Dancing in Odessa
In a 2013 essay, the poet Ilya Kaminsky identifies a literary tradition in which poetry shades into something like apophaticism—a way of doing theology that recognizes the inability of language to fully capture God.
In the work of poets such as Paul Celan and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kaminsky argues, words are wrenched and contorted in order to express that which exceeds words.
Language begins to break down and, in its breaking, to gesture toward the unsayable.
"Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,
I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak
of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say
is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise."
Poet Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa. He lost most of his hearing at the age of four after a doctor misdiagnosed mumps as a cold, and his family was granted political asylum by the United States in 1993, settling in Rochester, New York.
"Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,
I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak
of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say
is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise."
Excerpt from
Author's Prayer by Ilya Kaminsky
After his father’s death in 1994, Kaminsky began to write poems in English. He explained in an interview with the Adirondack Review,
“I chose English because no one in my family or friends knew it—no one I spoke to could read what I wrote. I myself did not know the language. It was a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom. It still is.”
