ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI ~

 

R E A D    M E

POLINA BARSKOVA ~

Manuscript Found by Natasha Rostova
During the Fire of Moscow




I will try to live on earth without you.



I will try to live on earth without you.



I will become any object,

I don't care what —



I will be this speeding train.

This smoke

Or a beautiful gay man laughing in the front seat.



The human body is without defense.



It's a piece of firewood.

Ocean water hits it.

Lenin puts it on his official shoulder.



And therefore, in order not to suffer, a human spirit

Lives

Inside the water and inside the wood and inside

     the shoulder of a great dictator.



But I will not be water. I will not be a fire.

I will be an eyelash.

A sponge washing the hairs of your neck;

Or a verb, an adjective

I will become. Such a word



Slightly lights your forehead.

What happened? Nothing.

Something visited? Nothing.



What was there you cannot whisper.

No smoke without fire, they whisper.

I will be a handful of smoke

Over this, lost, Moscow.



I will console any man,

I will sleep with any man,

Beneath the army's traveling horse carriages.


     — translated by Ilya Kaminsky



———————————————

This Lamentable City
poems by Polina Barskova
Tupelo Press 2010

CELAN ~

Paul Celan

"If there is a country named Celania — as Julia Kristeva once proposed — its holy texts are filled with doubt, and they overcome this doubt almost successfully, with words of wrenching, uncompromised beauty. . .The book in your hands is not intended to become one of those heavy scholarly tomes that serve as a "proof" of one's position in the literary/academic hierarchy. Rather, this is a collection of various works, directed at, or inspired by, the words of Paul Celan. What we wanted to make was a living anthology, in which authors observe the poet's work, read it deeply, penetrate and discuss it. but also play with it, remake it, and attempt to fit it into their own worldviews.

A great poet is not someone who speaks in stadiums to a thousand listeners. A great poet is a very private person. In his privacy this poet creates a language in which he is able to speak, privately, to many people at the same time."

Ilya Kaminsky, from the Introduction

______________________________

THERE WAS EARTH INSIDE THEM

There was earth inside them, and
they dug.



They dug and dug, and so
their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, witnessed all this.



They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
devised for themselves no sort of language.
They dug.



There came a stillness then, came also storm,
all of the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and it, the worm, digs too,
and the singing there says: They dig.



O one, O none, O no one, O you:
Where did it go, then, making for nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig through to you,
and the ring on our finger awakens.

translated from the German by John Felstiner

Homage to Paul Celan
edited by Ilya Kaminsky & G.C. Waldrep
Marick Press, 2011
www.marickpress.com

"It has an inexorable logic about it. A poetry that seems — now that we have it — had to be. A six-pointed star etched into our minds — a splintered star.

How could it not "stand out"?"

~ Cid Corman