to whom came to mind
a man observing the acres.
I’m frightened by the fact that everything becomes dilapidated,
and in comparison I’m not a rarity.
You and I, wind, will sit down together
on this pebble of death.
Like a candle the grass grows up all around,
and the trees sway back and forth in an instant.
I regret that I am not a seed,
I am frightened I’m not fertility.
The worm crawls along behind us all,
he carries monotony with him.
I’m scared to be an uncertainty,
I regret that I am not fire.
1934
[M.Y.]
Twenty-four Hours
Answer. A swallow runs in.
Question. But who are you, swallow of heaven,
are you a beast or a forest.
The swallow’s nonexistent answer.
I am a clockmaker.
Question. And yet who met you here
in this capital dark,
where nests circle above me,
where there are no green leaves,
where suffers the terrestrial man,
the lobsters sleep,
where there’s no sea?
Where there’s no meaningful quantity of water.
Say who you are.
The dark here is palatial.
The swallow’s answer.
I am a soldier.
I am a soldier.
The night flees down the mountain summit.
The summit stays black.
A star descends from the firmament,
which is left yearning,
a bush.
Question. Could you be sorry for the firmament
when you blush on it like a planet,
when you dash in place of the star
that dove this minute
into the grove.
The swallow’s answer.
The firmament became clear and clean
like the vault of heaven.
God sent a massing of cool air,
the day arises.
Question. One hour of time passes.
Answer. One hour of time passes.
Question. Is the wind like flowers,
like daisies or tulips.
Answer. An old man sat.
He manufactured blinds from his hands
to save his eyes
from glare.
Question. Is the wind like a bench?
Answer. Above us rises the comprehensible morning,
we feel the urge to fly in search of food
and sing,
sagely reasoning.
Question. Say who surpasses,
I
or
the summits of grasses.
And who lies senseless like an apple.
Answer. We sense the stones are awaking,
they start their conversation,
they fall like leaves
from the summits of magnanimous mountains.
Empty numbers come to life
because the moon shines on them as it leaves us.
The day appears,
the world grows.
Question. O swallow you are a raptor.
The capital is here.
There’s no world here.
There’s no sea here.
Maybe I too should head for the
provinces.
Swallow. Isn’t the sea a better world.
Isn’t the sea a better world.
It has grown.
The questioner.
O swallow what do we do?
The question is your own.
Your features alter.
Say where are you?
Answer. In winter snow was number.
It’s multitudinous. Look,
you can now nod your oar
up and down the brook.
Question. One hour of time passes.
Answer. One hour of time passes.
Question. Are they not avoiding us.
Answer. The clouds swam by blue as paint.
A beetle locomoted. Grass moved but a point
during this hour. An ant kicked with his foot
the fallen star like an insignificant point,
and in the sea a ship sailed, its motion as simple as simple gets.
Who is it that avoids us?
Question. Are they not circumventing us.
We are extraneous places,
what is more dear than death.
Look, from a deserted bridge
I want to tell the waves, believe,
I too will come to you O water,
I too will be your guest.
Answer. Unerring river.
It runs for bottomless years,
it stands in place for an instant,
it knows no sorrow.
It lies beneath each valley of a house.
It is lazy.
It is spacious.
It is proud,
it is firm,
it is incontestable.
It is the absence of a ray.
Question. A candle falls into a brook without crying hooray,
it hisses as its soul leaves it.
The mole weeps, thrown into the water,
reading the firmament with blind eyes,
and, sitting where the river is, the fisherman
invisibly turns into an old man.
Maybe he’s frightened of the glare.
Answer. Everything goes black,
the day is over.
One last time
upon the place of battle,
where the battle had been taking place,
again a prayer settles.
The prayer here is performed.
The dew flows down the summits of the grass.
The beetle goes to sleep. The star
is seen and isn’t.
The firmament again fills up with planets.
The sea grows dark. Where is the ant, it contemplates the waves.
It rubs its paw upon the point of sand.
Swims the extinguished fish.
Twenty-four hours have passed.
Question. Is the forest like the night.
Trees are a particle of the night,
the oaks are stars, the birds are moisture,
the leaves are answer.
The fall is absent from the forest.
Answer. Twenty-four hours have passed.
Twenty-four hours have passed.
The foliage makes noise.
1934?
[E.O.]
