I'm Thirty But Feel Three Hundred
I'm thirty but feel three hundred,
and this rough poetry can't express,
either ably or artfully, the ten men
who could equal my worldliness.
Lead-tongued and heavy-laden—
roots rutting darkness, its branches
raking light—my song
lacks a ballad's punch and polish.
I'm cleaved into two hostile halves,
I'm faced with two good options:
the soul's reason-killing blaze
or the soul-killing cold of reason?
I find I'm unified—half-snake, half-bird—
first I plunge from above, then soar
up from below. I traverse both earth
and sky unsurely, stuck here in midair.
My stepmother, the capital,
sheltered me, but it's Kursk where I know
faces I can no longer place, souls
like those in Dante's Paradiso.
Nobody knows me either. My sight's slipped
from years rendering the unworldly earth.
How often now have I tripped
on that rake I left out in a past life?
Long Now You've Lounged in Earth
Long now you've lounged in earth—futile,
useless—but at last your hour's struck:
you stirred from sleep, roused
your head's dead yoke, and aligned a crooked
spine, its vertebrae cracking like lightning—
a vast array of thunder's fearsome
peals, which lead now to the hail stones
these high heavens shed and shudder,
each transforms and tapers on the fly
into droplets thirsting to germinate, akin
to seeds, heedless of how
they'll sprout, whether as emerald herb,
hazel woods, or some other verdant
shoot . . . You've lounged in earth so long now—
futile, useless—but here it is, the moment
you faithfully tarried till:
for it is better to oversleep
your own short age, disdaining all
earthly vanity, than to grope dimly down
its crenellated top, stumbling across
with hesitant steps and carefree
laughter, preaching "All's well! Superb!"
That's why those who don't know
your true name call you a river of words.
Rising at Morning from My Graveside
Rising at morning from my graveside,
I rub these eyelids till they're lucid,
and then, squinting windward,
I set off—unsure where I'm directed—
only to stumble through my thought's thicket.
Daily I strive to divide my half-dreams
from this half-light, but the cupped scales
dip—first to waking, then to fictions—
and won't hold still a whole second.
But through dream's doughy incubation
a trumpet, also baked in pastry, cries—
I clearly hear it, calling me to awaken.
I imagine it's the call to Judgment,
leaving me to choose between one of two
options: go numb or exclaim "My God!
I rouse my spirit to greet You."
from The Horse of the Gorgon
Maxim Amelin
translated from the Russian by Derek Mong and Anne O. Fisher
Listen to the poems read in the original Russian by the author:
Maxim Amelin is a poet, critic, editor, and translator. He is among the last generation of Russian poets to grow up in the Soviet Union. The recipient of numerous national awards, including the Moscow Reckoning Award, the Anti-Booker, the Novyi Mir Prize, and the Bunin Prize, his work has been translated into over a dozen languages. In 2013 Amelin won the prestigious Solzhenitsyn Prize for his contributions to Russian poetry. The author of three books of poetry, including Холодные оды (Cold Odes, 1996), Dubia (1999), and Конь Горгоны (The Horse of the Gorgon, 2003), as well as a collection of prose and poems, Гнутая речь (Bent Speech, 2011), he is also an accomplished translator of Pindar, Catullus, Homer, and other ancient and contemporary poets. He currently lives in Moscow. He is a member of the Russian PEN-Club and editor-in-chief at OGI, a leading publisher of contemporary literature.
Derek Mong is the author of Other Romes (Saturnalia Books, 2011) and the poetry editor at Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, & Translation. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the University of Louisville, The Missouri Review, and the Hopwood Program, he lives in Portland, OR with his wife and son. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and is currently finishing a Ph.D. in English Literature at Stanford. His poems, translations, and prose have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Pleiades, Court Green, and on the website "99 Poems for the 99 Percent." Find more at his website.
Anne O. Fisher is the translator of Ilf and Petrov's novels The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf, as well as their 1936 travelogue Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip. She has also translated the prose of Margarita Meklina and Leonid Tishkov, and—with husband and co-translator Derek Mong—the poetry of Maxim Amelin. Their Amelin translations, supported by an NEA translation grant, have appeared or are forthcoming in The Dallas Review, Cerise Press, Big Bridge Magazine: An Anthology of Twenty-First Century Russian Poetry, and Chtenia/Readings. Fisher's translations have also appeared, or will appear, in Cabinet Magazine, Squaring the Circle: Winners of the Debut Prize for Fiction, and Flash Fiction International. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and son. Her current favorite Russian children's book is Vitaliy Bianki's Сказки о животных (Fairy Tales about Animals).
