casual lover’s shoulder

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Untitled
Natalya Gorbanyevskaya

And there is nothing at all – neither fear,
nor a stiffening before the executioner.
I lay my head upon the hollowed block,
as on a casual lover’s shoulder.

Roll, curly head, over the planed boards,
mind you don’t get a splinter in your parted lips–
the boards bruise your temples, the trumpets
sound solemnly in your ears;

the polished copper dazzles you,
the horses’ manes toss–
O, what a day to die on!

Another day dawns sunless,

and in the semi-dark – either
through sleepiness, some ancient madness,
or new apocrypha – my lover’s shoulder
still smells to me of pine shavings.

И вовсе нету ничего – ни страху,
ни цепененья перед палачом,
роняю голову на вымытую плаху,
как на случайного любовника плечо.

Катись, кудрявая, по скобленым доскам,
не занози разинутые губы,
а доски ударяют по вискам,
гудят в ушах торжественные трубы,

слепит глаза начищенная медь,
и гривы лошадиные взлетают,
в такое утро только умереть!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
В другое утро еле рассветает,

и в сумраке, спросонья или что,
иль старый бред, или апокриф новый,
но все мне пахнет стружкою сосновой
случайного любовника плечо.

Oh, those Russians

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Untitled
Viktor Sosnora/Виктор Александрович Соснора

There it all was: the gaslamp, drugstore,
street, a kiss,

a fountain, imposture, Mniszech,
Evgeny and the Neva night,

a madman and revolvers,
a genius and the jealousy of hands,

friends with double eyes,
wit of our will-o-the-wisp,

Salieri with the wrong goblet,
take everything to heart: tomorrow, love…

how light it is to love the dead!
how late it is to love the living!

Photo (c) 2006 OiMax used under Creative Commons license.

 

My beast, my age

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The Age

Osip Mandelstam

My age, my beast, is there anyone
Who can peer into your eyes
And with his own blood fuse
Two centuries’ worth of vertebrae?
Blood, the builder, gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
And the parasite just trembles
On the threshold of new days.

While the creature still has life,
The spine must be delivered,
While with the unseen backbone
A wave distracts itself.
Again they’ve brought the peak of life
Like a sacrificial lamb,
Like a child’s supple cartilage—
The age of infant earth.

To free the age from its confinement,
To instigate a brand new world,
The discordant, tangled days
Must be linked, as with a flute.
It’s the age that rocks the swells
With humanity’s despair,
And in the undergrowth a serpent breathes
The golden measure of the age.

Still the shoots will swell
And the green buds sprout
But your spinal cord is crushed,
My fantastic, wretched age!
And in lunatic beatitude
You look back, cruel and weak,
Like a beast that once was agile,
At the tracks left by your feet.

The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
The lukewarm cartilage of oceans
Splashes like a seething fish ashore.
And from the bird net spread on high
From the humid azure stones,
Streams a flood of helpless apathy
On your fatal wound.

The challenge, the pain, the cruelty, the lie of translation…

Her ex-husband is dead

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Very often I cite the work of Bella Akhmadulina but rarely that of her ex-husband, the much better-known Yevgeny Yevtushenko. A giant of 20th century Soviet/Russian poetry, Yevtushenko died in, of all places, Tulsa, Oklahoma, this past weekend. His passing made me think back to university in the mid-to-late 90s. One professor had spent time with Yevtushenko, telling of what a magnificent and shameless flirt he had been. No surprises there. I marvel at times thinking of poets filling concert halls and stadiums, holding rapt the attention of a massive audience. Can you imagine a modern audience in America trying to get tickets to such an event?

Later
-Yevtushenko
Oh what a sobering,
what a talking-to from conscience afterwards:
the short moment of frankness at the party
and the enemy crept up.
But to have learnt nothing is terrible,
and peering earnest eyes are terrible
detecting secret thoughts is terrible
in simple words and immature disturbance.
This diligent suspicion has no merit.
The blinded judges are no public servants.
It would be far more terrible to mistake
a friend than to mistake an enemy.

