Five Poems of Admiration (1926-31)
To the Memory of Larisa Reisner
Now is the time, Larisa, to lament
That I’m not death, compared to death I’m nil.
I’d have found out what makes a living tale
Hold to the shards of days without cement.
How closely I examined the materials!
The winters tumbled in a heap, rains drenched,
And, wrapped up in their blankets, all the snowfalls
Held towns like tiny babies to their breast.
Glimpses of walkers in the toils of weather.
Carts creeping around a turn in the road.
Years sinking up to their throat in water,
And more years, damming up the ford, a flood.
While in the alembic nests were being woven
And life was bubbling stubbornly as ever,
And street-lamps cordoned off the various labours,
Lit up by words, lit up by stars and reason.
Now look – have any of us not been made
Of snowflakes and the secrecies of mist?
We’ve all been reared upon the loveliness
Of ruins – only you are beyond praise.
Wonderfully beaten into shape by battles,
You alone surged ahead, like charm, like shot.
Should life forget the meaning of enchantment
You’re the unswerving answer, straight to the point.
You flew like smoke, you were a storm of grace.
One single moment in your living fire
And everything imperfect fell from favour,
Everything mediocre met disgrace.
Wander, then, heroine, into legend’s depth.
That path won’t tire your feet.
Spread like a loftiness above my thoughts.
In your great shadow, thought draws easier breath.
Angela Livingstone taught literature, mainly Russian, at Essex University for thirty-one years. She has published a book on Lou Andreas-Salomé, three books on Pasternak, and two volumes of translated Tsvetaeva: one of these is The Ratcatcher, A Lyrical Satire (Angel Books, London, 1999), part of which first appeared in MPT 10. She is now mainly trying to write about the prose of Andrei Platonov, ten of whose stories she translated with Robert and Elizabeth Chandler (published by Harvill Press, 1999).
Angela Livingstone writes: In each of these translations I have sought to reproduce or at least emulate the original’s metre, and I have used rhyme wherever I could. In ‘Snowstorm’ my attempt to echo the original’s sounds (e.g. the first line goes: ‘V posade, kuda ni odna noga...’) did not succeed (e.g. ‘In the yard, in the archways of markets past…’) so I substituted a pattern of equally frequent but quite different sounds (‘In this outer quarter where never a foot..’).
Translated by Angela Livingstone
Page(s) 111-112
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