Anatoly Naiman

Along an ancient thought-tree

to Isaiah

As light stripes a tree-trunk, heat streams through the ashes, steam puffs
from lips on its trip to others, attended by phrases,
so a thought about bark, a crowd and a bonfire slips off
to serve as a prop in the Theater of Shades.

Flying to an alder, scrambling up, the thought is
about how I've balanced a load of brush
and am grasping the meaning of un-caught words:
that thought was and is a wolverine, and its form--the branch.

Sweep everything backstage, to your very last mite,
all that you had, all you found so exhausting.
I didn't hear the words but waved as I followed their flight,
and their fate was this: the Theater of Things, not of straw men.

The nervous ignition of speech, after all, is breath,
its sound can't be lessened, once in the listener's ear:
what was for us a sound will become the stage,
and what for us is memory--the overture.

tr. Margo Shohl Rosen

Crater

In December nineteen ninety-nine
we stood on the rim of a snow-white
crater. Who's the "we" in mind?
From Peter a bunch of guys
(two or three, maybe five)
surrounding a hole in the haze.

Out of the fog and greenery around us
the New Year seed harvest quivered
like air hot with a fever,
and the earth like a huge, ill pearl
all droplets of sweat, down with a cold,
muttered over and over, "I won't die."

"We won't die!" we cried out to the North
and knocked on the trunk of a tree.
We won't because we're we!
And swore it over the crater's mouth,
over the hold of an anchored ark
in the swirls of last winter's foam.

Sense and nonsense mixed, but what mattered
was the way a saintly halo laid out
a gravel path for an angel
through the monastery garden where
the gladioli in their windings twined
in our hair in nineteen ninety-nine.

The near horizon began to clear,
not wider and wider but smooth and sheer,
which made us feel sad again.
But it turned out, with a little effort,
the crater would open like a lily
and the century would never end.

tr. F. D. Reeve

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Anatoly Naiman began as a poet in the late 1950s, one of the circle now known as the "Leningrad School" and dubbed "Akhmatova's Orphans," but until the collapse of the Soviet Union, he couldn't publish. His poetry, prose, and criticism now appear regularly in Russia's leading journals. Naiman has been a fellow at Oxford and at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center. He lives in Moscow. F. D. Reeve has translated Russian poets from Pushkin to Mandelstam and contemporaries such as Voznesensky and Sosnora. His most recent book is The Return of the Blue Cat with a CD of his reading to the improv jazz of Exit 59. Margo Shohl Rosen, poet and translator, is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University's Department of Slavic Languages. Her translations have been published in the London Review of Books and the Mississippi Review. Her own poetry has appeared in Oktiabr'. contents | previous | next