










































From Sign to Sound: Rendering Linguistic 
Play in Krzhizhanovsky’s The Poetics of Titles

Anne O. Fisher

The recently rediscovered Russian writer Sigizmund 
Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) is a stylistic master, a 
polyglot whose fluency in English, German, Latin, Polish, 

and other languages deeply informed his modernist prose. His 
preferred genre of “experimental realism” is now available to an 
English audience in Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov’s 
excellent translations, while Karen Rosenflanz’s keen insight 
into Krzhizhanovsky’s intricate paranomastic play allows readers 
with no access to the Russian to appreciate the skill behind his 
seemingly effortless virtuosity.1 Notwithstanding these extant 
models and explications, every translator of Krzhizhanovsky 
must still sit face-to-face, or rather, page-to-page with his (mostly) 
Russian text and make her own creation, slowly filling her empty 
page with letters, taking her cue from Krzhizhanovsky to replicate, 
as best she can, his authorial design. But what is that cue? 

This essay gives my own reflections on that problem—in 
the form of a craft talk on a work in progress, rather than an 
academic analysis of a completed project—and describes the 
features of Krzhizhanovsky’s own writing that helped me develop 
a preliminary translation strategy for The Poetics of Titles (Poetika 
zaglavii), Krzhizhanovsky’s 1925 (published in 1931) meditation 
on the function of titles that predates Gerard Genette’s own 
delightful, rigorous study of that paratext by several decades.2 

The most important element of this translation strategy, 
I suggest, is sound. Now, it’s common knowledge that 
Krzhizhanovsky’s prose explores the literalization of metaphors 
and emphasizes the physicality of cognitive and perceptive 
processes. It’s a natural extension of this abiding concern that 
in both his fiction and his non-fiction, the process of reading is 

1 Turnbull and Formozov’s translations include Memories of the Future 
(2009), The Letter Killers Club (2011), Autobiography of a Corpse (2013), and 
The Return of Munchausen (2016), all from NYRB Classics. Rosenflanz’s 
monograph, which also examines Krzhizhanovsky’s formidable erudition in the 
areas of mathematics and metaphysical philosophy, is Hunter of Themes: The 
Interplay of Word and Thing in the Works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (New 
York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005). 
2  As an aid for readers who don’t know the Cyrillic alphabet, I have trans-
literated all Russian text into Latin letters and italicized it. 



Anne O. Fisher    21

emphatically haptic,3 sometimes even to the point of physical 
violence: 

I walked through the bedlam of letters, my pupils 
drawn taut at first, then, as I tired, drawn jerkily here 
and there. I tried to look past and through them, 
but they rudely yanked my eyelids up and kept 
crawling under my eyelashes, ever more of them, in a 
continuous stream of patches and blots.4 
He took several packs of uncut books with him. But 
the war invaded his plans, and instead of cutting 
pages he had to cut bodies.5

Oh, how hateful all those people seemed to me back 
then, the ones who disemboweled the latest editions 
of journals with their paper knives and surrounded 
my beaten, winded name with tens of thousands of 
eyes.6 

So it’s no surprise that voice, as a physical phenomenon, 
also has a special place in Krzhizhanovsky’s understanding of 
literature and its production and reception. In his entry for “The 
Reader” in the 1925 Dictionary of Literary Terms, Krzhizhanovsky 
writes, “In the beginning, when the book was rare, it had listeners, 
not readers. But gradually the author’s reception moves from the 
epoch of speech to the epoch of the eye (iz epokhi skaza k epokhe 
glaza): the sounds of words go mute and become entrenched in 
those conventional little signs, letters.”7 Later in the same entry, 
Krzhizhanovsky writes: “The poet, though, must […] force the 
reader to receive even the individual word not as a single logical 
sign, but as a changing flow of sound.”8 He even distinguishes 
titles of plays from book titles because originally, play titles were 
pronounced out loud: “The title of a play is different from the 

3   I.e., having to do with the sense of touch. My use of this term derives from 
Gary Frost’s article “Reading by Hand,” inspired by Frank R. Wilson’s book 
The Hand (1998). Frost’s piece is available at http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/
reese/classes/artistsbooks/Gary%20Frost,%20Reading%20by%20Hand.pdf 
(last accessed 1/5/2017). 

