from “Spheres”
Head little head bloodshed
Klavka grasska Kafka
in the spring comes the swallow
bashful edible travel
viscous pearly with a pin
with a mitten with a mousie without trousers
in Lyubertsa in the hearts in a dump truck
in the field of birch in the Columned Hall
in the orchard everyone is wonderstruck
Are your nerves on fire?
The head has the form of a cube
of a loghouse of sugar of an unscrewed moon
of a fork of a ham of a stool
and of the doorman of an English club
/ the half-arsed kind /
***
The guys are under the lean-to discussing God
confusing some sort of nonsense with orthodoxy
I am sitting in the toilet insides straining
insides shuddering
as if bitten by the watchman’s dog
The guys are under the lean-to under the rain under the influence
attempting to express transcendentalism in the terms of fish out of water
occasionally interrupting the talk with the cries of a Siberian stag
and snatches of Soviet folk song
The guys
one of whom is for some reason American
and three others just drowsy from shashlik and gushing patriotism
are unable to stop
not having developed the topic completely
But in such heavy rain a good host won’t even put out a finger
I am sitting in the toilet
dumbfounded by the assertions which
occasionally break through their drunken blather
/ If he says you struggle all the time
then that’s already not Orthodoxy /
You just don’t see it pardon me in your Zurichs
and Vermonts
But you only hear it
sitting in the dacha’s plank closet
in the middle of the rain and the beds with lettuce and flowering strawberries
where on a line beats a handkerchief
or a single sail
or an angel’s wing
disturbing the water in the medicinal bath
in the overcast dawn
14.6.94
Interrogation
Antigone freakish girl
What are you plotting under your comb
Who hit you with a concrete wall
You won’t even end in the works battalion
Why do you cling so to this carrion
Seen through the window heavenly thunder
Everywhere white shirts celebration
Under-Caesar smooth-talks from his paper
His know-alls stand at a distance
Crows stand over his enemy
He won’t be buried today
He won’t be You hear that Antigone
What a stink Perhaps close the window
Maybe you’re just an idiot
Who walks across a ski-jump
Kamikaze A crumpled cottonwool wad
In the throat of a triumphant trombone
Antigone look at your uncle
His feet are clodhopper’s feet
Antigone He even has claws
He has children you hear me scum
Pity the senile fool
What will his issue think of him
General-Secretaries Cardinals Fuhrers
Antigone he has tanks
You drunk daughter of incest
Of Tanya Larina and guerrilla-Zoia
As soon as they start their conniving
Your spleen will burst
Your ear will end in your mouth
As soon as they open the safe
Antigone There’s no kick
Their grey matter won’t seize
Or don’t you know the horoscope
Remember the gods favour Epigones
Huns horse-thieves and narks
Or have you gone blind without sleep
Well wake up your brother’s a bastard
And your groom is neither chicken nor egg
Whether from Thebes or Lubyanka
Achaian-trash are Achaian-trash
Little girl Perhaps you’re a snitch
A girlfriend of Lavrenti Beria
A biohormonal honey trap
Grabbing the cash for yourself
Or can’t you quit the needle
Or maybe it’s not all Freudian
Just that you’ve got a screw loose
You’re unhinged You want a cigarette?
Well think who you’re trying to be
Your hustlers ended the war
Your friends became whores Some people left
For the Peloponnese For the Metropolis
Take care Yes it only gets worse
Antigone In the world of antinomies
In the world of AIDS and camel meat
In the whim of public delirium
In the world of books animals expert opinions
Are you Anti-dove of Anti-peace
Or a dissident chimera
In the view of Sophocles and the Afghan
In darkness in vain in desperation
In power in the emporium in the fountain
You with a shield or on a shield
Antigone who are you Antigone
Three Poems
Nina Iskrenko
translated from the Russian by Anne Gutt
Listen to "[The guys are under the lean-to . . .]" read in the original Russian by Elena Malysheva:
Nina Iskrenko appeared on the Moscow scene in the 1980s as a force of great energy, provocation, wit, and virtuosity. Her “polystylistics” combined the banal and the esoteric, love and desire, history and myth, explicit sexual references, the stagnation of contemporary life, and the position of women in Soviet society with radical experiments in poetic form, sometimes mixing literary, colloquial, and scientific registers in one sentence. “She was . . . an eccentric, shocking inventor, by nature avant-garde.”1 Iskrenko’s range and inventiveness are astonishing. Reading and translating her poetry, I am thrilled by the directions she takes, unrestrained and often completely unpredictable, by her humour, and by the fundamental lyricism of her work.
