You granted me some salt for the journey, sprinkled so much white I lost my mind. Holy Kama winter, you burn like light. I live alone as wind in a winter field.
You’re stingy, Mother. Just give me a little bread. The silos are filled with snow. I’m hungry. My bag is heavy: A loaf of sorrow for a bite of catastrophe.
The frost is gnawing my feet. Who needs me? I’m a refugee. You don’t care whether or not I breathe.
What should I do among your pearls and the chill wrought silver on the black Kama, at night, without a fire?
by Арсений Александрович Тарковский (Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky) (13 November 1941) IV from Christopol Notebook from Butterfly in the Hospital Orchard 1926-1945 translated by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev
Беженец
Не пожалела на дорогу соли, Так насолила, что свела с ума. Горишь, святая камская зима, А я живу один, как ветер в поле.
Скупишься, мать, дала бы хлеба, что ли, Полны ядреным снегом закрома, Бери да ешь. Тяжка моя сума; Полпуда горя и ломоть недоли.
Я ноги отморожу на ветру, Я беженец, я никому не нужен, Тебе-то все равно, а я умру.
Что делать мне среди твоих жемчужин И кованного стужей серебра На черной Каме, ночью, без костра?
Ere I freeze, to sing bravely By Mary, is best for me; I will make a new canto To the terrible mist and snow, Steel ground, grass short and withered, The black month, the shiver-stirred. I’m not hale here, nor wisely Sing nor well, alas for me! Better the awkward Muse might Run in May or June’s sunlight, When a sweet bird in the thick Of leaves charms with its music, And under a birch like heaven A fool enjoys hugging Gwen, And his voice in a greenhall Is found, and a poem’s soul. But not like this, I dare swear, Does winter stay forever. How old it looks, white snowdrift Hiding every slope and rift, Everywhere cold, white each tree, And no stream in the valley. Water locked, no genial day, Black frost along the footway; Birds of the world, sad deadlock – God’s put their food under lock: The key let Him take home then Rightly to be kept in heaven!
by Lewis Morris (1701-1765)
Additional information: Lewis Morris (2 March 1701 – 11 April 1765) was a Welsh hydrographer, antiquary, poet and lexicographer, the eldest of the Morris brothers of Anglesey. Lewis was the eldest son of Morris ap Rhisiart Morris, a farmer, of Llanfihangel-Tre’r-Beirdd in Anglesey. His bardic name was Llewelyn Ddu o Fôn (“Black Llewelyn [Lewis] of Anglesey”). The correspondence between him and his younger brothers is a valuable historical source. In 1751, he founded the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion along with his brother Richard.
It is important not to confuse him with Sir Lewis Morris (1833 – 1907) who was a later poet of the Anglo-Welsh school as well as being an academic and politician.
That winter of our Island Fortress, the docks blacked-out and sirens wailing, the house closed its brittle silence around her. Rain drummed the windows behind her children’s dreams. Over the months she saved from her widow’s pay and the hours of cleaning at the manse seven silver coins, one from the abdication year with the head of the love-lost king.
Should the coastline be split by incoming shells, parachutes flower in the Vale and jackboots strut in King’s Square, then she would lay her six children to sleep, sealing the windows and doors with newspapers and blankets. Seven shillings’ worth of gas would deliver them out of occupation.
For months she has dreamt of his lost freighter, torpedoed six days out of New York, men overboard, gagging on salt and diesel. How the ship reared and plunged like a whale, her wash sweeping cold hands from flotsam. As he sank into the anonymous dark the final waves from her minting coins from the constant moon.
Tonight the City of London burns with St Paul’s untouched at the very centre. At the edge of night the Welsh ports sound no alarms. She opens the curtains to a moon-bright sky, counts out the coins in the tea-caddy and holds them cupped in her palms. OMN. Rex. Defender of the Faith. Emperor of India. The seven polished shillings sing in her hands.
by Tony Curtis
Additional information: Although it goes without saying Tony Curtis is a Welsh poet not to be confused with the American actor.
