eZhdsikhi

These translations all appeared in The Inconvertible Sky (Talisman House, Publishers, 1997), selected poems by Ivan Zhdanov in English translation. Many also appeared in Crossing Centuries: The New Wave in Russian Poetry (Talisman House, Publishers, 2000), an anthology of contemporary Russian poetry in English translation. For more information about both books, visit the Talisman House website at: www.talismanpublishers.com.

"Not a house or a prison..."

"And despair rushes about the eyes..."

"If a bird is the shadow of flight..."

Prophets

Contemporary (Antiprophet)

Prophets

Ancient (Pseudoprophet)

"When the sin is obscure..."

Return

Ascent

The Doors Are Wide Open

The Mountain

"An inconvertible possession..."

Before the Word

"Just a failed identikit, this city..."

A City Tune

"A spider hanging on the flower..."

* * *

Not a house or a prison, though similar —

this cube we carry within us, like an external soul,

like a wilted garden artlessly boasting

of its Achilles' heel, or perhaps his shield.

And no matter how you unfold the sign of a cross, it won't help,

only a square will emerge, invisible or black.

Like the noise of a werewolf, its clear utterance —

this inhuman swearing pours from the ears.

And a frost-covered dream of a White India

looks at itself in the icy surface with a silver palm,

where a star in unison with the glance

now agrees with a laser beam, now with a lit-up road to Mars.

Let's assume this is hell, where each gets his due:

neither darkness, nor utter darkness, though it remains with those

who drag along a black cube like some conscience and habitation,

a theme set forth in mountains of skulls.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

* * *

And despair rushes about the eyes

toward the forbidden exit,

a bluish-gray flicker in the ashes,

not knowing whether to hide itself, or disappear.

The pattern on the embroidery

will become the cloth itself: and the carbon monoxide

glittering in the wormwood foliage,

it's the same as a stellar inoculation.

Nothing's eternal for it,

save the impossibility of occurrence:

and from pestilence to creative weeping,

only the salt of a drawn-out instant remains.

And so any sea echoes

all the seas that never existed —

concealing in each depth

a lament of all the unborn.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

* * *

to E.S.

If a bird is the shadow of flight,

I know, probably, why your hand

waving to someone is utterly

unable of release.

A certain blood with a blind eye

can live apart from the heart.

A certain time exists

that no clock can track down.

Past populations usher past the kingdoms

as a commotion of leaves into the woods,

along the train platform, at nature's edge,

the heavens float by, like windows.

Delayed faces floating,

a bird will cry out — it's a leaf falling.

Only lasting a long, long while, its flight

beneath the palm of your hand.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

Prophets

Contemporary (Antiprophet)

If the mountains are read from left to right

or casually in the opposite direction,

not from bottom up — daybreak — or from the top down — nightfall —

it means time's exhausted itself before your eyes,

refused its own aging, and its incorruptible right

changed without a backward glance.

And when you want to hurl yourself at some goal

to satisfy one of countless undertakings,

unweaving the single road into the paths of a seer

(as if Antaeus thrust upon Hercules his feat

in order to see his own self torn from the earth

rushing upwards in an insane merriment),

then you'll see up close, astonished —

and you'll perceive that neither you nor the thing

that raised you up is nearby or roundabout.

You'll understand the horror of the canon's gaping mouth.

You, simply an aspect of description — withdrawn, frightened —

an unguarded charge inspiring terror.

You can pull a splinter from a living poppy

so it ceases the blood-letting called courage,

pull a history from the passing walker,

with beauty teach the wasted word

to raise warehouses from the injured pages

so that the other rock lies barren within them.

The hair of Artemis grown after her death

in the fire of Ephesus to crown a headless body

can be made into a wig,

made to replicate a shock, unseal insults

or better still, present hope as a mere thing of trade,

but you can't, because...and it all comes down to this.

You'll see how the mountains recede, and from each one —

a horizon and possibility of the other expanse manifest,

this ability to remember the calculation of seasons.

