| add to favorites |
|
|
|
| Translated from Russian by Peter Daniels |
|
|
| about this translation |
|
The Music Blizzards have whirled all night, but the morning's clear. Still a Sunday laziness crawls across my body, and the Church of the Annunciation hasn't yet come out of mass. I go out to the yard. How small, all of it: a little house, a little twist of smoke above the roof! Silvery-rosy, the frost-vapour. It forms its pillars that rise from behind the houses, up to the dome of heaven as if they were the wings of giant angels. How miniature, suddenly, seems the burly figure of Sergei Ivanych, my neighbour. There he is, in sheepskin coat and felt boots. Firewood is scattered round him in the snow. With both his arms tensing, lifting up the heavy chopper above his head, he swings it - but Tock! Tock! Tock! goes each unresounding blow: sky, snow and cold are swallowing the sound… "Greetings, neighbour." "Ah, good morning!" - and I sort out my own firewood, too. His Tock! My Tock! But it soon gets on my nerves, chopping. I straighten up, and say: "Hang on there a minute, isn't that some kind of music?" Sergei Ivanych pauses in his work, raises up his head just a little bit - nothing that he can hear, but he's trying hard to listen… "You must have imagined it," he tells me. "No, look, you have to get attuned to it. Such a clear sound." He's listening again. "Well, maybe - are they burying a soldier? Only somehow I can't make it out." But I don't let it go. "Forgive me, but now it's really clear. And the music's coming somehow from above. I can hear a cello, and there are harps, perhaps… That's such good playing! Stop bashing -" and poor old Sergei Ivanych once more holds off from chopping. He doesn't hear a thing, but wishing not to spoil it for me, tries hard not to look annoyed. Funny, how he's standing in the middle of the yard, afraid to interrupt an inaudible symphony. And I regret, eventually, the way I've made him stop. I declare: "It's finished." Once again we get down to our axes: Tock! Tock! Tock! - while the sky stays as high as ever, and up there still the same, the feathery angels shining. Blind Man With a cane he feels his way, blind man on a random walk, carefully he plants a foot and mumbles something to himself. In the whiteness of his eyes a universe reflected back: a house, a field, a fence, a cow, patches of a pale blue sky - everything that he can't see. Nights for Sergei Krechetov A thin howl from the dogs on guard. Tonight still camped in the same place, no-good vagabond orphans, we are warming our hands at the bonfire. A sullen look beneath the brows from empty nights of far-fetched sleep. The smoke is full of ruby floaters whirled from flames that whistle and crack. The waste says nothing. Silent, barbed, a distant wind pursues the dust; we sing with an evil dreariness that's chafing at our curling lips... A thin howl from the dogs on guard. The House There was a house here. They recently dismantled the upstairs for firewood, leaving just the rough lower stonework structure. I go there often of an evening to relax. The open sky and green trees in the little courtyard rise up so fresh from all that's fallen, and there's the clear outline of the wide window-frames. A tumbled beam resembles a column. A musty chill is coming from the piles of rubble and debris filling up the rooms, where once the people nested... Where they quarrelled, they reconciled, they stored up greasy money in a stocking for a rainy day; where in the stuffy dark spouses embraced; where they sweated in a fever's heat; where people were born and died in private - all of it now open to the passer-by. O, blessed is he whose untrammelled foot treads cheerfully on this dust, and whose indifferent staff can knock against the abandoned walls! The royal palace of great Rameses or an unknown labourer's shack, they're equal to the wanderer, taking the same comfort in the song of passing time; whether ceremonious ranks of columns, or gaps from yesterday's doors, much the same they lead the traveller from one emptiness into another... With a pattern of broken banisters the stairs are walking up into the sky, and where the landing has been interrupted seems to me like an elevated podium. But there's no orator. And in the sky the evening star has started shining, instigator of high-flown meditations. Yes, Time: you are so good. It's good to inhale your awful spaciousness. Why hide the fact? The human heart is playing like an infant fresh from sleep, when war, or famine, or civil turmoil swoop down suddenly, and shake the earth; the times like opening skies will gape apart and man will throw himself, and his ever - unsatisfied soul, longingly into the deep. Like a bird up in the air, a fish in the ocean, a slippery worm in a damp layer of earth, like a salamander in flames - man lives in time. A half-wild nomad, using the moon's changes and sketched-out constellations, he makes attempts to measure the abyss, with his unpractised letters noting down events like islands plotted on a map... But son displaces father. Cities, empires, scriptures, truths - they pass away. And man breaks and builds up again with equal joy. He has invented history - what a pleasure! And