The Soldier Ay Bee See
along the shore of the resounding sea walked the soldier Ay Bee See. He had a fundamental guiding thought about nuts. He walked and whispered a song. It was evening. The soldier Ay Bee See, approaching a pitiful, unlit by the inhabitant fishermen fisherman’s hut, where fishermen lived, provided they were not out navigating the resounding, black, caspian, or essentially even the mediterranean or, which is one and the same, adriatic sea, but were ashore, that’s when they lived there. They the fishermen were five in number. They intently ate soup with fish. Their names were Andrey, Bandrey, Bendrey, Gandrey, and Kudedrey. They all had daughters. Their names were Lialya, Talya, Balya, Kialya, and Salya. The daughters had all gotten married. It was evening. The soldier Ay Bee See did not stop by the home of these garden-patch minders. He did not knock on their home door. He walked deep in his thought, the fundamental guiding him thought about nuts. The soldier Ay Bee See did not notice their fisherman’s house. Not their nets, not their rigging, not their daughters, not their soup. Even though he felt cold and night was falling all the same, he still walked past them. So much was he engulfed by his fundamental guiding thought about nuts. It was evening still. Ay Bee See walked, almost ran and spoke his nut song. Let us imagine, that is let us mentally hear, this song. Does it follow from the song’s being called nut song that nuts must feature proudly
in it. Yes, in this case it follows. It is far from being so always, but in this case it follows. Here it is, this song. The soldier Ay Bee See sang about the difference in the shells of the walnut and the brazil nut. Here’s what he sang.
The shell of the walnut
is tender to look at.
The shell of the brazil nut
is savage to look at.
The former shell is clean,
firm, lush, and lean.
The latter shell is a simple one,
it’s like a tailless swan.
Why this difference, goodness gracious,
those in the know are horribly pugnacious.
I like the walnut before and after,
its body carries a certain laughter.
Its shell is mighty fine
but thinking about it is a waste of time.
The brazil nut has color,
maybe the color is its brother.
Yet where its dawn gets its start,
no one can say either forward or backward.
Why this difference, goodness gracious,
those in the know are horribly pugnacious.
This is all that I could say
about their shell that ends with an A.
Here, as if in answer to this song, blazed up the candle-lit, previously unlit, window of the fisherman’s house whose light had gone out entirely and forever. The fisherman Andrey, Bandrey, Bendrey, and Gandrey rapped his fist on the window and shouted to the soldier Ay Bee See: Officer officer, do you take the world’s offer, sir? But the fisherman Kudedrey self-sufficiently cooked and went on eating his fisherman’s soup. It was evening, although also night was falling. But what could Ay Bee See say in reply when he didn’t hear the question. He was already very far away from them. And then he suddenly, but not unexpectedly, turned into a father and...and right away sang a new song. The father sang. The mother listened. The father sang but the mother listened. The father sang and the mother listened. And what was she listening to?
I walked a long the ci ty streets,
I looked for my son e verywhere,
but I cou ldn’t find him a nywhere,
even among the sea side cliffs.
Then I walked in to the fo rest,
then I ran to wards the sea.
Where are you, where O my son,
I cried a round me sa dly.
My son an swered here I am,
may be I ’m enti rely here,
then I looked a round my self,
my son who lly disa ppeared.
All the birds put up a howl,
coo ed the wild ani mal.
Cry and cry and cry and cry,
the fo rest cuc kooed to them all.
The soldier Ay Bee See, strongly inspired, courageously we
1937–1938
[E.O.]
Elegy
I made an elegy with art
of how I rode in a farm-cart.
Surveying the tops of mountains,
their uncountable feet,
wine-swollen vessels,
the world, like snow, in splendor,
I saw cold streams,
the storm’s fierce gaze,
the wind high and serene,
and death’s fruitless hour.
Here is a knight, swimming like a cod:
with lofty courage in his heart
against the agitated main
he wages an unequal battle.
Here, a horse lays in its hands
the blaze of wild deliverance,
as twilight horses do a dance
on the palm of the stately thistle.
Where the forest looks into the fields,
at night’s inaudible décor,
we look through the window with no blinds
at the glow of the soulless star,
hide our hearts in empty doubt,
wake languish whimper in the night,
we mean almost nothing,
we wait for an obedient life.
We are estranged from admiration,
we feel only perturbation,
we cowardly betray a friend,
the Lord is not our lord.
We cultivated the flower of grief,
ourselves to ourselves forgave,
we, who like ashes have grown cold,
prefer the carnation to an eagle.
With envy I look at beasts,
I trust neither thoughts nor words,
our minds have suffered a loss,
there’s no reason to struggle.
We apprehend all as a fall,
even the day the dream the shadow,
and even the buzz of music
won’t escape the abyss.
Neither the restlessness of the surf,
nor deserted shifting sands,
nor the obscene bodies of women
sated our yearning.
We forgot the pose of untroubled calm,
sang death, sang dearth, sang lies, sang harm,
equated remembrance with pretense,
that’s why we’re burning.
Divine birds fly,
their fine braids flap,
their bathrobes glint like knives,
their flight lacks mercy.
They measure off units of time,
they test the weight and the strain:
ignore the empty stirrup’s clang,
don’t plead insanity.
