from Предназначенье [“Predestination”], published by Советский писатель (Soviet Writer, Moscow, 1983)
Translated from the Russian by Kitty Hunter-Blair
April 1942
This winter was a vicious one,
Ferocious frosts for half a year.
Our little town was driven mad
As snowdrifts wrapped it to its chest.
It seemed it would be swept away -
Here winds blow from all four sides,
Sweep their way through town at will,
Chest smashing against chest.
Perished with cold, the town would soon
Have been blown off its feet,
Had blizzards not been smashed to bits
By heavy snows.
And now - here’s April in the calendar,
Earth is all transparent silver
That crunches at dusk and dawn.
Sunshine glows ever warmer,
Streams rush one after another.
Starlings vie to out-sing each other,
And the blue air swoons with pleasure.
And, were it not for war,
This would be spring.
1942
Only a storm lends shelter and safety,
For it rules out night and day.
My ever loved autumn gales,
You at least mustn’t desert me!
Blow dust-showers into my eyes
Until I no longer see
That streets are still the same,
Still on the same steep bank.
That the town still has the name
It had when it saw us together …
Even in sleep, still call me -
Let us meet in your heart.
1942
Spring and snow. And still unwoken
The forest lies in snowbound rest.
Winter is loathe to part from earth,
As I from you, as I from you.
In March the winter settled in.
Frosts grip fast while snowstorms rage,
With evil glee and fierce abandon
The wind attacks from north to south.
Not a sign of spring - the heart
Will reach a breaking point,
Enslaved by lethal lethargies
Of apathy and silence.
Who’ll give speech back to the deaf-mute,
Who’ll show light to the blind?
And how can a road home be found
When there’s no home in the world?
[1955]
Grasshoppers … Who are they?
Have you seen their workshops?
You must have thought them blacksmiths,
With little forges, where tiny hammers
Beat on tiny individual anvils,
And the din flies out on every side.
But that’s a misconception. You are wrong.
It’s no smithy in the grass, but - telegraph,
Where dots and dashes, dashes and dots
Follow closely along buzzing lines,
With latest news of all the doings
Done that day in fields and woods.
1957
We sit side by side.
I kiss your dear face.
I stroke your grey head.
I sense beside us the presence
of some secret menace.
But you tell me
everything happens in life by chance.
You say with a laugh:
“How else? Of course it’s chance”.
That was on Tuesday.
And here we are on Sunday.
Never will this spring chill
Depart from my heart.
You are no more,
but what of me, my dearest ...
On your fresh grave I bow low,
Stroking not your grey head
But young grass,
Kissing not your dear face,
But damp earth.
4.VIII.56
And only at rarest moments
Do we gaze into blue skies
And keep saying in amazement:
I exist, I am alive.
The touch of a pencil
On paper - and at once
Like gods or magicians
We’re in a new phase.
At once all is clear,
All at once free of menace,
Provided you do not draw back,
Don’t cut short your phrase,
Then line follows line in a stream
As if responding to orders …
Unseeing trust, you alone
Have never once let me down.
1967
Maria Petrovykh (1908-79) was born in Iaroslavl, ten years before the Bolshevik revolution, to a deeply religious family. She was a renowned translator, but life under the Soviet regime was difficult. Maria married in 1936, but within months her husband was arrested and perished in Siberia, leaving her with their infant daughter, Arina. Some years later she fell in love with Aleksandr Fadeiev, head of the Soviet Union of Writers, who shot himself a few months after Khrushchev’s 1956 speech on Stalin’s crimes. Petrovykh had a deep fear of having her own poetry published. Only one volume came out in the Soviet Union during her lifetime, despite the encouragement and support for her work of many poets and writers, including Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Arsenii Tarkovsky, who were close friends and considered her a poet of extraordinary talent. Today, Petrovykh’s poems are being published in Russia, but her work is not widely popular, and outside the country she remains virtually unknown.
Kitty Hunter-Blair (b. 1933) was educated in Scotland and read modern languages at Oxford. She taught in many capacities. In the 1970’s she translated Russian plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the BBC, by Chekhov, Gorki, Ostrovsky, Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy. She translated Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time (Bodley Head, 1987); Time within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986 (Seagull Books, 1991) and the kinoroman Andrei Rublëv (Faber & Faber, 1991). In 2014 Tate Publishing brought out Poetry and Film: Artistic Kinship between Arsenii and Andrei Tarkovsky, her selection of poems by Arsenii Tarkovsky with an introductory essay on the poetic language and imagery in the artistic relationship between father and son, with extensive notes on the poems.
World Poetry Review 