In wartime, culture can't help but warm its hands over the misfortune of others. Igor Pomerantsev

IGOR POMERANZEV

Igor Jakowlewitsch Pomeranzew, auch Pomerantsev, Pomeranzev; geboren am 11. Januar 1948 in Saratow, studierte englische Philologie und Pädagogik an der Universität Czernowitz.

1971 Umzug nach Kiew, Kontakt zur ukrainischen Bürgerrechtsbewegung. Seine ersten Lyrik-Veröffentlichungen erschienen 1972 in der Moskauer Zeitschrift „Smena“. 1976 wurde Pomeranzev vom KGB - wegen der Verbreitung von anti-sowjetischer Literatur und dem Abhören ausländischer, "feindlicher" Radiostationen - verhaftet. 1977 wurde ihm nahegelegt zu emigrieren. 1978 erfolgte die Ausbürgerung nach Deutschland. 1979 zog er nach London, um dort für das Russische Service von BBC zu arbeiten. 1987 wechselte er nach München, bis 15. Jänner 2020 ist er als Produzent von Kultursendungen "Over The Barriers" für Radio Free Europe, Russland (RFE/RL) tätig. Seit März 2022 produziert er gemeinsam mit Ivan Tolstoy für RFE/RL den Podcast  "Humanitärer Korridor".

Im September 2010 fand das durch Pomerantsev initiierte Lyrik-Festival "Meridian Czernowitz" erstmals statt, dessen Gründungsmitglied er ist, und seitdem jährlich Anfang September in Czernowitz über die Bühne geht. Seit 1995 lebt er in Prag. Seine ins Deutsche und Englische übersetzte Beiträge schufen den Impuls und die redaktionelle Grundlage für den digitalen Zeitzug, der 2008 in das Netz gestellt wurde.

Milena Findeis, Zeitzug Herausgeberin
Zum 75. Geburtstag 11.1.2023
Hommage zum 70. Geburtstag

Auszeichnungen: P.A.Viazemskij Preis (1996, Niznij Novgorod), Literatur Magazin "Oktober" (2006, Moskau), Internationaler Radio Festival Preis (2011, Tallinn), Tsarkoselskaya Khudozhestennaya Premiya (2013, St. Petersburg)

Zeitzug Beiträge in deutscher Sprache: 

• Mein erster Luftschutzkeller, 2023
• Geographie meines Lebens, 2022
• Pawel L'wowitsch, 2020
• Erstickte Gegenliebe, Gedichtzyklus übersetzt von Beatrix Kersten (2016, Erstveröffentlichung Zeitzug)
• Gedichtzyklus 2015: Liebe und Tod
• Im Gespräch mit Joseph Brodsky über John Donne (Sinn und Form, 2011/6)
• Czernowitz. Erinnerungen eines Ertrunkenen (Wespennest, Mai 2011)
• KGB und andere Gedichte, Auszug (Wespennest, Mai 2011)
• Radio Lyrik, Gedichtzyklus übersetzt von Claudia Dathe
• Kindheit in Czernowitz, Auszug aus einem Essay übersetzt von Peter Rychlo, in "Europa Erlesen: Czernowitz" (2004)
• Familienalbum, Essay übersetzt von Claudia Dathe (2003, frei-räume, winter 2003/04)
• Radio - Mein Element der Freiheit
• Das Recht zu lesen, Essay aus dem Jahre 1979 (Erstveröffentlichung in SPUREN, 1980/2)
• *** Im September verwandelt sich mein Herz in eine Kastanie, 1975/76

Bücher:
Czernowitz, In-Ex-Terieur, Essays, Prosa, Lyrik - April 2023, Verlag Meridian Czernowitz
Czernowitz: Erinnerungen eines Ertrunkenen, Oktober 2017, Verlag Der Konterfei, Wien
Czernowitz, Europa erlesen, 2004 - herausgegeben von Peter Rychlo, Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt

Links:
Igor Pomerantsev, Augnerin
Augenkuss

IGOR POMERANTSEV

Igor Pomerantsev was born in Saratov, USSR, in 1948. He studied English philology and pedagogy at the University of Chernovtsy (Czernowitz).

His poetry was first published in 1972 in the Moscow magazine "Smena". At this time he also became involved with the Ukrainian civil right movement. In 1976 Pomerantsev was arrested by KGB, accused of distributing anti-Soviet literature and listening to foreign, "enemy", radio stations. In 1977 he was officially encouraged to emigrate together with his wife and son Peter, and the next year he left for Germany. In 1979 he moved to London to for the Russian Service of the BBC. In 1987 he moved to Munich to produce the Russian-language culture program "Over the Barriers" for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Since March 2022  together with Ivan Tolstoy he is creating for RFE/RL  the podcast "Humanitarian Corridor".

