Air Raid by Polina Barskova

Translated by Valzhyna Mort

Review by Marina Kraiskaya

ISBN: 978-1-946433-70-1

Trade Paperback

Smyth-sewn. 160 pp, 5.25 x 8.25 in

Publication Date: October 01 2021

Eastern European Poets Series #47

After a period of prolonged pain – after disaster or mass casualty, what language emerges? What art comes in the wake of tragedy? Some disasters are so far-reaching that they beget no new language at all. “There is no public verbal memory,” as translator Valzhyna Mort says in the afterword of Air Raid, for something of which everyone in earshot is aware. Yet the trauma of witness is leapt over, crawled under, taken in, hauled wordlessly from place to place like a heavy family heirloom. 

In Air Raid, Polina Barskova’s poetic voice travels. Her speakers peer from different angles at the untraceable losses of the Siege of Leningrad, a genocide perpetuated from 1941 to 1943 by Nazi Germany and its allies. During the 872 days of the siege, over a million civilians died; most from starvation or hypothermia as the Stalinist government continued to persecute, banish, and vanish would-be dissenters. Today, St. Petersburg residents pass over the ashes of civilian victims and soldiers alike – an image which Barskova raises:

……………………………………“Piles of corpses by the railroad looked like snowed-over jills and only the bodies

……………………………………on top were distinguishable. In spring, once the snow melted, the lower bodies

……………………………………emerged, dressed in summer uniforms, soldier’s shirts and boots. On top of them

……………………………………lay marines in heavy leather jackets and black flared trousers. On top of the

……………………………………marines, in short fur jackets and wool boots, lay the Siberians…” (39)

This scene is contrasted with the beauty and youth of the speaking daughter who searches for remnants of her lost father. Like many of these voices, these crushed private lives, she asks questions that are met with silence or observation. In Air Raid, there is a great power behind the unaddressed – sometimes god, sometimes government, sometimes time – discerning, anguishing, moving the speaker. Though brimming with stills of emptiness, the images of this book are not limited to such stark depictions as that above. They are varied and rich even when intentionally clipped, pulling the lines taut with tension. Barskova is interested in the iridescence of unknown history, and the world of objects is not left unexamined in this collection. Bites of food, clothes and accessories, leaves, ashes, teeth, works of art flash throughout. The book’s cover art depicts blue shells to the tune of this poem (excerpt):

……………………………………Kitagawa Utamaro. The very end of the 18th century.

……………………………………Preferred depicting seashells to human figures. 

……………………………………When he had to include the depictions 

……………………………………Of children-fishermen-courtesans in his works,

……………………………………He made them gather shells. 

……………………………………Stirred, chilled by the wind, flushed.                       (73)

In Barskova and Mort’s thoughtful “Conversation in Lieu of an Afterword,” Mort reveals that

……………………………………“In Russian, a siren is a mythological bird-fish-woman who lures sailors with her

……………………………………unfathomable singing, but a siren is also a word for an air raid warning, an alarm. Here

……………………………………we are in your city of sailors and sirens.” 

The collection includes ironic references to and personifications as feminine figures like Shaharazad, Baba Yaga, and Snegurochka. Fairytales have always been culturally relevant in Russia as a medium for subverting the state, addressing symbology, and hinting at collective trauma. Spanning a breadth of age and culture, Barskova’s allusions to literary figures like Flaubert, Zola, and many Soviet/Leningrad poets serve a similar purpose. They appear ghostlike as the theme of death raises questions of legacy and nomenclature. Haunting a cemetery and Emily Dickinson’s grounds, the speaker of “A Friendly Divorce” says, “dead poets love me back.”

As Air Raid poems move into America (Brooklyn, New Orleans, Connecticut) and other countries, the book reveals a global awareness of remembrance, mourning, and moving on. These poems are linked by cemeteries, upheaval, and the processing of grief. “Talking about death in polite society is awkward,” says Barskova, “but if you do it in the form of a poem, chances are people will accept your awkward and embarrassing utterance” (143). 