4   “Postmark: Moscow” (“Shtempel’: Moskva,” 1925). Russian text in the 
edition of collected works, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, Sobranie sochinenii (St. 
Petersburg: Simpozium, 2001-10), vol. I, p. 516. This edition will be referred to 
hereafter as SS by volume and page number. All translations are my own.
5   “The Phantom” (“Fantom,” 1926), SS II, 551.
6   “The Letter Killers Club” (“Klub ubiits bukv,” 1926), SS II, 13. 
7    “The Reader” (“Chitatel’,” 1925), SS IV, 691. 
8   Ibid., p. 693.  

http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/reese/classes/artistsbooks/Gary%20Frost,%20Reading%20by%20Hand.pdf
http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/reese/classes/artistsbooks/Gary%20Frost,%20Reading%20by%20Hand.pdf


22     Lingusitic Play in Krzhizhanovsky

title of a scientific treatise, a novel, a novella, or anything else, 
in that it is exceptionally sensuous. I emphasize that word. In 
Shakespearean times, that title went out into the street with a 
drummer and a trumpeter. […] It was a sound title.”9 In the syllabus 
of his Literary Studio for Young Writers in Kiev in the early 1920s, 
he writes, “language is essentially speech (skaz), not soundless 
letters.”10 Scholars have also noted Krzhizhanovsky’s attention to 
sound: Irina Belobrovtseva has examined the way he creates a 
phonosphere out of repeated sounds, syllables, suffixes or roots, 
and words, in order to highlight semantic rhymes, parallels, or 
echoes, concluding of his stories that “the author counted not 
only on them being read (de visu), but on them being read aloud 
(de auditu).”11 And finally, we mustn’t neglect biography: in his 
youth, Krzhizhanovsky trained to be an opera singer.12

Given Krhizhanovsky’s emphasis on the physical nature of 
language and reading, it is especially poignant that, in his lifetime, 
there was a drastic reduction in the need for physically handling 
instruments in order to make or consume books, since the paper 
knife and the compositor’s stick went from being tools required 
to make and read books to being outmoded encumbrances, 
or at best, souvenirs. But as far as translation is concerned, 
Krzhizhanovsky’s continual emphasis on physicality, his specific 
interest in the physicality of the voice and sound, indicates that 
the target text should reproduce, where possible, the extent and 
effect of the original’s audible soundplay.  

Sound clearly influences Krzhizhanovsky’s idiolect. Take 
the sentence, “Bezlitsost’ ochelovechivshegosia This and That 
peredalas’ i litsevym listam knig” (literally, “The facelessness of 
a personified This and That is transferred to the face pages of 
books”).13 He plays on litso (face) and list (sheet, page, leaf), but 
he also lends the sentence a palindromic structure by creating 
the word bezlitsost’ for the beginning, to be echoed by litso at the 

9   “The Play and Its Title” (“P’esa i ee zaglavie,” 1939), SS IV, 622. “Sound” in 
this case is used to distinguish it from “silent,” as in silent film and sound film. 
10   SS IV, 810. 
11   Irina Belobrovtseva, “Uslyshannyi mir: o ’fonosfere‘ Sigizmunda 
Krzhizhanovskogo,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 14 (Fall 2005). http://sites.
utoronto.ca/tsq/14/belobrovceva14.shtml. Last accessed 10/31/2016. 
12    From a presentation given by Vadim Perelmuter at the symposium 
Planting the Flag: The Nonfiction of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (held 10/21-
22/2016 at the University of Indiana at Bloomington).

13    “The Poetics of Titles” (Poetika zaglavii, 1925), SS IV, 23. 

http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/14/belobrovceva14.shtml
http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/14/belobrovceva14.shtml


Anne O. Fisher    23

end. That is, instead of using the perfectly reasonable and widely 
used bezlikost’ (anonymous),

prefix bez- [without] + Old Church Slavonic root lik* 
[face] + abstract noun suffix –ost’ [ness]

—where, let’s admit, the morphological links between lik* and 
litso would’ve been enough for most writers, he makes these ties 
redundant by creating his own parallel, perfectly understandable, 
but nonstandard word bezlitsost’ (anonymous): 

prefix bez- [without] + modern Russian word litso [face] 
+ abstract noun suffix –ost’ [ness].

It should also be mentioned that this sentence occurs, of course, 
in the section entitled Litsa i “litsevye listy” (literally, “faces and 
‘face pages’”). Fortunately for the translator, the English words 
“face” and “page” are already assonant; rarely, every once in blue 
moon, a bit of the translator’s work does spring fully formed out of 
the original words, like Athena from Zeus’s head.  

