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Daniil Kharms’ “The Blue Notebook”
Ugly Duckling Presse is known for their beautiful DIY books, but the fine folks there also do the world a great service by posting some books online, making them free and available to all. Most recently, they’ve posted The Blue Notebook, a book of short poetic fragments by Daniil Kharms, the Russian “absurdist” poet and dramatist
Kharms’ work, which is typically both aphoristic and a little surrealist, is not “absurd” in the sense of being “wacky,” but more “absurd” in the existential sense of drawing from a certain inherent meaninglessness of the everyday as a fountain of creative energy. Thus, the poems can be both funny and paranoid. For example, number 21 in The Blue Notebook:
Returning home after my walk,
I suddenly exclaimed: Oh my God!
I’ve been walking four days in a row!
What will my family think of me now?
Oh, those Russians! They just want to have fun!
Posted in Publishing on Friday, December 3rd, 2010 by Harriet Staff.