 

Pomerantsev has lived in Prague since 1995. His contributions - translated into German and/or Englisch - created the impetus and the editorial basis for the digital time train "Zeitzug", online since 2008. Starting in 2010 he became one of the founding members of the International Poetry Festival he became one of the founding members of the International Poetry Festival Meridian Czernowitz. 

Milena Findeis, publisher Zeitzug

Awards: P.A.Viazemskij Prize-winner (1996, Niznij Novgorod), Literary Magazine "October" Prize-winner (2006, Moscow), International Radio Festival Prize-winner (2011, Tallinn), Tsarkoselskaya Khudozhestennaya Premiya (2013, Petersburg)

---

Cross My Heart

In August 2015 I was in Kharkiv making a film with some Ukrainian colleagues about army psychologists and their patients. We had tracked down the psychologists and found three patients – a wounded fighter, a former prisoner of war and a woman refugee from the Donbass – who were willing to talk on camera. All we needed then was three or four minutes of front-line city atmosphere for background.

Kharkiv lives parallel lives: summertime easy living and a barely discernible war. More than a hundred thousand refugees try to remain invisible, though the queues for handouts are plainly to be seen. In a little more than a year the army hospital 'processed' more than ten thousand soldiers. Many of them did not go back home or to the front, but were returned to the cemeteries of their towns and villages. This zone of misfortune, physical suffering and agony behind barrack walls is off limits to film crews. The director of the film, Lidia Starodubtseva, and I went into the hospital with a concealed camera to interview the fighter. Otherwise we couldn't have got in. We brought him fruit and juice as a cover, while secretly filming the rows of crutches and empty wheelchairs lining the corridors, the silhouettes of patients smoking in the yard.

Culture in wartime is in a kind of no man's land. It pokes about furtively in other people's wounds. One of the medics told us how he was in a truck with his unit when they came under fire. It was winter. The medic was in luck. He came out of it without a scratch. But his head and feet were so frozen, his teeth were chattering. Suddenly he felt his chest go hot. He looked down at his combat jacket and saw he was hot from the blood of a dead comrade. This story scorched my memory. I recalled some lines the Soviet front-line poet Iona Degen wrote in 1944:

My comrade, in your death agon
Do not call on your friends in vain. 
Better I warm my hands
Over your steaming blood.

In wartime culture can't help but warm its hands over the misfortune of others. But it has a justfication for doing so. Images of death, despair, grief registered by a poet, composer, artist, can postpone new wars, yes, postpone, but not prevent.

Igor Pomerantsev translated by Frank Williams

Amputation: Documentary Film

English "Zeitzug" contributions:

• Thank you for your tears, translated by Frank Williams, September 2022
• Poetry in Translation, Poems translated by Frank Williams and Alan Myers
• KGB and Other Poems, translated by Frank Williams
• 'Late Vintage ...', poems translated by Peter Pomerantsev
• 'Curvature ...', poems translated by Daniel Weissbort
• 'Goodbye ...', poems translated by Sally Laird
• Checking In & Out, Poems with Co-author Hotel Manager Milena, Prague
• CHERNIVTSI PALIMPSEST, 2022
• Moscow, Russia 2050, Reinventing Russia, Index on Censorship, 2005
• World Service, Radio Lyrics translated by Frank Williams
• Do You Hear me?, Drama broadcast by BBC Worldservice, translated by Frank Williams
• Reading Faulkner, Novella translated by Frank Williams
• Aubades and Serenades, Essay translated by Frank Williams
• A Bird Over the Dnieper, "Ukraine is a tabula rasa" translated by Frank Williams
• Air is Free, translated by Frank Williams
• Disgust. Embarrassment. Love, translated by Frank Williams
• A Little About You, translated by Frank Williams
• Notes in Ethereal Margins, Essay translated by Frank Willams
• From a Diary, translated by Frank Williams
• A Dialogue Of The Unhearing And Unheard
• " ... My Motherland is, translated by Frank Williams
• Out of step, Index on Censorship, 3/86
• Raw meat: we've had enough, Index on Censorship, May 1987
• Journalism: Above the Barriers, Journalism Faculty, Lviv Catholic University, 20.9.2011
• Having being remembered - the Pluperfect
  
• All the colours of mother tongue, Memories of Summer
• Long short story ***, written 1975/76
• Mykola the Fantast
• Until we meet in the Santa Cruz
• Forecast Moscow 2050
• ιβλιοθήκη - library
• Terroir
  