“ . . . the Oberiu group communicated to us that human life is absurd, and that this is amazing (ridiculous, humorous, tragic, monstrous . . . ). Contemporary post-absurdists assert rather the reverse: human life is absurd, and this is normal. If there is anything really amazing today, it is that amid all the nonsense that surrounds us, there still exist some human feelings, desires, impulses . . . The eternal values (love, human warmth, mutual understanding) fall, and I like a fool hold out my arms. Perhaps I'll catch them. Perhaps they won't smash to pieces.”2
This is the first publication in English of “The guys are under the lean-to discussing God.” The original appeared in O Glavnom (The Main Thing), published shortly after Iskrenko’s death. This collection of poetry and short prose pieces with each entry dated forms a scrupulous, introspective diary of the last two years of her life. The poems written against a background—and sometimes foreground—of illness can be devastating, witty, touching, mundane, religious, anguished, banal. “It is avant-gardism, moving past the end.”3
The core of Iskrenko’s oeuvre is formidable. A collection of Iskrenko’s verse in English translation, The Right to Err, was published in 1995 in the US, edited by the poet John High, a close friend of Nina’s. Since then individual poems have appeared in translation from time to time.
1Kirill Kovaldzhi, “The ‘New Wave’ at the End of an Era,” trans. Patrick Henry in Crossing Centuries: The New Wave in Russian Poetry, ed. John Alexander High
2Nina Iskrenko, “We Are the Children of Russia’s Dull Years” (1990) in Nina Iskrenko, The Right to Err, trans. John High, Patrick Henry, and Katya Olmstad
3Mark Shatunovsky, “The Discovery of Nina Iskrenko” (Introduction to O Glavnom)
“ . . . the Oberiu group communicated to us that human life is absurd, and that this is amazing (ridiculous, humorous, tragic, monstrous . . . ). Contemporary post-absurdists assert rather the reverse: human life is absurd, and this is normal. If there is anything really amazing today, it is that amid all the nonsense that surrounds us, there still exist some human feelings, desires, impulses . . . The eternal values (love, human warmth, mutual understanding) fall, and I like a fool hold out my arms. Perhaps I'll catch them. Perhaps they won't smash to pieces.”2
This is the first publication in English of “The guys are under the lean-to discussing God.” The original appeared in O Glavnom (The Main Thing), published shortly after Iskrenko’s death. This collection of poetry and short prose pieces with each entry dated forms a scrupulous, introspective diary of the last two years of her life. The poems written against a background—and sometimes foreground—of illness can be devastating, witty, touching, mundane, religious, anguished, banal. “It is avant-gardism, moving past the end.”3
The core of Iskrenko’s oeuvre is formidable. A collection of Iskrenko’s verse in English translation, The Right to Err, was published in 1995 in the US, edited by the poet John High, a close friend of Nina’s. Since then individual poems have appeared in translation from time to time.
1Kirill Kovaldzhi, “The ‘New Wave’ at the End of an Era,” trans. Patrick Henry in Crossing Centuries: The New Wave in Russian Poetry, ed. John Alexander High
2Nina Iskrenko, “We Are the Children of Russia’s Dull Years” (1990) in Nina Iskrenko, The Right to Err, trans. John High, Patrick Henry, and Katya Olmstad
3Mark Shatunovsky, “The Discovery of Nina Iskrenko” (Introduction to O Glavnom)
Nina Iskrenko (1951–1995) was an influential poet of the Moscow New Wave in the 1980s and a member of the unofficial Moscow club “Poetry.” Following the putsch in 1991 she became a member of the Russian Writers’ Union. She published three books of poetry in 1991 and her work appeared in many journals. In 1995 she received the Yeltsin Award for her poetry. When she died of cancer aged forty-three, less than half of her work had been published. Since then her complete oeuvre has appeared in a series of small volumes.
Anne Gutt is a poet and translator. She was awarded the Gabo Prize for Literary Translation Summer/Fall 2017 for her translations of poems by Ganna Shevchenko. She has also translated work by contemporary Russian poets Andrey Rodionov and Tatiana Moseeva, and Latvian poet Sergej Timofejev.