Winter, to me your gestures are cold and careful: yes, in winter there is something gentle as medicine,
or why else would sickness put out trusting hands into that season, from its own torture and darkness?
Weave your magic then my love, let the kiss of one curl of ice brush over my forehead.
Soon I shall trust any deception, and look without fear into the eyes of dogs, as I press close to the trees:
And forgive, playfully, with a run, turn and jump; and after a bout of forgiveness forgive again,
become like a winter’s day: empty and oval, though in comparison to such presence, always small.
I shall turn to nothing, and so call over the wall, not some shadow of myself, but light I shall not block at all.
by Бе́лла (Изабе́лла) Аха́товна Ахмаду́лина Белла Әхәт кызы Әхмәдуллина Bella Akhatovna Akhmadulina (1950) translated by Elaine Feinstein
Зима
О жест зимы ко мне, холодный и прилежный. Да, что-то есть в зиме от медицины нежной.
Иначе как же вдруг из темноты и муки доверчивый недуг к ней обращает руки?
О милая, колдуй, заденет лоб мой снова целебный поцелуй колечка ледяного.
И все сильней соблазн встречать обман доверьем, смотреть в глаза собак и приникать, к деревьям.
Прощать, как бы играть, с разбега, с поворота, и, завершив прощать, простить еще кого-то.
Сравняться с зимним днем, с его пустым овалом, и быть всегда при нем его оттенком, малым.
Свести себя на нет, чтоб вызвать за стеною не тень мою, а свет, не заслоненный мною.
A recital of the poem in Russian by Maria Selivanova.
Additional information: Bella (Izabella) Akhatovna Akhmadulina (10 April 1937 – 29 November 2010) was a Soviet and Russian poet, short story writer, and translator, known for her apolitical writing stance. She was part of the Russian New Wave literary movement. She was cited by Joseph Brodsky as the best living poet in the Russian language. She is known in Russia as “the voice of the epoch“. Despite the aforementioned apolitical stance of her writing, Akhmadulina was often critical of authorities in the Soviet Union, and spoke out in favour of others, including Nobel laureates Boris Pasternak, Andrei Sakharov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. She was known to international audiences via her travels abroad during the Khrushchev Thaw, during which she made appearances in sold-out stadiums. Upon her death in 2010 at the age of 73, President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev hailed her poetry as a “classic of Russian literature.”
The main themes of Akhmadulina‘s works are friendship, love, and relations between people. She wrote numerous essays about Russian poets and translators, some devoted to her close friend, Bulat Okudzhava. Akhmadulina avoided writing overtly political poems, but took part in political events in her youth, supporting the so-called dissident movement.
Akhmadulina wrote in an apolitical style making use of imagery and humour in her work. She used rhymed quatrains in her early works, which discussed ordinary, yet imaginative occurrences from daily life in language that was full of both archaisms and neologisms. Religion and philosophy became her themes as she aged and she wrote in longer forms.
Of mixed Tartar and Italian descent, Bella Akhmadulina was born in Moscow into a middle-class family. At the age of eighteen she married Yevtushenko, a fellow student at the Gorky Institute of Literature, from which she was expelled. Her second husband was the well-known short-story writer Yuri Nagibin, with whom she collaborated on a film scenario. Her third marriage weas to the playwright and children’s writer Gennadi Mamlin.
