Regina Derieva: Six Poems (trns Daniel Weissbort)

Regina Derieva

Regina Derieva has published twenty books of poetry, essays, and prose. Her works has been translated into many languages, including English, French, Swedish, and Arabic. Her most recent book of poems in English translation is Alien Matter: New and Selected Poems. Derieva's poetry has appeared in the Poetry, The Liberal, Quadrant, Modern Poetry in Translation, Salt, Poetry East, Notre Dame Review as well as in many Russian and Swedish magazines. She has translated poetry by Thomas Merton and contemporary American, British, Polish, and Swedish poets. In 2003, Derieva has been awarded the Shannon Fellowship of the International Thomas Merton Society and has participated in a number of international festivals.

Daniel Weissbort

Daniel Weissbort was born in 1935 and educated at St. Pauls School, London and Cambridge University. In 1965, with the late Ted Hughes, he founded the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, which he edited up to 2004. In the early Seventies he went to America where he directed the Translation Workshop and MFA Program in Translation, at the University of Iowa for over thirty years. He is Professor (Emeritus) English and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa, Research Fellow in the English Department, at King's College London University, and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Daniel Weissbort's anthologies of Russian poetry and of East European poetry are known and he has also published several collections of his own poetry. Anvil Press has published his translational memoir of the late Joseph Brodsky, From Russian with Love. He has co-edited for Oxford University Press, a historical reader in translation theory, which has just been published. For the same publisher he is writing a book on Ted Hughes and Translation and for Faber he has edited the Selected Translations of Ted Hughes.

Six Poems

Translated by Daniel Weissbort

Tattooed Mnemosyne

To promulgate the courtyard, its cul-de-sac,
calling to mind, a crossroads, a maple tree.
Snow has not settled, but grows slack,
Like a wilting teen.

How much can be taught? For winter,
the home fronts secured, it’s about-face —
the world’s no prison;
it’s just a grave,

from which the carefree friend and brother.
cannot be summoned.
But a stone-hearted man arose,
once most in demand.

He traversed life like a dotted line,
More than once had fits
cringed, for appearance’s sake,
as well as assuming this was the pits.

This wretched tattoo will not come off,
even if acid is smeared on.
Only, the air’s density declines the winter
of this endless era.

Vocabulary

To get on with one another
does nor require so extensive a vocabulary
Two formulations will do,
if appropriately voiced:
Leave me alone;
Stay with me.
Though maybe there’s a third as well:
No more to say.

Den-adaptation

Time to move into a den.
Still not too late to move into a den
broadening its horizon,
fortifying walls, spine,
stamping down the heart and the earth.
Time to study the blindness of moles,
again to get on neighbourly terms
with beetles and worms.
Time to count roots.
If adaptation proceeds according to plan,
one might renounce all other citizenships
and settle in there for ever.

Incompatibility

Jonah, who lived for three nights and days
in the interior of a whale,
never, so to speak,
felt at home there, or integrated,
for instance learning by heart all its rib,
or the rules governing this new state of affairs,
figuring out what was good
or not so good in the gigantic hulk.
Jonah was discombobulated by all the jolting,
the rotten visibility, horrible stench.
He had to contort himself
to stand in the usual way,
to sit or lie down, to walk —
and the absolute din wore him out,
stopped him concentrating
on his new quarters …
Anyway, his eyes got inflamed,
his teeth chattered, his hands and feet trembled
from the need to find a point d’appui.
The whale, though, carried on as usual,
sporting in the abyss, spouting,
and snacking on plankton.
Though the new tenant seemed not to bother him
any more than all those parasites.
a time came,when Jonah was expectorated
with all his woes. Meanwhile,
millions strain to make a whale swallow them,
oblivious of the fact that
those Moby Dicks that have survived
simply cannot digest newcomers.

Fruits of education

A teacher in a Soviet school,
Kashkin, Ivan Ivanych,
considered physical culture
an important life-skill,
and made his charges march in circles,
hourly, doing the goose-step.1
He knew that this “step”
would bring some to prison,
reduce others to beggary
and god knows what else. But
he was puzzle at how
some of his students
could stand on their own feet
and move about the various
continents, where to the very end
of their days they would walk
in circles of recollection,
[“doing the goose step”].

On the nature of memory

Eugene2 is used to eating
winter’s crumbly potato off a knife.
Again, in terror and panic he races
down the street for his life.

A hand is about to descend on his puny back.
A horse has just started snorting
Even by daylight and now it is dark —
You could hardly call this living!

And shall we again, from the mundane shores,
spread out, at large?
In the darkness of the ages
Our pain has turned to starch.

For a long time we have been at the races,
Wandering like lost souls
And dust whirls in the blizzard,
water to its full height grows.

The “goose-step” was practised in physical training in Soviet schools.

The reference is to Pushkin’s long poem “The Bronze Horseman’ in which the hero, Eugene [Evgenii] is pursued by the equestrian statue of Peter the Great.