The Stray Dog Cabaret

Paul Schmidt (1934-1999), translator, poet, actor, librettist, playwright, and essayist, was born in Brooklyn, the oldest of seven children. He received a degree from Colgate University in Russian studies in 1955 and, after a year of graduate work at Harvard, he moved to Paris, where he studied mime with Marcel Marceau and acting with Jacques Charon of the Comédie Française. Drafted in 1958, he served in the US Army Intelligence and on his release resumed his Russian studies; his doctoral thesis on "the stylized theater of V.E. Mejerxol'd" was published as Meyerhold at Work. For eleven years, Schmidt was a professor of Slavic languages at the University of Texas at Austin, where he won the Bromberg Award for Teaching Excellence. His Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works was published in 1975, and translations of Russian poets, notably Marina Tsvetaeva, followed. A commission from the Dia Foundation supported his translations of Velimir Khlebnikov (four volumes published between 1985 and 1997), allowing him to leave academia and move to New York City. Working with the Yale Repertory Theatre, the American Repertory Theatre, the Guthrie, and other companies, he translated Euripides, Chekhov, Brecht, Genet, Gogol, Marivaux, and Mayakovsky, and wrote three plays of his own, winning the Helen Hayes and Kesselring awards for best play for Black Sea Follies. Providing text and often performing, he collaborated with the Wooster Group and with the avant-garde directors Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, David Schweitzer, and Peter Sellars. He also acted in film and television, and in the 1970s devised "The Lost Art of Melodeclamation," a program of nineteenth-century works for voice and orchestra, which he toured and performed with the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, who transposed the works for keyboard. The Plays of Anton Chekhov, Schmidt's translation of twelve of Chekhov's plays, was published in 1997. From 1993 until the end of his life, he taught translation and dramaturgy at the Yale School of Drama. »

Catherine Ciepiela is a professor of Russian at Amherst College, and the author of The Same Solitude, a study of the letters and poems exchanged by Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak during their epistolary romance in the 1920s. »

Honor Moore's collections of poems are Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir. She edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the Library of America and is author of The White Blackbird, a life of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent. »

A Book of Russian Poems

Translated by Paul Schmidt
Introduction by Catherine Ciepiela
Afterword by Honor Moore

In the years before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Stray Dog cabaret in St. Petersburg was the haunt of poets, artists, and musicians, a place to meet, drink, read, brawl, celebrate, and stage performances of all kinds. It has since become a symbol of the extraordinary literary ferment of that time. It was then that Alexander Blok composed his apocalyptic sequence "Twelve"; that the futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky exploded language into bold new forms; that the lapidary lyrics of Osip Mandelstam and plangent love poems of Anna Akhmatova saw the light; that the electrifying Marina Tsvetaeva stunned and dazzled everyone. Boris Pasternak was also of this company, putting together his great youthful hymn to nature, My Sister, Life.

It was a transforming moment-not just for Russian but for world poetry—and a short-lived one. Within little more than a decade, revolution and terror were to disperse, silence, and destroy almost all the poets of the Stray Dog cabaret.

Read the afterword (PDF)

View the index (PDF)

Reviews

For Paul Schmidt, the most versatile American translator of his generation, expression became literature insofar as it was dramatic—hence his translations and performances in and of Racine and Chekhov, Euripides and Marivaux, among others. For those of us who constituted his disparate audience, what a cherished surprise and inevitable reward is this unlooked-for trove of these vivid imperious poems, so helpfully edited and annotated by Professor Catherine Ciepiela and "placed" in Paul's biography by his friend Honor Moore: texts by eight men and women who made of their own performances a modern cultural monument, if that is not too marmoreal a description of these intense and subversive scripts, surely an appropriate term for Paul's pivotal versions of these exorbitant poets.
— Richard Howard

Also see:

Russian Writers Collection

The Slynx, Ice, Envy, and The Stray Dog Cabaret

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.95
Price: $11.21 (25% off)

Dec 5, 2006
128 pages
ISBN: 1590171918
9781590171912
NYRB Classics
Poets & Poetry
Literature in Russian

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