Translator's Introduction to Cock — Web Exclusive
By Vitaly Chernetsky
Aleksandr Anashevich (b. 1972) was born and lives in the city of Voronezh in central Russia, where he works as a newspaper editor. He has been recognized as one of the most important poetic voices to emerge in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. His first collection of poems, Stol'ko lovushek [So Many Traps], was published in 1997, followed by Signaly sireny [The Siren Signals, 1999] and Nepriiatnoe kino [Unpleasant Movie, 2001]. He has been shortlisted for the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize, and in late 2002 a volume of his selected writings, Fragmenty korolevstva [Fragments of a Kingdom] came out in the Andrei Bely Prize book series. His poems andplays have also appeared in RISK, Vavilon, Mitin zhurnal and other literary periodicals, and have been widely anthologized both in Russia, and abroad. In English, a selection appeared in the anthology Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (Talisman House, 2000). The text translated here was published in issue no. 8 of the almanac Vavilon [Babylon] in 2001.
This text is in a way a departure for Anashevich. It can be defined as a short story, or a long prose poem, or even as something akin to a musical score, as it is composed of several interweaving series of fragments that are akin to musical motifs. The challenge for the translator has been to capture the right tone for these motifs—from the bawdy, silly tone of remarks at a large informal gathering offriend (judging from the text, mostly in their late teens and twenties) where the conversation has turned to the "titillating" topic of male genitalia, to an evocative lyrical recollection of the night of the senior prom, along with "scraps" of other narratives (most of them indeed of "parties"); finally, the motifs yield to the one where the narrator reveals that he has learned he's HIV-positive, and speaks of his attempts to cope with this news and of the reactions of the people around him. In this respect, "Cock" is truly a pioneering text for Russian literature.
Last but not least, Anashevich is a prominent representative of the new flowering of Russian gay writing, a phenomenon started by the late Evgeny Kharitonov (1941-1981), unpublished in his lifetime but extremely influential for the more recent literary generations. In fact, the text's epigraph is from an anecdote about Kharitonov: the writer apparently once told an acquaintance that he could write a short story titled simply "Cock"—traditionally a much more transgressive word in Russian than in English.
Vitaly Chernetsky is an associate professor of German and Ukrainian languages at Miami University. He also pursues research on Ukrainian cinema and is engaged in numerous literary translation projects focused on contemporary Ukrainian and Russian poetry.