with both horror and a secret lust the madman watches how, somewhere between the past and the future - like clear water slipping between the fingers - unceasingly life is trickling away. And the heart flutters like the flag aloft on the mast of a ship, between the recollection and the hope - that memory of a future... But here - the rustle of footsteps. A hunched old woman carrying a big sack. With a wrinkled hand she's ripping down old oakum off the walls, pulling out laths. I go up silently to help her, and in pleasant harmony we do some of the work for time. It's darker: out from behind the walls a green crescent rises, its feeble light, like a little stream, flows over the glazed tiles of the collapsing stove. The Swallows If you have eyes - through day you'll see a night the rays from that inflaming disk won't reach. A pair of swallows fighting to escape flap at the window, where they feebly cheep. But that transparent yet unyielding sheet was never cut by wings, however sharp; no darting that way out into the blue, with any tiny wing, or captive heart. Until the blood issues from every pore, until you've wept away your earthly sight, you can't become a spirit. Wait, and stare at how a splash of light won't hide the night. In Front of the Mirror Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Me, me, me. What a preposterous word! Can that man there really be me? Did Mama really love this face, dull yellow with greying edges like an ancient know-it-all snake? Can the boy who danced in summer at the Ostánkino country-house balls be myself, whose every response to freshly-hatched poets inspires their loathing, malice and fear? Can that youthful energy thrown into arguing full pelt well after midnight have been my own, now that I've learnt when conversation turns to tragedy better say nothing - or make a joke? But that's how it always is at the mid point of the way through your fate on earth: from one worthless cause to another, and look, you've wandered away from the path and can't even trace your own tracks. Well, there was no leaping panther chasing me up to my Paris garret, and there's no Virgil at my shoulder - there's only my singular self in the frame of the talking, truthtelling looking-glass. "God Alive!" God alive! I'm not beyond coherence: mindfully, I walk among my poems like a disobliging abbot among his humble monks. I shepherd my obedient flock with a staff that's bursting into bloom. The keys to the mysterious garden hang clinking at my belt. I ponder hopefully, I pronounce. Metalogical? Maybe the angel that stands in the presence of God to sing, or the oxen that don't even recognise God, way beyond thought as they moo and bellow. But I'm no angel of brightness, no cruel serpent, no idiot bull. From generation to generation this human language has been spoken: I love its rigourous freedom, I love its twisting laws... O may my last expiring groan be wrapped inside an articulate ode! April Through the consoling April sun the breeze, so very unconsoling, a sandy whirlwind on the road - shutting up the chattering starling. Up above the northern latitudes, dark grey clouds are bulking high. Bowler hats get pulled down tight - but these two dandies let theirs fly. And under the noise of the rumbling hail, the proud and wicked heart revives: "That's our very own lightning-crack, the wingbeat as our spring arrives!" 21 April 1937, Paris "Not My Mother…" Not my mother, but a Tula peasant, Eléna Kúzina, fed me her breast. She warmed my swaddling-clothes above the stove, and with her cross at night my dreams were blessed. She knew no fairy tales and never sang: but always kept as treats for me instead inside her treasured white enamel tin a peppermint horse or fruity gingerbread. She never taught me how to say my prayers, but gave up everything she had for me: even her own bitter motherhood, all that was dear to her, unconditionally. Only the time I tumbled from the window, but stood up alive (that day for ever mine!), with half a kopek for the miracle her candle graced Iberian Mary's shrine. And you, Russia, "great resounding power": taking her nipples for my lips to pull, I suckled the excruciating right to love you, and to curse at you as well. My honest, joyful task of making psalms, in which I serve each moment all day long, your wonder-making genius teaches me, and my profession is your magic tongue. And I may stand before your feeble sons priding myself at times that I can guard this language, handed down from age to age, with a more jealous love for every word… The years fly by. The future has no use, the past has burnt itself into my soul. And yet the secret joy is still alive, for me there is one refuge from it all: where with the still imperishable love even a maggot-eaten heart can keep, beside the trampled coronation crowd my nurse, Elena Kuzina, asleep. "Step over" Step over, leap across, fly beyond, however you like, get through it - but tear yourself off: be a stone from a sling, be a star that breaks away from the night... You lost it yourself - now look for it. God knows what you grunt to yourself, looking for spectacles or keys. Translated by Peter Daniels |
| © Copyright Peter Daniels, translation |
|
