POES 35: Filling the Unfathomable Full of the Unknown
Weststeijn, Willem G.
Pegasus, 324 blz., paperback, 2020, ISBN 9789061434757
POES is een serie studies op het gebied van de Oost-Europese taalkunde, letterkunde, cultuurkunde en geschiedenis onder redactie van prof. dr. Ben Dhooge (Universiteit Gent), prof. dr. Wim Honselaar (Universiteit van Amsterdam), dr. Henk Kern (Universiteit Leiden en prof. dr. Willem Weststeijn (Universiteit van Amsterdam).
The title of this book was taken from Paul Schmidt’s translation of Chlebnikov’s poem ‘O Dostoevskijmo iduščej tuči’ (1907-1908) in Selected Poems. Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov. Volume III (1997, p. 29). The last line of this short (four lines) poem is ‘Zamernoe bezmernym polnja’, literally ‘The measurelessness filling with infiniteness’, which Schmidt rather freely rendered as ‘filling the unfathomable full of the unknown’, an apt characterisation of Chlebnikov’s oeuvre.
In the book a number of articles are collected Willem G. Weststeijn wrote on Chlebnikov during the last forty years, the first one being published in 1979, the last one in 2018. One article has not been published before and is here appearing for the first time. All the articles are published in the form as they appeared.