Akhmadulina’s first collection, String, was published in 1962 and criticized by the Party as ‘superfluous’, too intimate, etc. It was composed mainly of short lyrics, witty, whimsical, well-turned – strongly influenced by Ahmatova in their sobriety of form and preoccupation with individual emotions. Though Akhmadulina’s work appeared thereafter in magazines and almanacs from time to time, it was not until 1969 that her second collection, Music Lessons, was published. In 1963 a fragment of her long poem ‘A Fairy Tale about the Rain’ was published in Literary Georgia. ‘Rain’ marked a high point and and is still her most ambitious work to date. Since then she appears to have done more translating, especially from Georgian, than original writing, though the indications are that she has again entered a more creative period. Akhmadulina has perhaps major potentialities (Yevtushenko regards her as the foremost woman poet in Russian since the death of Akhmatova). Her work became rapidly more complex after the early short lyrics, and in ‘Rain’ it gained a weight of symbolic meaning that indicates considerable poetic endurance and power. Her subject in this poem, and in many others leading up to it, is nothing less than her relationship to her own poetic inspiration, symbolized by the Rain.
As Christine Rydel says in her illuminating analysis of Akhmadulina’s symbolic system, ‘The Metapoetical World of Bella Akhmadulina’ (Russian Literature Triquarterly, No.1): ‘Where most poets look to love for inspiration, Akhmudalina looks to inspiration for love.’ Like Tsvetayeva, with whom, as in ‘Music Lessons’ and ‘I Swear’, she identifies explicitly, Akhmadulina is uncomfortable, uneasy in the world. There is a plaintive, complaining tone to all this that can be irritating, but her verbal power, her technical accomplishment, allied to her capacity, by remote control as it were, to enter into and share in the destiny of her distinguished women predecessors, accurately and agonizingly conveys the struggle of creativity in an alienating environment.
Biographical information about Akhmadulina, p.227- 228, Post-War Russian Poetry (1974), ed. Daniel Weissbort , published by Penguin Books Ltd.
‘Bella Akhmadulina: Meeting in the Ostankino Concert Studio’ (1976). It’s about an hour and a half long featuring her doing recitals of her poetry and talking about various subjects. If you have time it’s worth watching (It’s in Russian obviously but the auto-translated subtitles will let you get the gist of many parts).
Among Akhmadulina’s ancestors on her mother’s side were Italians who settled in Russia, including the professional revolutionary Aleksandr Stopani, after whom a street in Moscow was named. On her father’s side were Tatars. In 1955, when her first verses were published in the journal Oktiabr’, it was immediately obvious that a real poet had come on the scene. She entered the Gorky Literary Institute the same year and became its queen. All of the young poets there were in love with her, including the compiler of this anthology who became her first husband. Her talent was also admired by poets of the older generation – Pavel Antokolsky, Mikhail Svetlov and Vladimir Lugovskoi. She encountered Boris Pasternak once while walking down a country path; he recognized her and invited her to visit him the next day when guests were coming, but she was too shy and respectful to come.
After mastering the assonant “Yevtushenko” rhyme, she took a sharp turn in the opposite direction, into whispers, rustling indeterminacy, and, at times, such intimacy as to be incomprehensible. Many of her major poems establish links to the memory on the great Russian poets on the past, especially Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam and Aleksandr Pushkin.
With Anna Akhmatova’s death, Akhmadulina became known as the most brilliant woman poet writing in Russian. She is an absolute sorceress with poetic form, though she has a tendency to spin intricate verbal webs. Probably no one in Russian poetry at the present has such an innate feeling for words. Akhmadulina’s poetry is somewhat private and she has a reputation of being apolitical, as assessment that misses the point. One can discern in such poems as “I Swear”, “St. Bartholomew’s Night,” and “A Fairy Tale About Rain” a social conscience permeated with a hatred for the vile politics that degrades people. Her fragile, gentle hand has signed any and all letters in defense of dissidents or anyone in trouble in the Soviet system. She was unafraid to cross police lines to visit Sakharov while he was in exile.
Akhmadulina writes elegant prose, placing refinement of language above all else, as she does with her poetry. She was awarded the State Prize for literature in 1989 and was the first of her generation to be elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Biographical information about Akhmadulina, p.873 – 874, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc.
Rambling At The Bridge Head 
You must be logged in to post a comment.