Sounding Sincerity: Thoughts on One Recitation and Two Musical Settings of Boris Ryžij's Verse

The sonorous presence of a voice intoning a poem triggers a number of experiential transformations, the most obvious being that the reader is turned into a listener, who cedes control of the temporality in which the poem is experienced. Another consequential effect of the aural experience of poetry is a reduction of the text's inherent polysemy, as the elements of prosody conspire to produce a sonorous “reading” that is necessarily an interpretation. At the same time, the voice that sounds the poem creates new, vocal polysemies, new problems for interpretation. In this article, I attempt to track some of the transformations that occur when the works of Boris Ryzhii, a poet to whom sincerity has frequently been ascribed, are given as vocal performances. How do we hear the “sincere authorial voice” of Ryzhii when his works are not read but spoken – or, more radically, when they are not spoken but sung?