(A Nivkh ritual)
Evil brought by the Sea
and by the Old Woman of the sea,
That decrepit goddess. . .
The destruction of her seals
Tortures us, the killers . . .
We will give their heads back to her,
we will give her the souls of the seals.
We will beat our tambourines
and ask forgiveness from the goddess.
The wound of the nourishing sea
pains us today, it does not spare us.
Is there another way to be healed?
The Wise Man Deliberates
for E. Pubovkina
No, I will not go on your wild goose chase.
I do not believe your fairy-story
About this child who will be born.
I am already old and weary,
Without the help of servants
it’s hard now to sit a camel
And I know too well — the inns are filthy,
roads teem with thieves, highwaymen.
No, I will not — away with you.
Oh well, where is this place?
Ah, Bethlehem. Never heard of it,
Most likely, a pestilent backwater.
I will not go.
And yet you say a new star
has suddenly appeared
And burns on the horizon . . .
Maybe it really is a sign?
Maybe the tales have something in them?
Maybe I should go?
Ho, slaves!
Where is that favorite camel of mine?
Books of the bittergrass steppes
from the book depositories of Batu
And the archives of yurts —
secretly written, marvelous luggage
All of this has rotted, perished,
on a black field, mixed with the bones
Of Russian warriors, Mordovians,
and of course Mongolians
Near the slow-moving Don
But a singing tree
grew up in the field of destruction
And triumphs over the rot
Acknowledgements
Image credits: Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923). And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive (1894). Dimensions: 151 .5× 204 cm. Materials: Oil on canvas. Source: © Museo Nacional del Prado.
Ah, Bastida’s expensive fish…. Bastida presented fisherfolk as the ones paying the price for capitalism’s manic drive towards the most of the best for the least expenditure. Stratanovsky’s first poem in the collection seems to place our collective guilt (rather unfairly) on the shoulders of seal hunters. It felt just that we nuance the latter interpretation by juxtaposing the two.
Translator | J. Kates
J. Kates, a minor poet and a literary translator, received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems and two full books, The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books) and Places of Permanent Shade (Accents). The translator of a dozen books of Russian and French poetry, he edited two anthologies of Russian translations. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association and co-diretor of Zephyr Press, he has co-translated seven books of Latin American and Spanish poetry. [Text source: J. Kates]
Author | Sergey Stratanovsky
Sergey Stratanovsky was the first Russian poet to be granted a Joseph Brodsky Fellowship. He has also been awarded the Tsarskoselsky Prize, the Pasternak Prize, and the Andrey Bely Prize. Born in 1944 and living in St. Petersburg, he is a poet, playwright, critic, and co-editor of the magazine Obvodnyi Kanal. He has been widely published, first in samizdat, in the Western magazines Ekho, Strelets, Vestnik RKhD (Le Messager), and others. He has published three books of poems. In English translation, his poems have appeared in Takahe (New Zealand), Modern Poetry in Translation (U. K. / U. S.) as well as in the anthologies In the Grip of Strange Thoughts and Crossing Centuries. Muddy River, a comprehensive English-language selection of his poems, was published by Carcanet Press in 2016. [Text source: J. Kates]