Allow the crystal stream to roam,
the mirror horse to trot on home,
breathing in the musical air
you breathe in rot.
Driver irritable and ill,
at the final hour of sleepy dawn
rush rush the lazy carriage
with all you got.
No swans above the festive boards
flap the white pinions of their wings,
together with bronze eagles
trumpeting hoarsely.
Eradicated inspiration
now visits for almost no duration,
orient yourself by death by death,
singer and poor horseman.
1940
[E.O.]
Notes
Translations by Eugene Ostashevsky are marked [E.O.]. Translations by Matvei Yankelevich are marked [M.Y.]. The inconsistent punctuation approximates that of the originals. We have supplied titles for “The Joyful Man Franz,” “Snow Lies,” “Rug Hydrangea,” and “The Soldier Ay Bee See.” “The Gray Notebook” takes its title from the gray notebook in which it was composed.
Vvedensky’s poems rhyme in ad hoc rather than stanzaic patterns with couplets and quatrains predominating. Most are polymetric, alternating between iambic or trochaic tetrameters and non-metric but rhymed passages. A few stick to trochaic tetrameter, the form of counting rhymes (eeny meeny miny moe).
THE MIRROR AND THE MUSICIAN
Ivan Ivanovich: Not the first name and patronymic of the composer Prokofiev, who, though living in Paris, staged his Love for Three Oranges in Leningrad in 1926.
Amour: Pun on Cupid and Amur, river in Siberia.
Kant: The word “musician” in the title is muzykant.
THE JOYFUL MAN FRANZ
Oberth: Hermann Oberth (1894–1989), German pioneer of rocket science.
I’m...: Break in manuscript.
SNOW LIES
Night or demon: The demons of Pushkin’s “Demons” (1830) blend with the night blizzard.
Lena: The pun is on lentochka, little ribbon, and Lenochka, sweet Lena.
GOD MAY BE AROUND
Title: The Russian emphasizes the spatial rather than the existential sense of “around.”
Genre: The tendency of the “stage directions” to rhyme with characters’ lines, and to have verbs in the past tense, shows that genre distinctions do not apply to “God May Be Around.” The tense shifts of the Russian have been retained.
Ef: The protagonist’s name is the sounded-out letter F, as well as the first syllable of the Russian word fo
r ether.
Balthazar: see Daniel 5:1–31.
Mazepa: Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709), Hetman of the Ukraine. Coupled with Aida, the reference is operatic.
Chechen exile: In the original, Hadji-Abrek, hero of Romantic poem by Lermontov.
Tsar’s speech: Elements of Russian Baroque and folk drama pervade the execution scene down to the prosody. Greek nor Jew, see Galatians 3:28. The lines about all sorts of people parody a cliché of folk poetry that also appears in Soviet propaganda of 1920s.
Theater of law: The first large-scale show trials took place in 1928 (the Shakhty case) and 1930 (the Industrial Party case). Note that the poem conflates the “theater of law” (more literally, “the spectacle of a law trial”) with the execution: any deliberative step is skipped over. In The Conversations, Vvedensky again describes the court of law as “bad theater,” proposing that defendants, instead of cooperating, speak out of turn and say whatever they want.
What dummy likes to go: Paraphrases the proverb “The pitcher that often goes to the well comes home broken.”
This is Mitya, right? No, it’s a meteorite: Parodies Korney Chukovsky’s popular children’s poem “The Telephone” (1924).
Rurik: Ninth-century Viking chief to whom the bluest blood in Russia traced its descent.
Hour from to hour not more easily: Quatrain rendered by online translation software. Spark plugs: “candles” in the original.
Maria Natalievna, Nina Picturovna, Kuno Petrovich Fischer: All three names violate Russian naming rules. Fischer: German historian of philosophy (1824–1907).
Bekhterev: Vladimir Bekhterev (1857–1927), pioneering Russian neuroscientist.
Only God may be: The Russian is either a statement of extreme monism to the effect that nothing exists besides God, or an interrupted “Maybe only God...”
The star of meaninglessness shines: A declaration of bessmyslitza that also quotes Lomonosov’s 1743 “Reflection on the Northern Lights”: “An abyss opened, full of stars. / The stars have no number, the abyss no bottom.”
Dead gentleman: In contrast with the biblical formula “living God,” first used in Deuteronomy 5:26, Vvedensky’s image of Christ in his second coming literalizes Nietzsche’s famous quip that God is dead. The apocalyptic irruption of tsar Jesus as a dead man thus parallels the punitive coming to life of tsar Peter as a statue in Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman.
THE GRAY NOTEBOOK
“The Gray Notebook” is unfinished. Editors differ on how to divide it into sections. The originals of “Stomach Rumbling” and “Contracting Syphilis” are single sheets of paper folded inside the same notebook.
Alexander Vvedensky Page 10