Yet only if you're governed by the laws of falling

into an irrepressible thirst for the heights of conversation —

this thirst that elucidates all your torments.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

Prophets

Ancient (Pseudoprophet)

And then the crozier will stand erect and lunge at the tsar,

the slit of the coronation lock gapes open,

the self-will's amusement loosened and babbling

reproaches, burning rampant with squabble.

Forget the familiarity you once shared with the sky,

the spindle will send the spinner swirling,

shouting out orders, collecting the mute's

meekness into a straightjacket.

And as the prophets gaze into the past preparing

to foretell it again, self-serving to the core,

the ancient pedigree brocade blushes

with these yet unmanifested gullies of blood.

That disease marked as the Second Coming

passing along the roads of Egypt, Nineveh.

And those still living heavens remember us,

we were long absent, but the circle closed.

Eye to eye with those once beneath us,

before this chance vanishing and endurance,

the one who rose from the dead will miss his incarnation

in the vanity of infamy, this scuffle of confessions.

The one who accompanies us here hardly

a gentleman of typical joy or common love.

Yet the crozier will shoot up and burst across the universe:

— Out, all of you! Now I will go alone.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

* * *

When the sin is obscure, nothing's so cherished as guilt —

the stars look up, invisible from below.

When we're frightened, they glance at us sideways,

or rather, they fix on this fear, not seeing our faces.

They couldn't care less if the snow falls naked or clothed —

if the boughs crackle without fire, the flight flies without its bird.

They couldn't care less, not a damn, how the objects appear.

They glance sideways, sowing a barbed light,

which passes through the cavity of hands parted in offence

and then returns, but the stars are no longer there.

Turned their backs, you can't see them from below.

And who — tell me — could rise above them, if just once

to see, not a reflection on the cornice,

not a hand's shadow on the wall, but a faceless reproach?

God alone knows how to reign them in.

They alone know how to ease the obscure pain.

Revive love or the black heart's disquiet?

They're silent. As before our own selves we stand before the sky.

And the snow passes — invisible, unheard, stark naked —

and the flight of birds long dead continues,

and a reproach floats over the rooftops, replacing the starlight,

and I do not sense your being, and fear lives outside these faces.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

Return

At a light knock — its pain having passed from him —

the windows blazed with a biased heat, and the house,

as if suddenly flying up above the rooftop,

abandoned its wooden frame for next to nothing.

Wherever he found himself the golden

latch on the unpainted door secretly lit his path,

though now he waits, his eyes collapsing the darkness,

possessed by a terrified faith, yet devoted to this outcome.

On the fringes of hope, approaching loss —

he awaits any answer at the road's end,

inopportunely gilded to the elbows by the coolness

of the latch seized in the cup of this hand.

On the porch a mother will appear, and a figure

in an incorrigible overcoat outmoded even in the pre-war winters,

then will respond in her familiar, "Who's there?"

The echo of unslaked, imaginary insults erupts

and settles into nothing, into these left-over, guilty days.

Maybe it's true, now things are in a pitiful state —

the prodigal son, they say, didn't come back as expected:

unsayable, like rain, this untrained in lament,

as if he managed to get a return on his debts,

in a currency of resurrected days — it's nothing really.

Blessed the one whose road is clear, simple from first light,

the one, who even when his head's turned, doesn't lose sight

of return and remembers the numbering of clouds

among the signs that know his offense!

What is resurrection? It's such a slit,

a place, where no places exist, something from those shelters —

a sheath for rivers or a stall for mountains,

ripped once and for all from the sequence of events.

If only he knew in what country that same house

would be located, as if it reflected his own fated departure,

he could bring back with mystery

the thing never squandered in living death and freedom.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

Ascent

It's worth the step — you'll land on the needle's summit,

stuck in a map of an unseen locality, where

instead of a pinprick, a spring shoots from the dark,

drives a stinging bush toward its own waters.

Farther along, around the spring, altars of villages,

the fumes of an existence and the smoke of a wheaten heat.

There, in twilight's opulence, one's will emerges,

the map snaps off on darkness' threshold.

All this can be loved without a fear of loss,

because a map cannot verify

the immeasurable, invisible span,

rising from the dead, threatening the habitual heart.

