Paronomasia as a Documentary Tool: Eugene Ostashevsky’s Translingual Poetry

Abstract This article discusses the Russian-American poet Eugene Ostashevsky’s translingualism, which includes Russian, German, and, to a lesser degree, other languages. The focus is on the cycle Die Schreibblockade (2020), published as part of the collection The Feeling Sonnets (2022). In it, Ostashevsky addresses his Leningrad origin and the theme of the Siege ( blokada ). The Feeling Sonnets use the linguistic device of paronomasia or pun excessively in a translingual framework, whereas the rhythm of the lines is markedly prosaic and the style pointedly laconic. This essay shows how Ostashevsky, despite his (Russian) formalist, markedly technical self-commentary both in analytical notes to the poems and separate theoretical essays, turns paronomasia into a documentary tool for the migrant condition and the representation of transnational communication (in a multilingual family) that exceeds the formalism of his self-reflection. The formalist emphasis, this article argues, not only tends to distract from that intimate dimension of paronomasia; it also conceals a potential romantic dimension that associates paronomasia with a distant allusion to integration, totality, and abundance by virtue of the conflation of languages, rather than only with (self-)alienation and irritation. The largely unstudied phenomenon of formalist self-commentary is discussed in comparison with similar practices in contemporary experimental poetry from Lin Hejinian to Uljana Wolf. As a documentary tool, paronomasia redirects attention in a U.S. American context from activistic issues of identity back to the linguistic mediation of lived experience and emotions. At the same time, this essay concludes, Ostashevsky’s laconic rhetoric balances out the poetic proliferation of (translingual) paronomasia, thus helping The Feeling Sonnets achieve a fragile formal equilibrium.