5 poems by Tatiana Voltskaya translated by Richard Coombes
1.
Россию отменят. Вместе с Пушкиным и Толстым.
Когда рассеется дым
Над Украиной,
Мы окажемся на руинах
Царства. Будем дышать с трудом,
И разбитый роддом
В Мариуполе – будут платочком Фриды
Подносить нам каждое утро в бравурном ритме –
Под наше мычание или стон.
А Россию отменят. С Пастернаком и Чеховым,
С Мойдодыром, Щелкунчиком – в самом деле, зачем о них
Вспоминать на обломках больниц и школ.
На границе вырастет частокол
С черепами горящими,
А железные ящеры,
Поурчав напоследок, сгниют
У нас в изголовьи.
Мы же будем тут
Толковать привычно про мир и труд
И писать вам письма – из ада с любовью.
Но они не дойдут.
Russia will be cancelled. Including Pushkin and Tolstoy.
When all the smoke has cleared away
Above Ukraine,
We’ll discover ourselves among the ruins
Of Empire. We’ll find it hard to breathe,
And the rubble of Mariupol’s maternity wards
Will be our Frieda’s handkerchief,
Brought to us with stirring chords each morning
To the backdrop of our mooing or our moaning.
Oh yes; Russia will be cancelled. Including Pasternak and Chekhov,
Wash ‘Em Clean, The Nutcracker―really, why give them room
In the wreck of hospitals and schools.
A palisade with burning skulls
Will bloom along the borderline
And the Irondrakes will growl
One final time, and rot and rust
Atop the headboards of our beds.
We’ll still be here, though; on we’ll roll,
Elaborating, as we do,
On peace and honest work,
And writing letters: from Hell with love.
But they will not get through.
2.
В ресторане музыка играет,
Женщина, свеча, бокал вина.
Украина – это где-то с краю,
Никому отсюда не видна.
Рвётся пламя, рушатся кварталы,
С площади доносится: ‘Ганьба!’
Женщина движением усталым
Поправляет волосы у лба.
Матовая белая посуда,
Капучино с пенкой и десерт.
Проплывает далеко отсюда
В дымке – чья-то маленькая смерть,
Точкою, горошиною, только
Никому пока что невдомёк –
Рухнет и сюда, за этот столик
Весь в крови, бесформенный комок.
There is music playing in the restaurant,
A woman, a candle, a glass of wine, good cheer.
Ukraine―the very name means ‘at the margins’,
Invisible to anyone in here.
Flames erupting, whole quarters tumbling,
A voice―Ukrainian―from the square: ‘Disgrace!’
The woman sighs, and with a weary movement
Pats a curl too bold to stay in place.
Saucers, cups and plates of frosted white;
Cappuccino; something to sweeten the breath.
And far away from here, passing by
In a haze of smoke―somebody’s little death,
A tiny dot, a pea, except … except
―Something no one has yet understood―
It will come here too, and crumple at this table,
A formless, shapeless lump, drenched in blood.
3.
Огребём по полной. Неправедная война
Обесценила дедовы ордена.
Я держу их в горсти
И говорю – прости
Деду Ивану, врачу
В блокадном военном госпитале. Хочу
Услышать – что он сказал бы
На ракетные залпы
Наши – по Киеву. Опускаю голову и молчу.
Слышу, дедушка, голос твой –
Мы зачем умирали-то под Москвой –
Чтобы русский потом – вдовой
Украинку оставил?
Каин, Каин, где брат твой Авель?
We’ll get what we deserve, and more. Unholy war
Has tarnished grandad’s medals.
I hold them in my hand
And say, I’m sorry.
Grandad Ivan was a doctor
In blockaded Leningrad,
At a military hospital. I wonder
What he would say to our rocket thunder
On Kyiv. I lower my head, stay
Mute. I hear your voice, Grandad. You say:
We died around Moscow—why?
For a Russian man to come, by and by,
And widow a Ukrainian mother?
Cain, Cain, where is Abel your brother?
4.
Лампа, стол, кусок стены,
Чашка с недопитым чаем.
Вот и наше ‘до войны’
Тихо встало за плечами.
То же от плиты тепло,
То же розовое мыло –
Только тонкое стекло
‘До’ и ‘после’ разделило.
Та же улица в окне,
Снега тающие горы,
Но при мысли о весне
Ком подкатывает к горлу.
Никому мы не нужны.
Скоро масленица ми́нет –
По убитым в Украине
Поминальные блины.
A lamp, a table, a stretch of wall,
A cup of still unfinished tea.
And look, our own ‘before the war’
Has stolen up on you and me.
The same warmth beating from the oven,
The same pink soap, same sink of water―
But delicate glass all of a sudden
Separates ‘before’ from ‘after’.
