With AWP quickly approaching, we're beyond excited to start promoting our first release forthcoming in 2018—A Failed Performance: The Collected Short Plays of Daniil Kharms, translated by C Dylan Bassett and Emma Winsor Wood.
An early Soviet-era writer, Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) is best known for his absurdist poetry and prose. When C & Emma first shared their translations of his plays with me, though, I was amazed to find he isn't mentioned in the same breath as other major Russian playwrights. His plays are so poetic, strange, and bitingly political... They were right up my alley. How had I completely missed him before?
I was even more surprised, however, to learn what may be one of the major reasons why—a collected edition of his short plays has never been published in English. That is, until now.
Forthcoming Winter '18, we couldn't be prouder to be publishing Kharms' plays in English as Plays Inverse's first book of translations. These plays are sadly and urgently relevant to our current political times, and C Dylan Bassett and Emma Winsor Wood have translated them beautifully. I could ramble on and on about this collection, though. Better to let the translators explain what drew them to the texts themselves: "Daniil Kharms (who also went by Khoms, Holmes, Dolmes, DanDan, Charms, Shardam, Kharms-Shardam, Karma, and Sharma—who experimented with his identity almost daily, who lived and died fighting Stalin’s authoritarian regime) offers us “absurdist” plays of untimely political relevance: people disappear constantly, the government take hostages, the powerful behave irrationally, inexplicable catastrophes directly clash with daily life, war and death occur without reason or meaning, the cycle of poverty and deprivation proliferates. Indeed Kharms’s world is our world, threatened by a political power which instigates paranoia, fear, and violence. In Kharms we find the subversive, darkly humorous, often incomprehensible force that is required for us to survive in the now—in our moment of political disaster."
—C Dylan Bassett "In of my favorite plays by Kharms, a man walks into a restaurant and tries to order the 'boeuf-buoy.' At first the waiter thinks he's misheard (perhaps he meant 'Bouef Bourgignon'?), but no: boeuf-buoy, boeuf-buoy, boeuf-buoy! "What? Huh?" the waiter asks before eventually giving up and leaving. At that point (in our translation), a second waiter comes in, and the entire, already-repetitive scene repeats itself.
Many of Kharms' plays are like this: full of repetition, made-up words, and literally misunderstood characters. They are misunderstood because these others (like the waiter) are so stuck in the roles they've been assigned in the 'rational' world that they are unable to see an alternative or an exit, unable to consider for even one minute that 'boeuf-buoy' might carry meaning.
Kharms' plays—themselves often described as 'absurd'—force the reader out of the realm of the logical into the world of 'nonsense.' But what is 'nonsense?' And who decides? And why have we been taught to shut it out, pretend we can't hear it, to ask, 'What? Huh?' when confronted by it?"
—Emma Winsor Wood Keep an eye our for more information on A Failed Performance: The Collected Short Plays of Daniil Kharms—including previews—soon!
(Kharms illustration by Kiril Zlatkov: https://www.behance.net/Rand0mAbstract)