Language is the legacy of the Siege. Many of Barskova’s poems reference or become letters. In a letter inside a milk tin, a father in a labor camp describes his 20-month-old daughter’s striving toward speech, the lines alive with alliteration and exclamation. Meanwhile, deceased Dame Zinaida Bykova’s belongings and bad French translations are discovered and “a team of librarians” break into her rooms for the “Scraps of an Archive.” The titular section, “Air Raid,” begins with the epigraph, “these poems describe the trace left in me by the reading of letters.” They are heartbreaking letters to and from the condemned, and they examine the strained, evolving life of speech.

……………………………………People phoned each other: “How’s your health?”

……………………………………One was “unwell,” the other “hospitalized.” 

……………………………………Everyone knew what that meant. 

A censor crosses out seven lines of one letter. “I won’t turn down dog fat,” pleads a voice in “Request for a Care Package.” Elsewhere, a poet trades rare red pearls for precious temporary sugar crystals. In the final poem, “Pottery/Poetry,” links and breakages between mediums are explored:

……………………………………The clay grows like a tumor on innocent flesh. 

……………………………………With a rusty spoon, poetry takes the foam /  cream / fat, and 

………………………………=……………………..fertile topsoil

……………………………………Off the brew of bewilderment amassed over a day       (127)

But is English really equipped to carry the weight of Russian horror, history, wordplay, and cadence? Fortunately, Valzhyna Mort is not in the business of transcription. She recognizes that “both English and Russian are imperial languages systematically used to justify violence” (139). At a poetry reading, Mort shared that it is “easy to get carried away with repeating language,” that having a sense of humor is important, and that recording something true is like peeling an onion: getting past layers of what is easy and going toward the inner musical eye. Her goal is not to create an illustration, but a world in itself, in order to perceive the sacred. These philosophies are evident in her translations. Her multilingual background allows her the freedom to play, to repeat, and to access new tonal analogues. “I do not look for words I can attach on top of other words,” she says. Thus, Mort often puts forward sonic qualities of alliteration, rhyme, and music. Though not always exact mirrors of the Russian word choice, the poems in English never lose their soul, conceit, or control. For example, in the book’s first poem, Mort made a major yet organic and clever addition, rewriting the final line, adding an onomatopoeia which conveys “the howling of greyhounds, the noise of guns, the screams of people in the square” (138). 

Poet Ilya Kaminsky, who translated Barskova’s first book, writes of Air Raid: 

………………………….“This book casts a spell; it leaves me with an ornament of silences that emote—for, as Dickinson

……………………………told us: after great pain, a formal feeling comes.”

And yet, through the generations, genocide rings as so much more than formal feeling. After the lessening of the terror and dismay of what is (the reality of living in unabating trauma), there is no room left for what could have been. Familial love, observation, perseverance, and wit is never, in these poems, to be misunderstood as wishmaking or deflection. As in so much Soviet and post-Soviet art, nothing is sacred. If we are lucky, the poetry seems to say, we might just sift through dust and rubble to collect some lost piece, though everything that returns to us must return changed – “scratched in the transit of time” like the earring that “returns, from under the cupboard” in Barskova’s poem “Joy.” 

Air Raid is a study of human response to history; a light-catching collection that casts the minute and individual alongside the collective experience of survival and loss. It is a gift to have this polyphonic work of cultural legacy presented to English-speakers in such excellent translation.

Bios from UDP: https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/air-raid

Polina Barskova is a poet and a scholar, author of twelve collections of poems and two books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, “Living Pictures,” received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and is forthcoming in German with Suhrkamp Verlag and in English with NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (UDP) and has three collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House) and Relocations (Zephyr Press). She has taught at Hampshire College, Amherst College, and Smith College. In 2021, she will be teaching Russian Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of Factory of Tears, Collected Body (both from Copper Canyon Press), and Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG). She is the recipient of an NEA translation grant, fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Amy Clampitt Fund from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, the 2010 Bess Hokin Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the 2018 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation. She is the translator of Air Raid by Polina Barskova (UDP). She teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian.

Marina Kraiskaya is a poet, editor and translator. Born in Ukraine and raised in Northern California, she studied International Relations and Russian at UC Davis and Creative Writing at San Diego State University. She is an Editorial Assistant for Poetry International and a recipient of the Graduate Equity Fellowship, the Marsh-Rebelo Scholarship, and the Savvas Endowed Fellowship.

15 March 2022