Or this lovely one (which I’ve just read aloud and recorded).

And let us not forget the masterpiece for which he may be best remembered, Babii Yar.

drömland

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I recalled a nightmare from a few nights ago. In it, I lived in Paris and worked as an English teacher for three French kids. I got through one 45-minute lesson with them, and I was miserable, counting the seconds until the lesson was over. In my mind, I was feverishly thinking about how I could get out of this huge mistake. How did I end up being in that situation and how could I possibly teach even one more lesson when just one was interminably long and hellish?

It made me wonder how I had spent something like half a year teaching kids. What an eternity ago that was (almost 20 years!), and what a horror show.

I also had a dream in which I married someone I had only met the previous week. And we were happy for one week. But then misery came in massive clusters. I am pretty sure I know what that was all about.

And last night I was dreaming in Russian for the first time since I was actively studying Russian. It was a strange mix of things. I was reading and speaking Russian, but I ended up having a conversation with a guy (American) I had known many years ago about a Russian poem I had (in reality, not in the dream) shared with him back then: “The new blast-furnace in the Kemerovo metallurgical combine” by Bella Akhmadulina. (I can’t find an English version of it to share here right now.) I have not read the poem or talked to the guy in question for at least 15 years. Maybe the guy came to mind both because the poem entered my dreaming mind and also because I had been thinking about how he’d been in thousands of dollars of debt because he was making local long-distance phone calls, which seems ridiculous when considered today with the array of tools we can use to call people anywhere in the world basically for free.

Also wondering whether I should reread The Master and Margarita?

Photo (c) 2013 Boston Public Library used unchanged under Creative Commons license.

Rilke exposure

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If the neverending New Age books brought me nothing else (but in truth, they did bring me more than this), they connected me to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, whose works I had glimpsed only only through his correspondence with Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak (writers much more in my milieu for so much of my life).

Most beautiful, the Duino elegies (Duineser Elegien).All thought-provoking, but on this particular occasion, it was the eighth that struck me:

“We are, above all, eternal spectators
looking upon, never from,
the place itself. We are the
essence of it. We construct it.
It falls apart. We reconstruct it
and fall apart ourselves.

Who formed us thus:
that always, despite
our aspirations, we wave
as though departing?
Like one lingering to look,
from a high final hill,
out over the valley he
intends to leave forever,
we spend our lives saying
goodbye.”

But it renews my objections to and troubles with translation. I read several translations of the elegies – all are quite different, and create quite different impressions. I could easily immerse myself in these differences for days, for weeks, as I once did with Akhmatova translations.

 

Random abandon – I am a wee marshmallow fox

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I can’t sleep. Checking out the ridiculous Eastbound & Down and overdosing on cute pics of twin baby polar bears. Thinking I will switch over to news even though I am tired of hearing about Crimea now. How is that story a surprise to anyone?

Reading about the talented and alluring Yasmine Hamdan – always wish I knew Arabic.

Love – I never knew I needed or wanted to hear sweet words. You can just call me a wee marshmallow fox. I have completely melted.

I like multimedia, multitask, multithought, multifeeling multistories that are as full of random abandon as I am.

And poetry, of course. Uncertainty.

ДРУГОЕ

Белла Ахмадулина, 1966 / -Bella Akhmadulina

Что сделалось? Зачем я не могу,
уж целый год не знаю, не умею
слагать стихи и только немоту
тяжелую в моих губах имею?

Вы скажете – но вот уже строфа,
четыре строчки в ней, она готова.
Я не о том. Во мне уже стара
привычка ставить слово после слова.

Порядок этот ведает рука.
Я не о том. Как это прежде было?
Когда происходило – не строка –
другое что-то. Только что?- забыла.

Да, то, другое, разве знало страх,
когда шалило голосом так смело,
само, как смех, смеялось на устах
и плакало, как плач, если хотело?

 

Russian studies at 19 – Bulat Okudzhava / Була́т Окуджа́ва

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Listening to Bulat Okudzhava and reading Bella Akhmadulina, I feel 19 again.