A poem written by S.S. Averintsev for home recitals, addressed to his future wife, poses the problem of deep selftranslation: not only expressing ideas in a foreign language but also studying the very minimum conditions for the appearance of poetic statements in different languages. The study proves that some features of the form of this poetic impromptu are explained by Averintsev’s interest in the culture of the Baroque, where reflection on the nature of languages was converted into a project of making artificial languages corresponding to actual dispositions in culture. Averintsev, taking into account the peculiarities of the poetic culture of early Byzantium and the German Baroque, wrote an impromptu in which the transgression of the genre was accompanied by the cultivation of baroque aesthetics in opposition to further literary languages and styles. This renovated Baroque was declared as aesthetics of existential experience, the speech at the deathbed or before a meeting with the loved one when existential situation introduces unusual poetic structures and artificial expressions. Thus, Averintsev, relying on the experience of Clemens Brentano, who embedded the aesthetics of the Baroque into a romantic experiment of new subjectivity creation, also expanded the boundaries of selftranslation, turning it from an educational tool into a way of understanding the structure of poetry of an entire epoch, a method comparable to M.L. Gasparov’s conspective translations.
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