This Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems by Russian literary critic and poet Grigori Dashevsky. In translating Dashevsky’s singular style, translator Timmy Straw writes: “Dashevsky’s poems are difficult to translate, for several reasons: their extreme compression and economy; their knotted, almost secretive syntax; their aslant musicality; the often-outright weirdness of their “aboutness”; and the span of their references, from the familiar (Homer, the Bible) to the less-so (Russian folklore, Orthodoxy, the bodily knowledge of Russian/Soviet apartment blocks). And some of the passages that land in Russian—lines that salt their revelation with sobriety, or ground it in the pleasures of sound, or both—just vibrate at too high a pitch in English.”
Not Self Nor People
Not self nor people
are here, and never are.
The commandment illuminates
thistle, burdock, mosquito.
A feeble singing whines,
a no-see-um saw:
as if some evil sawed away
and an innocent suffered,
gone paler than white.
But the law without people
in unpeopled spaces shines:
no evil, no forbearance,
no face here—only the flickering
winglet of a mosquito.
Neskuchnyi Garden (3)
1
Let’s go out for some air,
talk a little there.
Air, like another’s heart
you can’t be seen
and til the grave are true.
It pleases you, in any case,
to warm yourself
with my voice.
2
And you, in early spring,
the blank season,
are wounded like that heart
by the dawn’s needles
or naked branches
and by the shifting
of a few shadows – those
of the rare passersby
such as I.
3
Some are cruel, some rueful,
the numbering of a shadow—
one conscience, another—passion.
Want it or not,
by pang or sting
if a shadow pricks
the heart—the sense holds
that it is a mere
part, a portion of the heart itself.
4
The bedrooms are overcast,
only the kitchen windows
lit up all at once
in this place we’ve settled
this stone advertisement
for happiness or evil.
My life preserved
not in my own but in a far
heart, like a needle.
5
And of the one who cries,
who speaks so long:
intercede, I said, have mercy—
meaning:
break, or blunt at least
this needle of mine.
Not you, though, transparent,
but this neon sinew:
flash your letters in the dark.
1991, 1994
Translated from the Russian by Timmy Straw and Ainsley Morse
In addition to his highly original work as a poet, Grigori Dashevsky (1964–2013) was also a literary critic—for many years contributing a weekly column to Moscow’s Kommersant—as well as a classicist, teacher, and a gifted and ecumenical translator (of Rene Girard, Arendt, Frost, Raymond Carver, Hopkins, Catullus, Bonhoeffer, among others). His afterlife in Russian literary circles is formidable and closely felt; light; after his death, the poet and writer Maria Stepanova called him “our sun.” In 2019 a major publisher in Moscow released a collection of his poems and translations, from which the poems included here are taken.
Timmy Straw is a writer, musician, and translator. Their poems appear in the Paris Review, Yale Review, Second Factory, Volta and elsewhere, and their first book is forthcoming from Fonograf Editions.
Ainsley Morse teaches in the Russian department at Dartmouth College and is a translator of Russian, Ukrainian, and former Yugoslav literatures. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the post-war Soviet period, particularly unofficial or “underground” poetry, as well as the avant-garde and children’s literature.
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