Krzhizhanovsky constructed other words, too, like inskriptornyi 
(“inscripted,” used to describe titles that are written “in scriptum,” 
that is, at the same time as their texts) and lakonizator (“laconizer”); 
the latter presents almost no difficulty for the translator, who may 
scavenge from the same Latin roots at will. As far as sonority 
goes, when the sound-alike Russian words are both from Latin 
roots, then things fall into place nicely: lakonizator leksiki = lexical 
laconizer.

This does lead to a larger question, though, of how to reproduce 
the feel of Krzhizhanovsky’s swift tacking from Slavic to non-
Slavic influences and back again. The boat of his prose never 
stops moving smoothly forward, the wind never goes out of his 
sails, but the two linguistic vectors still exert their own individual 
forces on the text. In this case, although it’s an inexact analogy, 
I wonder whether it might be useful to think about deploying the 
divide in English between Anglo-Saxon words and French ones.

But to return to the issue of sound. Let’s look at the first 
paragraph of The Poetics of Titles (italics in the block quote are 
Krzhizhanovsky’s): 

Desyatok-drugoi bukv, vedushchikh za soboi tysiachi 
znakov teksta, prinyato nazyvat’ zaglaviem. Slova 
na oblozhke ne mogut ne obshchat’sia so slovami, 
spriatannymi pod oblozhku. Malo togo: zaglavie, 
poskol’ku ono ne v otryve ot edinogo knizhnogo tela 



24     Lingusitic Play in Krzhizhanovsky

i poskol’ku ono, v parallel’ oblozhke, oblegaet tekst i 
smysl,— vprave vydavat’ sebia za glavnoe knigi.14  

Here we have the paranomastic play of d-u-v in desiatok-drugoi 
bukv, vedushchikh. We also have a palindromical structure in 
the second sentence, built on assonance and word repetition: 
slova na oblozhke is mirrored in slovami […] pod oblozhku. We 
have more assonance: v otryve ot edinogo knizhnogo, we have 
oblozhke, oblegaet—even, if you expand it to syllables, parallel’ 
oblozhke, oblegaet tekst., But perhaps most insistent is the way 
the passage calls out the vowel sound a, heard twice (due to 
vowel reduction) in each of its keywords: zaglavie (title), slova 
(words), oblozhka (cover). Look at the same passage again, 
where the vowels pronounced a are underlined, and you’ll see 
that a whopping fourteen of the second sentence’s twenty-five 
syllables are based on a (thirteen, if you insist that the unstressed 
reflexive particle -sia in obshchat’sia would not be pronounced as 
an a, which it is in the Muscovite accent, but then, Krzhizhanovsky 
wasn’t originally from Moscow): 

Desyatok-drugoi bukv, vedushchikh za soboi tysiachi 
znakov teksta, prinyato nazyvat’ zaglaviem. Slova 
na oblozhke ne mogut ne obshchat’sia so slovami, 
spriatannymi pod oblozhku. Malo togo: zaglavie, 
poskol’ku ono ne v otryve ot edinogo knizhnogo tela 
i poskol’ku ono, v parallel’ oblozhke, oblegaet tekst i 
smysl,— vprave vydavat’ sebia za glavnoe knigi.  

The point is that any translation that doesn’t take this soundplay into 
account isn’t working hard enough, although the best way to do the 
work (substitution or transference if direct replication starts to sound 
light or humorous?) is still very much an open question.  

And there’s another issue: we also have an untranslatable 
(into English, at least) pun on zaglavie (title) and glavnoe (the 
most important thing/the main thing). The noun zaglavie, in 
turn, spins off into compound nouns such as zaglavnyi shablon 
(title template; occurs once), zaglavnyi znak (title sign or title 
letter; occurs 7 times), zaglavnyi list (title page; 12 times) and 
its synonym, zaglavnaia stranitsa (title page; twice), even 
okolozaglavnye elementy (paratitular elements; thankfully, once). 
Let’s not forget the non-compound abstract noun, zaglavnost’ 
(titleness; once). The piece begins its final wind-down with the 
inevitable samoe glavnoe v zaglavnom (the most important thing 

14   Ibid., p. 7.  



Anne O. Fisher    25

is in the most important title thing), where the coining of a new 
adjectival noun, zaglavnoe (the title thing), on the model of the 
extant glavnoe (the main thing), is a typically Krzhizhanovskian 
idiolectic moment. 

