In diligent apprenticeship (Forever?),
To multiply all that which grows,
And, bridling the half-wild thorns,
To weed the fenced out thistles and, fertilizing,
Naturalize the endemics of unknown lands, watching over,
That the carnations not wither under the ashes of fading
And the lilies, with their irrepressible milky lime,
Not flood their curb of modest earth.
2010
Trees, fallen under the axe, or oppressed
By cytosporosis, necroses, and rots, or dead of old age,
Will they resurrect in the fields above asphodels or
Be condemned to be floating riptide timber
In the flood (Where is its source? Where the mouth?) of Styx,
Either huddled in the apron bends of Acheron or
Become drowned in the backwaters of Cocytus,
Or bobble in the anaerobic ooze of Phlegethon?
2010
Is not the reason the moment is uninterruptible,
No matter how wonderful it be,
That time, like a fermentation
Byproduct at the world’s creation,
Accompanies the sun and moon—a day, a month, the year.
Why bend the truth, when it is far more seductive
To offer hypotheses and conjectures, and fantasies
Of time’s reversibility?
2012
Faust (Act 1, Scene 4)
The fox extrapolates where she shall intercept the hare.
Her hungry kits savor expectantly her hunting glory. The rats
Escape, anticipating trouble. Castles and locks
Owe their existence to alertness and alarm. Forefathers
Foreshadow the ruination of their artefacts.
What is clairvoyance?
Is it not an expression of living prescience?
The partial knowledge of Providence permitted to man?
2012
The variegated foliage shall be shed upon the earth,
And with the larch the ochre of pine needles shower,
Charging the mist (From among rains, is it not the most tedious?
Only the drizzle more insufferable). It is well, that in due season,
The first frost smudges the earth with a Hyperborean monochrome,
For which it is predestined in due time to fragment
Into primroses, veronicas, carnations, asters,
And all those post-summer hues.
2013
from Poems: Book 5
Mikhail Eremin
translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale
Listen to the poems read in the original Russian by Alex Cigale:
Mikhail Eremin has lived in St. Petersburg since before WWII, writing and publishing very sparsely for over a half-century in a peculiar kind of highly respected anonymity, his work having the reputation of being the most hermetically “difficult” in all of Russian poetry. His response: “But poets are meaning-makers.” He was awarded the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize in 1998 and, in the fall of 2014, the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship residency at the American Academy in Rome. His oeuvre, consisting entirely of eight-line “free verse,” has been issued by Pushkinskii Fond in five volumes (so far), each one modestly titled Poems. When asked why octaves, he responded: “They structure themselves precisely so.” Regarding the free verse label: “In fact, these are absolutely iambs, [the stress] shifting between the second and fourth paeon.” That is, there is a strong patterning of duration and sound, as for each poem as a whole so for each line (there is even rhyme). Regarding his early influences: “Pasternak and the Oberiu [Russian Absurdists].”
Primary among Eremin’s recurrent thematic touchstones—the Bible, classical mythology, art, architecture, Russian folklore—is the natural world. It is where the spirit inheres; he is a metaphysical poet. It seems to me that the crux of Eremin’s ongoing conversation with the world offers us a panentheistic conception of nature as the locus of divine immanence in creation. The critic Ilya Kukulin has written that Eremin’s poems give “metaphorical expression to the transformation of the soul.” In this respect, he connects Eremin to Osip Mandelstam, another practitioner of the eight-line verse, finding a common source in Mandelstam’s writings on Dante’s “search for the spiritual foundations of the world.” Kukulin concludes that these external transformations have an invisible counterpart in the internal “soul work, the discovery of one’s own ‘I’—for the apprehension of all these treasures. Each time, this apprehension may only be provisional and so it requires a choice . . . Eremin’s art offers one possibility for how such poetry may endure in the post-modern era . . . Even with all its philosophic qualities, it remains a private and faith-filled lyric.”
Primary among Eremin’s recurrent thematic touchstones—the Bible, classical mythology, art, architecture, Russian folklore—is the natural world. It is where the spirit inheres; he is a metaphysical poet. It seems to me that the crux of Eremin’s ongoing conversation with the world offers us a panentheistic conception of nature as the locus of divine immanence in creation. The critic Ilya Kukulin has written that Eremin’s poems give “metaphorical expression to the transformation of the soul.” In this respect, he connects Eremin to Osip Mandelstam, another practitioner of the eight-line verse, finding a common source in Mandelstam’s writings on Dante’s “search for the spiritual foundations of the world.” Kukulin concludes that these external transformations have an invisible counterpart in the internal “soul work, the discovery of one’s own ‘I’—for the apprehension of all these treasures. Each time, this apprehension may only be provisional and so it requires a choice . . . Eremin’s art offers one possibility for how such poetry may endure in the post-modern era . . . Even with all its philosophic qualities, it remains a private and faith-filled lyric.”
Mikhail Eremin (b. 1936, in the Caucusus) participated in one of the first unofficial post-war poetry groups, the so-called “philological school” of the late 1950s. His books, Poems (1–5), were published by Pushkinskii Fond. Joseph Brodsky wrote this of him: “Eremin is an unreconstructed minimalist. Poetry in essence consists precisely in the concentration of language: a small quantity of lines surrounded by a mass of empty space. Eremin elevates this concentration to a principle: as though it is not simply language but poetry itself that crystallizes into verse . . . Most remarkable is that all of it has been written for oneself, out of one’s own conception of the mother tongue. Eremin’s poetry may rightfully be called Futurist in the sense that, to this type of poetry, the future belongs.”
Alex Cigale is a poet and translator. His first full book, Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings, came out in the Northwestern University Press World Classics series in 2017. He is a 2015 NEA Translation Fellow for his work on the poet Mikhail Eremin of the St. Petersburg “philological school.” His own poems in English have appeared in Asymptote, Colorado Review, and The Literary Review, and translations of classic and contemporary Russian poetry in Harvard Review Online, The Hopkins Review, Kenyon Review Online, Modern Poetry in Translation, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Two Lines, Words Without Borders, and World Literature in Translation. He recently edited the Russian issues of the Atlanta Review and Trafika Europe and is currently a lecturer in Russian literature and language at CUNY-Queens College.