Here, every span under foot is a summit,

and light itself goes dark in this Promised Expanse:

the mountain slumps, or height collapses within it,

or the pinprick spreads across the spot on the map.

This, your ascent, rising in the mountain's

reflection that's surmounted itself once and for all.

So it came to be, this resurrection — and you the guide

of rage and fortitude, not seeking to shame.

So Georgy splits open the captive source

with his own spear — feeding the devoured flesh.

Like salt, a shade of battle appears in the source

which could not overcome you, even momentarily.

So it came to be, beauty exists, indebted

only to itself, like a refuge of the miraculous.

The horseman, who yields the hidden desire to the enemy,

unconquerable here, since he was summoned to squander his gift.

Here and now in this age, there's no eternity —

if, striking within, time ravages itself,

if it sinks in the sand, not a shy one with the signs,

yet alien and equally irreproachable to all.

Is it not because the pinprick aimed at the heart

rises from the death inside you with all its genealogy,

inundating the vacuous dale with a suspension of flowers,

echoing with news of the tribes in this vanishing fate.

It's impossible to guard, impossible to conceal,

without trading the muteness for an abundance of information.

It means, to take a step is to split forth a fresh spring,

it means, to set off is to become the outer ring of the world.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

The Doors Are Wide Open...

A sickle moon, drowned in a Sea of rainwater

grazes over the slain with its edges,

these nameless ones, never coming back —

do not know they've been forgotten.

Fires traipse through the forsaken villages,

cackle at night over the telephone wires.

The doors wide open, yet they should have been bolted,

they don't realize there's no one here to look after

the universe they've abandoned.

And the road they were led down

hangs there since, not touching the earth —

just the knee-deep dust of a moon.

Not jealousy between them and us, yet a ditch,

not the indistinct blanket of impetuous impotence,

but the forgetting's soporific speed.

Still a soul speaks once more from obscurity,

the aureole transforms into a sickle and flames,

and the lament of resurrection roams.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

The Mountain

Like a cow's flank, the mountain above my village.

Memory has nothing against warming itself nearby.

From the mountain top, another childhood visible,

or rather, a pre-childhood, an idea between the lines.

But there was a war then. Snake-meat venomously

shot out of the grass, ravaging the countryside,

multiplying itself like a number. One of my names buried

outside Leningrad, so that it might survive in me and sprout.

It means this mountain too, seized by an honest earth,

departs to the depths of that earth, searching for its lost home.

And on it, like a battle, dew gleams beneath a brother's hand,

the dew of a tender grass, a capricious green thunder.

At times Ursa Major disappears beyond the horizon — it's the Earth's

axis shifting, inquiring of beast and spirit: where did the wheat vanish,

the light's guiding adolescence? Where is the sky's customary face,

growing from which gaping hole?

Where is the sky's customary face? The creators

of Babylon's tower sought it above, no hope of finding it,

so they aimed to knit themselves to it, to equate it with common flesh,

and they were fated to lose touch, degrading both.

Now, flying over the place where the tower stood,

a bird could forget whither and why it flies,

the rain vanishes within itself, and emerging as it did

before the world's creation, the grass remains unquivering.

This burden of conjoining walls — and the shield on Constantinople's gates,

the prototype of the Petrine window, glitters from all sides.

Still a trace of Babylon's tower gapes with hell's amnesia

and stalks, staining the roads of time with fist fights and hatred.

He who constructed "you" and became its pedestal

sees the heavenly face through the thickness of walls and times.

A brother goes along the mountains, looking more like you —

and the closer he comes, the more you grieve.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

* * *

In sister's memory

An inconvertible possession, this terrain:

the feathery water of clouds.

Dissolving into a tribe of yore,

there a sister remains as she was in her youth.

Betrothed to an innocent fate,

true wife to an unworthy man,

her love, measured off by the length of days,

she gave in return to infinity.

As she was a schoolteacher,

since that beginning a piece of chalk in her hand

burns wide open in a three-fingered cross,

writes something on the blank blackboard.