The same street view as yesterday,
Piles of snow starting to melt,
But thinking spring is on the way
Brings a lump into my throat.
No one needs us, you and me.
Maslenitsa will soon be gone―
Pancakes made in memory
Of everyone killed in Ukraine.
5.
Ночь. Березы висят, как дымы
В твердом воздухе, срубленном крепко
Средь наждачной мерцающей тьмы
И в грудной настороженной клетке.
Тучи, поднятые, как мосты,
Сосны, вбитые в землю, как сваи.
В доме духи огня и воды,
Словно сердце и мозг, оживают.
Стены дышат, стреляют не в такт,
Появляются белые знаки
На окне. Я прижмусь к тебе так,
Как замерзшая буква к бумаге.
Night. The birches hang like smoke trails
In stiffened air chopped down and laid out
End to end within the shimmering, roughened
Gloom, and in the fluttering, watchful heart.
Storm clouds, raised aloft like bridges,
Pines driven into the ground like piles.
Inside the house, the spirits of fire and water
Awaken, for all the world like heart and brain.
The walls breathe, discharging cracks
To no strict beat. White marks appear
On the window. I’ll snuggle up to you the way
A stilled letter snuggles to the paper.
Translator’s Note
Of these five poems, four were written after 24 February 2022, and the fifth (‘Night’) before. As for the post-war pieces, Tatiana clearly understood right from the first moment that the war would not only wreak misery and distress on Ukraine, but would also bring down on Russia her own kind of ruin. There is no self-pity or special pleading here. Just the deep sorrow of one recording herself seeing the truth all too clearly.
I want to feel so close to any poem I translate that I fancy myself inside the poet. The process I then follow is much the same each time. Poring over the words and word combinations, searching out meanings and layers, checking linguistic and cultural doubts and difficulties with native Russian speakers. Much re-reading of the original, identifying rhymes and other sound references, feeling beats. Changing my location. Juggling with synonyms. Finalising decisions such as choice of metre(s), what to do with rhymes, near-rhymes, assonances, sounds generally. These decisions can vary from poem to poem, and can be instinctive. Rhyme, for example. Here, I wanted plenty of end rhyme and near-rhyme in ‘A lamp, a table’, but for ‘There is music’, rhyming 2 and 4 was enough. In both ‘Russia will be cancelled’ and ‘We’ll get what we deserve’ I was happy to sprinkle rhymes and sound similarities around a bit to begin with, and then allow the emergence of some end rhymes to bring the pieces to their conclusions. In ‘Night’, unusually for me, I simply didn’t want rhyme. The question with any translation, I think, is when you’ve been into that other world and looked around it and examined its textures and colours and sniffed the air, what are you going to bring back for your readers? Because all the choices I’ve mentioned―of rhythm, sound, word/word combination―have to come together to convey the essence of the piece, to let you inside the poet’s head and heart. With ‘Night’, my decision was not to bring back a bunch of end rhymes. Achieving them would have risked prejudicing what I most wanted you to find in this poem.
None of this is a prescription; this is just me talking. Other translators would do something quite different, and be wildly successful.
Tatiana Voltskaya is a Russian poet and a freelance correspondent for Radio Liberty in St. Petersburg. She has been published regularly since the 1990s; her work has appeared in numerous Russian literary magazines, and she has authored eleven collections of poetry. Her work has been translated into Swedish, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, English, and Lithuanian. Tatiana was a laureate of the Pushkin scholarship (Germany, 1999). She has also won the Zvezda magazine award (2003), the Interpoetry magazine award (2016), the Voloshin competition (2018), and the All-Russian poetry competition ‘The Lost Tram’ (2019). In 2020, she was one of the winners of a competition announced by the composer Ilya Demutsky. Tatiana has been awarded the Pyotr Weil Free Russian Journalism Scholarship for 2022.
Richard Coombes is a former international tax specialist who took early retirement from tax in order to pursue his passion for Russian. He has written music, songs and stories of his own, and translates Russian literature into English. Richard’s recently published translations include several short stories by Elena Dolgopyat and poetry by Lyudmila Knyazeva and Dmitry Vodennikov. Richard contributed 12 translations to the WWII poetry collection ‘Frontovaya Lira’ (‘Poems from the Front’), published in Russia in hardback in late 2021 and nominated for ‘Book of the Year 2021’ in a category specifically relating to the war. Forthcoming publications include ‘Liza’s Waterfall’, a documentary-thriller-biography by Pavel Basinsky. Richard has also agreed terms with a publisher to translate Elena Dolgopyat’s short story collection ‘Someone Else’s Life’, and also signed a contract (subject to funding) to translate a recent winner of Russia’s National Bestseller book award.
3 May 2022
Leave a Reply