wall, and he became annoyed and uncomfortable. He hadn’t even thought how many people would die in the catastrophe. And now causing pain to Hajji-Baba seemed an intolerably heavy responsibility. What should he do, how could he find a way out? Warn him, try to explain the heart of the matter, make him consent! But would Hajji-Baba listen to his proofs? Wasn’t that philosophy? It was always the same in the final reckoning, a vicious circle from which he couldn’t extract anything amenable to his heart, let’s say, or to the heart in general.
By the backstreets, without replying to the watchmen’s growling, Iliazd reached his former den. The coffeehouse was lit, and he could hear familiar voices while still at some distance. Iliazd crept along the wall, pushed on the door, found himself in the old cafeteria, went up to the attic. Hajji-Baba was sitting on the bed, carefully mending the very same pair of immortal baggy trousers. Iliazd sat down next to him and started to cry.
About Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd)
Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd) was born in present-day Tbilisi in 1894. For Russians, he was primarily a Futurist poet and theoretician of “beyonsense” language. He arrived in Paris in 1921, eager to share his typographical experiments and establish channels between Western European and Russian avant-gardes, but encountered rivalries within Paris Dada and growing Bolshevik suspicion toward émigrés and aesthetic radicals. In 1940, he designed and published the first of numerous collaborations with artists such as Picasso, Arp, Léger, Giacometti, Ernst, and Miró and gained a reputation as a key figure in 20th-century book arts. He died in Paris in 1975