Either the letters are unintelligible,

or their sweep continues, unbearable to the eye:

a reddish wind abides in the field,

the name of the rose on its lips.

And in the breaking of the sacred tablet

a notched wood will be discovered:

a piece of chalk crumbling, or hoarfrost,

or stars falling into sand.

You are one of the yet unknown women,

and for you I am indistinguishable.

In my hand I hold the other fragment —

when we meet we will join them.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

Before the Word

You — the stage and the actor in the vacant theater.

You'll pull down the curtain, playing out a form of life,

and the drunk anguish, sizzling like sodium,

will fly about the hall in utter blackness.

Ragged gardens choked with fruit,

when speech stretches your larynx,

and a tin-can pogrom raises you in the play

to pillage and burn, flood the stage corners with light.

Yet the unsound coffins of unoccupied seats

will not yield, or sigh, or snap in two,

or move toward that place where you've again spread

a marked heap, some moth-beaten trash.

And here, the parquet already grows into a mountain,

the stage seized under its foot,

and maintaining a quarrel with the muteness,

you roll your eternal monologue, like Sisyphus.

You — a nightingale's ricocheting whistle.

As if someone's sleeping and dreams this

place where you live alone, unaware that day

after day you wait for the dreamer to awaken.

And your shade took off naked through the city

to indulge the flower vender, stir up some fun.

No time for boredom, it's altogether different,

it can't blow with you into a single pipe.

The bird and flight are fused in it,

there, the ice and cold drone on in marriage,

the mother and father await the return of their mute son,

and he glances out the window and looks into nowhere.

Still, somewhere to the side of the icy gaze,

the word is born of itself in the dark,

writhing your pungent prison into a tornado,

it reaches out for you, and you go to it.

You crumble like the steppe gnawed away by heat,

and a crowd of horsemen rains down from the clouds,

and with freshness strike the extendable space,

and the wings of the bank embrace the ray.

O, just give me the cross! And I'll sigh in anguish,

stretching the bottom and causing the banks to heel.

I'll abandon farce — and there, in an open field...

But someone's dreaming, and the dream outlasts me.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

* * *

Just a failed identikit, this city,

of the ancient one on the hill.

Laid out with a seven-digit number,

as if possessing the claim to an unsplitable fear.

Framed, positioned there,

an identikit of the golden age,

in the company of scoundrels

and other gentlemen.

Like a sleepwalker multiplied by legs,

skipping floors into the abyss,

a ghost-town staggering in the frame.

A lying fear is stronger than a fear of lies.

Wandering about the aged streets,

unable to find itself anywhere

among the houses and pedestrians and automobiles,

which could more easily be the empty holes of rain.

An identikit composed of fear,

and the forest drawn over with frost —

a fish note or a night shirt

live within it, unaware of miracles.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

A City Tune

The neighbors playing dominoes in the yard,

their cigarettes like hushed flutes,

a window swings through the smoke

of a home, condemned to destruction.

Laundry drying on the balcony,

the filthy daily grind turned inside out,

and the real life is about as frank

as an invalid, once stripped of its bandages.

The old table, like a sore throat, rasping coarsely,

as if held together only by the dominoes' white dots,

to the left, either a heart or a home quivering,

and the window swinging in perfect time with the flutes.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

* * *

A spider hanging on the flower clock with its plumb web concealed.

Time — a day or nonday — as if in sync with these purification rites.

Unwind a stretch of cemetery clay from the bolt,

that's where the grave digger hopes to dig up a mountain.

The whole dawn at stake — only with a blackened sun,

as talk promises to smother the desecrated multitudes of history.

Clay devours clay, which pleases either the house-spirit or ghost.

Weeds at the fire site sprouting, though we're not responsible.

And not water but wine would have to burst forth,

changing to water again, to purify death.

So the weeds about the sprout gather with your generation,

the water bed exits for the water, with no desire to become a shore.

The fire site sprouting, the earth awakening with the sacrifice,

allowing us to forget it in grief, in favor of something else,

giving itself this way, bequeathing itself to no one —

letting go and going on, in order to appear again and again.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry