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. READ MORE…