This pun (which in the body of the piece branches out to include 
glava, “head” (as in, boss) and golova, “head” (as in, what’s on top 
of one’s body), extending as far out as ozaglavlyvatel’, “the one 
who gives a title”) might be considered the piece’s main theme, 
while a harmony or counterpoint is the recurrence of titulblat (title 
page; occurs 11 times) or titul’nyi list (title page; occurs 3 times). 

It’s helpful to think of these repeated words and word variations 
in musical terms; but instead of a leitmotif, it is, as Martin Buber 
identified it, a Leitwort (or, in this case, Leitwörter). 

By Leitwort I understand a word or word root that is 
meaningfully repeated within a text or sequence of 
texts or complex of texts; those who attend to these 
repetitions will find a meaning of the text revealed 
or clarified, or at any rate made more emphatic. As 
noted, what is repeated need not be a single word 
but can be a word root; indeed, the diversity of 
forms often strengthens the overall dynamic effect. 
I say “dynamic” because what takes place between 
the verbal configurations thus related is in a way a 
movement: readers to whom the whole is present feel 
the waves beating back and forth.15 

Again, notice here the emphasis on physicality: the effect is 
dynamic; readers feel. 

Most important, though, is how to render a sound palette 
that reflects these two constellations of words, all based on 
either the Slavic root glav* or the Germanic word titul (where the 
Slavic root is, understandably, more lexically, semantically, and 
paranomastically productive). Unfortunately, the best English 
can do for glav* is to split it into two roots, one bearing the 
semantic weight of “title,” the other carrying the sense of “main”; 
this necessarily kills the “dynamic effect” of the repetition of the 
sound. Even more unfortunately, this solution also complicates 
the secondary Leitwort of titul, since its translation—“title”—
is identical to the translation of the primary Leitwort, zaglavie: 
“title.” The pleasing interplay of the original’s color palette (to use 

15   Martin Buber, “Leitwort Style in Pentateuch Narrative,” in Scripture and 
Translation (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994), p. 114. I am grateful to Ben 
Paloff for introducing me to Buber’s term.  



26     Lingusitic Play in Krzhizhanovsky

a visual metaphor to express a phenomenon of sound) seems 
doomed to be rendered in black-and-white in its English version. 

I hope that in this case, sound can again come to the rescue. 
We remember that sometimes, Krzhizhanovsky specifically uses 
one of the four synonyms open to him for “title page” (zaglavnyi 
list, zaglavnaia stranitsa, titulblat, and titulnyi list) because of its 
sonic palette. For example, in po trebovaniiu titulblata (by the title 
page’s demands) and bumazhnyi kvadrat titulblata (the paper 
square of the title page) it’s clear that titulblat is the only option 
that provides the as, bs, and ts needed for the assonance and/
or consonance. 

In this sense, I wonder whether aiming to repeat a kind of 
“Leitlaut,” when a proper Leitwort is unavailable, might be one 
way of providing a similar dynamic, of making the target text 
feel/sound more like the source text. So I tried it out, translating 
zaglavie as “title” and glavnyi as “vital.” My current rendering:

We commonly call a couple dozen letters pulling 
thousands of characters’ worth of text behind them a 
title. The words on the cover can’t help but converse 
with the words tucked under the cover. Moreover, 
since the title is not discrete from the entirety of the 
book’s body, since in conjunction with the cover it 
does enclose both text and meaning, it’s entitled to our 
regard as the book’s most vital part.  

This all may change, based on how the rest of the translation 
goes. And this first passage, although among the densest in 
The Poetics of Titles, is by no means the only challenge. Too, 
the very strategy I’m proposing creates its own challenges: how 
do you know when it’s enough?16 Too much rhythm, alliteration, 
assonance, or other patterning can be distracting, detract from the 
point. I suppose that after arming myself with as much knowledge 
as I can, and testing how various word combinations sound rolling 
off my tongue, I’ll ultimately have to count on my ear.  

16    My thanks to Russell Scott Valentino for posing this question, to which 
I still don’t have an adequate answer. I am grateful to Jacob Emery and 
Sasha Spektor, who convened the Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky symposium at 
the University of Indiana at Bloomington (Planting the Flag: The Nonfiction of 
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Oct. 21-22, 2016), where I was able to present a 
version of these remarks, and to everyone attending, from whose comments I 
learned a great deal. 


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