For What? (On kings, cabbage and poetry)

Translated by Julia Istomina

Poems are written not to be read. Poems are written to be possessed.  More specifically, they’re written not for something, but for someone.  For anyone of the loyal subjects.  Each poet is – the king of his own personal country, which for the majority still remains terra incognito.  The general census of the population in these countries are not executed, but a system of chronology begins with the very day of a poet’s birth.  There are king-shepherds, king-builders of towers, king-astrologers, king-historians … Some understand the tongues of birds and animals, some of trees and flowers, few — the language of water and fire.  There exist kings, who gather clouds, stars, or even those same powerful waves.  One type asks questions, the other type knows the answer to everything.  Some of them speak with God, and the rest speak only with themselves … Exist furthermore, they, who know, they’re poets, and those, who don’t even have a clue about the fact.

There are many poets and very few poets.  Figures of one.  The prime example are those, who have formed relationships with tragedy.  Because, if one doesn’t have tragedy, that which forms the nature of things, then there can be no poems.  And to understand the nature of things, their “tears,” as wrote Horatius, it’s necessary not to be ashamed of personal tears and to own faithful landmarks, like those that were used by ancient Phoenician seafarers, bowing with every witnessed star.     

There exist poets, who seem to be locked in a glass snowglobes, in which one can look through and see a bell tower, and a square, and a prison, and many other things.  But the snowglobes must be periodically shaken, so that this inner world can reawaken.
                                                                                                                 
And so, poets own their wastelands and their inland seas, and, this means, they have to answer for the first and the second.  They must hold their answer before The Word.  Because it is specifically The Word that gave them the opportunity to own all that, which is unneeded to others: barren land, devil weeds and poison ivy, little skulls and shards, tears and melancholy; all this, without which it would have been unthinkable to travel along the roads of personal loneliness to long-waiting abysses and summits.

The roads of poets, like Euclid’s lines, do not connect even for the sake of common points. And they lead there, where poets are not quite glad, where they are beaten with stones or they think up more of some sort of Egyptian plagues.  A happy (or rich) poet — nonsense.  In Russian poetry there are very few who died their own deaths.  Lermontov was killed in a duel, Griboedov was chopped to pieces, Mandelstam was tortured in a camp, the power authority of the State persecuted Pasternak and Akhmatova their entire lives.  Despite such deathly examples, poets continue to be born and to deal with an actuality that doesn’t bring any sort of special joys.  But, the poems they write are not for objective reality, but for Myth, absolutely certain, that any sort of current exists solely for the purpose of swimming against the stream.   

Regina Derieva: Six poems
Julia Istomina reviews Regina Derieva’s Alien Matter