mglybzhvuo
mglybzhvuo jx”jan’dr’ju chtleshchk xi fja s’p skypolza
a Vtab-dkni t’japra kakajzchdi a Jew’s an inkwell
Distraction
suffocating from yankee arcana
from cancan and yardmuck
my pretty whalemouth ching
a whale and so and better than
armagnac
etiquette is quite cute
a label on your shirt
little kantian quit
A and O hoot
quan and took
so soft
fogms achums scum
and-mm-ed kicks
attactions hint of clever thumb
m-u-u-ck g-o-o-nnne
not a header by airship
but a public stop
a lop giving way in the vago.
[translation by Stephen Rudy]
Roman Jakobson ‘Aliagrov’
Zaum poems from the book Trans-rational Book, Moscow 1916, 0’38” and 1’00”
Voice – Ernest Peshkov
Recording – Miguel Molina, Audio Laboratory of the UPV Dpt. of Sculpture (Valencia, Spain)
Production Date – 2004
Aliagrov, futurist pseudonym of Roman Osipovich Jakobson (b. Moscow 1886 - d. New York 1982) was a linguist and philologist who participated actively in several Linguistic Circles: Moscow (Russian Formalism), Prague (Structuralism) , Copenhagen (Phonological theory) Columbia, Harvard and Massachusetts (North American generative linguistics, and the Linguistic Circle of New York). He always gave a multi-disciplinary slant to his language studies, combining the linguistic with the poetic, anthropology, the pathology of language, folklore or information theory. One of his most important contributions was in phonological theory when, in 1923, he gave a new meaning to the term “phonology”, understanding it in the sense of the “science of the structure and function of sounds” . The first modern definition of the phoneme is also his: “Mental impression of a sound, minimal distinctive unit or minimal semantic vehicle”. For Jakobson, the sounds of the tongue were an enigma to be deciphered, and he maintained within his phonological theory the existence of fifteen to twenty distinctive features common to all languages. This interest in phonology has its origin in his early years in Moscow when he participated actively as a poet under the pseudonym of Aliagrov (taken from his girlfriend’s name ‘alia’ and from his initials, ‘r’ for Roman and ‘o’ for Osipovich) and he maintained contact with the phonetic experiments of the futurists (he knew Marinetti and was a friend of Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky), publishing some zaum (or trans-rational language) poems in cubo-futurist books. The two poems included in this recording are a clear example of this. They were published in the book Transrational Book [Zaum-naya griga] (Moscow 1916) which also includes other poems by Alexis Krutschenij (creator of zaum poetry) accompanied by illustrations by the artist Olga Rozanova. He also puts a button on the cover of the book. Jakobson, in his memoirs My Futurist Years (1973) recalls discussions with the avant-garde artists about the affinities between “nonrepresentation” in painting and the “transrational verses” of poetry, in which he maintains that “the theme was that the verbal sound could have more in common with non-representational painting than with music”. On some occasions they listened to his verses: “They asked me to recite my transrational verses and the artists - both Filonov and Malevich approved of them greatly, precisely because they diverged even more strongly from everyday speech than Krutschenij’s dyr bul shchyl”. In counterposition to Alexis Krutschenij who maintained the “word and sound” relationship, Jakobson defended another association: “I was not in agreement when, after The Word as Such there followed The Letter as Such; for me it was the sound as such.”
Contributed by
Juan Pablo Macías