This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you two energetic poems from the Russian by Irina Mashinski, author of The Naked World and a prolific writer herself in both English and her native Russian. Harnessing the potential of Irina’s bilingualism and exophony, translator Maria Bloshteyn speaks of her dialogic translation process: “The process of translation with a bilingual poet becomes much less about the translator finding the perfect phrase or equivalent rhythm in the target language, and much more about assisting the poet by providing variations of translations of a single line or stanza for her to choose.” Dive right into this strange, mesmerising wasteland of this poetic collaboration.
In Absentia
1. Twilight
The tree is dead,
I drag it down the slope,
half-sinking in the snowbanks.
So will my Faustian questers
someday
haul me through the snow,
in just such tin-stiff mittens,
all my odd loops and whorls,
this tangle, knots upon the bark—
a pattern seen but once.
And just as quiet and pale
as these stunned trees,
my brother-poets will
escort me:
the icy beech, the hemlock, the black walnut,
the birch, the hornbeam, the bird cherry,
the sugar maple, the plantain, the other maple—
that for a long time will burn
scarlet.
When I’ll be dragged
blinded over the stumps—
through the gully,
over remnants of fencing,
the forked road, the post,
the plaster fountain—
the birdbath overturned,
the empty birdhouse, rot and moss,
the gulley, and the rot and moss,
when I’ll be dragged
down for the extraction
of the golden root—
a ragged trench will stretch across the deep snow,
stippled like a greyhound,
as if the angels wrestled on it,
they’ll stand there scattered in farewell,
the slope as deep as a fresh rough-draft,
not noticing how their legs are whipped
awkwardly by my dead branches,
by the trailing
still unyielding roots.
2. Staying Put
Glancing through the small streaked window
at the gleaming Dalmatian slope,
I wash a dish or two
in the sink with its chipped corner—
the only source of light in March
inside the house
with a shaky winding staircase,
a house that never scaled that slope
and has gone cold without him,
a plywood house
cobbled together
back in the seventies
by an artless settler,
avid collector
of The Geographic
3. The First Spring
First thing, I open all the windows.
Then it’s off to get the mail. Down by the hill’s foot
I turn onto a crooked road—it opens
up into a familiar light.
Out there an apple tree still darkens where the road parts
—last month, an ice rink lay below.
Two local ducks,
and one child
would take up an entire leafless limb.
A mere stump, and not an apple tree.
Then suddenly, I once again remember
the death of our small family.
Away from everyone I gather
my fallen apples scattered by the tree.
Poetry fills up drums canisters garbage cans…
Poetry fills up drums canisters garbage cans
lakes bogs artificial reservoirs
ponds up ponds
landslides down slopes
dragging hamlets behind it
from the russet loins
of a volcano
splashes out onto a plateau
or else
a cart with its belly pressed into the ground
its wheels square
rolls
down
a damp forest’s edge
gaining speed
here we go,
here we go,
it’ll be a doozie
the tracks thaw in the sun, walls
shimmer with a tarnished silver la poesie
the word wants to fill itself
and yet it cannot
like a trick glass double-walled
all the way up its throat
Translated from the Russian by Maria Bloshteyn
Irina Mashinski was born and raised in Moscow. She graduated from Moscow University, where she studied the theory of landscape and completed her PhD in paleoclimatology. In 1991, she emigrated to the United States, where she taught high school mathematics as well as literature, history, and meteorology at several universities. Mashinski is the author of The Naked World (MadHat Press, 2022) and of eleven books of poetry and essays in Russian. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015) and of Cardinal Points, the journal of Brown University’s Slavic Studies Department. Her work has been translated into several languages and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies both in the US and internationally. Her second English book, Giornata (Červená Barva Press), is forthcoming in the fall of 2022. Website: www.irinamashinski.com
Maria Bloshteyn was born in Leningrad and raised in Toronto, where she now lives. Her main scholarly interests lie in the field of literary and cultural exchange between Russia and the United States. She is the author of The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (University of Toronto Press, 2007), the translator of Alexander Galich’s Dress Rehearsal: A Story in Four Acts and Five Chapters (Slavica, 2009) and Anton Chekhov’s The Prank (NYRB Classics, 2015), and the editor of Russia is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic War (Smokestack Books, 2020). Her translations have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015).
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