In Conversation with

• Boris Akunin
• Joseph Brodsky about the poetry of John Donne
• Erich Fried about Franz Kafka
• Lawrence George Durrell
• Andrey Tarkovsky

About Frank Williams

• Excellence in Translation

About Igor Pomerantsev

• "I am not a moralist" by Masha Tomak
  
• A Broadcaster and a Poet by Alex Mayer

Voices of Russian Literature

• Sally Laird / Igor Pomerantsev

Bücher (Russisch) / Books (Russian)

• "Aubades and Serenades", Russian Roulette Press, London 1985
• "Poems of Various Days", "Sovietskij Pisatel", Sankt Petersburg, 1993
• "The Beaufort Scale", Urbi Publishing House, Sankt Petersburg, 1997
• "News", Fact Publishing House, Kyiv, 1998
• "Red Dry", NLO Publishing House, Moskau, 2000
• "Family Status", O.G.I., Moskau, 2002
• "Radio S", MK-Periodika, Moskau, 2002
• "Radio Lyrics", NLO, Moskau, 2007
• "KGB and Other Poems ...", NLO, Moskau 2010
• "Off License", Meridian Czernowitz, 2010
• "Czernowitz", Meridian Czernowitz, 2012
• "Late Vintage", Victoria Korchina and Andrej Maksimkov, Sankt Petersburg, 2013
• Вы меня слышите? Can you hear me?, Meridian Czernowitz 2018

Bücher (Ukrainisch) / Books (Ukrainian)

• "KGB and Other Poems ...", Verlag Grani-T, Kiew, 2009 "КГБ та інші..." - Grani-T, Kyiv, 2009
• "Off License", Meridian Czernowitz, 2011 "Винарні" - Meridian Czernowitz,Kyiv-Chernivtsi, 2011
• "Homo Eroticus", Duh i Litera, Kiew 2013 Gedichtband; Bilderzyklus für das Buch "Homo Eroticus"
• "On Air", Kulturtagebuch - 40 Jahre, UKU, Lemberg 2014 Вільний простір - Vydavnyctvo UKU, Lviv, 2014
  
  

Czech/v češtině: Igor Jakovlevič Pomerancev

Ruský režim je jako rakovina, ČESKÁ POZICE, 15.6.2014
ROZHOVOR S IGOREM POMERANCOVEM, Jana Kitzlerová - tvar 2018/15
Výbor Náš čas vypršel představuje českému čtenáří texty Igora Pomeranceva v takto ucelené podobě vůbec poprvé. Básně vybrala, uspořádala a přeložila Jana Kitzlerová na základě ruského originálu sbírek KGB a jíné básně, 2010 a Služební Lyrika, 2007, protimluv.net, 2020
Výbor textů Můj první kryt (soubor převážně esejů, črt či dokumentárních próz) staví do protikladu multikulturní a vícejazyčný svět sovětské (ukrajinské) Bukoviny minulého století a výsostně aktuální situaci na Ukrajině po vypuknutí ruské agrese, tedy po 24. únoru 2022. V překladu Jany Kitzlerové přibližuje příběhy lidí, kteří přišli kvůli válce o své blízké, o své domovy či kteří utrpěli těžká tělesná zranění. Při jedné z návštěv Aleny Wagnerové v Praze jsem jí na dlouhou cestu z Prahy do Saarbrückenu věnovala knihu Igora Pomeranceva Můj první kryt 

2022  "KGB i inne wiersze" Igora Pomierancewa w przekładzie Zbigniewa Dmitrocy! Projekt okładki Ewelina Kruszewska (Ewe Kruszewska)

Игорь Померанцев

What Is the Secret of Chernivtsi?: A Conversation with Ihor Pomerantsev, LARB by Kate Tsurkan, 26.12.2022
IGOR POMERANTSEV: «MY POETRY IS A BAT, POINTED AT BY A FLASHLIGHT», Craft, by Daryna Anastasieva, 26.9.2021
The distorting mirror A conversation between Igor Pomerantsev and Peter Pomerantsev, 2019/12, Eurozine
PORTRAIT COLLECTION by Milena Findeis

RADIO SVOBODA - collection in Russian
LYRIKLINE Listen do the Poet
Игорь Померанцев: Олена Холоденко
«В стране существует глубокая дисфункция — как бы парламент, как бы демократия, как бы журналистика» 
Поверх барьеров с Иваном Толстым. 40 лет на радио: беседа с Игорем Померанцевым