Bengt Jangfeldt delivered the eulogy last month at the Stockholm memorial for the Russian poet Regina Derieva, “who in her best poems achieved that true metaphysical quality which, according to T.S. Eliot, is the alloy of thought and poetry at a very high temperature.” I had hoped to get an English copy – but it looks like The Guardian beat me to it. Bengt writes in today’s paper:
Her most recent book in English (2011)
Of Russian poets born in the Soviet era, the first to speak seriously about metaphysics was Joseph Brodsky, in whose poetry this alloy occurs quite often. Brodsky called Derieva “a great poet”, stressing that her poems are hers “only by name, only by her craft”.
“The real authorship belongs here to poetry itself, to freedom itself. I have not met anything similar for a long time, neither among my fellow countrymen nor among English-speaking poets.” …
To say that I knew Derieva would be wrong. I translated her poetry into Swedish, and helped her to get Swedish citizenship, and we met on several occasions, though rarely in the last few years. Her means of communication was not through personal contact, but through poetry. According to her husband, I was one of the few people she ever confided in; her main interlocutor was God.
Read the rest here, and I include a poem in my earlier piece on her here. Out of the photos her husband Alexander Deriev sent me, I liked the one above the best. It looks like someone one might see in a Berkeley bookstore. However, I include the 1972 Karaganda photo he favored below. Apparently, it was a favorite photo of the poet’s as well: “She thought it displayed her wild cat’s inner nature the best. She always, from her early youth, associated herself with a lynx, and her nickname was ‘Lynx.'” In fact, here’s a poem, translated by Daniel Weissbort, that is dedicated “to my Singaporean friends who believed implicitly that I was a lynx.” And the 1973 photo below that, smelling a lilac … I like it, too.
Tags: "joseph brodsky", Alexander Deriev, Bengt Jangfeldt, Regina Deriev