Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler – Three Translations from the Russian of Aleksey Porvin
Advice on Body Modification
“Is there powder left in your flasks?” Taras Bulba asked, not knowing:
before it can become a character, a piece of the human heart
passes through soil overgrown with the inability to smolder:
and there’s no better flesh than that.
Attempts to speak Russian, who are they?
Miners engaged in the accretion of a new layer of skin:
coal dust contains the memory of what’s to come—
becoming a diamond—and there’s no better epidermis than that.
War is just a way to modify the body,
teach it to live inside an explosion; soon
it will be easy to wake up inside the blast wave,
search for your intoxication among the scattered garments.
For a modified body, these are clothes.
Sobriety is comparable to nakedness amidst flame
and the blend of dark and light used to clean
wounds isn’t a liquid to be wasted.
Living from one underground blast to the next,
through the glass of flickering lamps,
they drink up the light of peace talks
sent down failing wires into the mine.
They drink—and get drunk instantly, break into a song
about themselves, new as empty tunnels,
their ringing protraction reeking of fumes, like the insides of a cartridge,
its powder burnt out in a single crack.
РЕКОМЕНДАЦИИ ПО МОДИФИКАЦИИ ТЕЛА
«Есть еще порох?» – вопрошал Тарас Бульба, не зная:
прежде, чем стать персонажем, кусок человеческого сердца
проходит сквозь почву, обрастая неспособностью тлеть:
а лучшей плоти, чем эта – не сыскать.
Попытки говорить по-русски, кто они?
Шахтёры, занятые приращением нового слоя кожи:
угольная пыль содержит в себе память о грядущем
становлении алмазом – а лучшего эпидермиса не сыскать.
Война – всего лишь способ модифицировать тело,
приучить его к жизни внутри у взрыва: после
станет легко просыпаться внутри взрывной волны,
искать своё опьянение среди предметов одежды.
Для модифицированного тела – вот одежды,
трезвость сравнима с наготой посреди пламени,
а смесью мрака и света привыкли протирать
раны – нужно сберечь эту жидкость.
Живущие от одного подземного взрыва до другого,
сквозь стёкла мерцающих ламп выпивают
свет переговоров о мире, запущенный в шахту
по проводам, готовым перетереться вот-вот.
Выпивают – и вмиг захмелев, запевают песню
о новых себе, подобным пустым туннелям,
чья звенящая продолговатость пахнет гарью, как нутро гильзы,
чей порох сгорел в одном хлопке.
The wounded have raggedy arms and legs.
Their bodies are stuffed with the desire to live,
as if with the sawdust left over from the great tree
that stretches its roots towards our hearts.
Inside the toys there is fermented time;
it wells up in their plastic eyes
like tears that smell of something bitter and sour
even more strongly than the local huts.
Plums lie scattered at our feet,
soft as toy bullets;
they passed through the air, leaving holes
we want to cling to.
Press close and spy out new selves,
hear the music, draw in the right
to call yourself names full of pent-up sun,
despite the descending darkness.
A teddy bear on the curb, swollen
by rain mixed with clouds of smoke
and the sound of gunshots. Just think: a quickening plushie,
just like what’s in your guts right now.
У раненых – тряпичные руки и ноги,
их тела напичканы стремлением жить
словно опилками, что остались от великого древа,
что тянет корни свои к нашим сердцам.
Внутри у игрушек перебродило время,
наворачивается на пластмассовых глазах
слезами, что пахнут чем-то горьким и кислым
сильнее, чем здешние избы.
Сливы валяются под ногами у нас –
мягкие, как игрушечные пули:
прошили воздух насквозь, оставив дыры,
к которым хочется жадно припасть.
Припасть и высмотреть новых себя,
услышать музыку, втянуть в себя право
называться именами, накопившими солнце
вопреки наступившей темноте.
Плюшевый медведь на обочине набряк
дождём, перемешанным с клуба́ми гари
и звуками выстрелов: подумай, оживающий плюш,
какое теперь у тебя нутро.
Ode to Sawdust
Can the conscience break down
into tremendously fine pieces? Can nonviolence
go under the saw like a tree does? Yes,
if they know they will grow back into a single whole.
To sing the sawdust covering the floors
of interrogation rooms, to sing the smallest shaving;
with its sharp edges, it imitates
the carpenter’s plane that engendered it.
To sing of the splinters that go under the skin,
the burdensome air of prisons and railroad stations,
to pay tribute to all the other wooden minutiae
the wind lifts up higher than the flag.
The Russian forest passes into the Ukrainian forest,
not on the land but in the speech of the people;
the Russian forest passes into pulverization
if only to become sawdust and absorb everything it’s given.
Only by becoming a shaving, only by laying down like sawdust
under the bodies of people, is it possible to absorb their sweat, their words,
their despair and hope—and only when imbued with all this
is it possible to stick together, to grow into a trunk again.
The one who sang all this listens to a rustling in himself
something revived now that it is swollen with damp
and salt that hid inside bodies for so long
they have become indistinguishable from the words “lay down arms.”
ОДА ОПИЛКАМ
Может ли совесть распасться на части
предельно мелкие, может ли ненасилие
лечь под пилу, как ложится дерево? Могут,
если знают, что заново срастутся в одно.
Воспеть опилки, усыпающие полы
в комнатах допроса, воспеть мельчайшую стружку,
она своими острыми краями подражает
лезвию рубанка, породившего её.
Воспеть занозы, вводящие под кожу,
тягостный воздух тюрем и вокзалов,
воздать должное прочей древесной мелочи,
поднимаемой ветром выше флага.
Русские леса переходят в украинские
не по земле, а по речи людей,
русские леса переходят в свое измельчание
лишь бы стать опилками и впитать всё, что дано.
Лишь стружкой став, лишь ложась опилками
под тела людей, можно вобрать их пот, слова,
отчаяние и надежду – всем этим пропитавшись,
можно склеиться, заново срастись в ствол.
Воспевший все это слушает шелест в себе,
который возродился, набрякнув влагой
и солью, так долго прятавшейся в телах,
что стала неотличима от слов «бросай оружие».
Artists’ Statements on Beauty
Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler, translator: The challenge that defines literary translation is the fact that no translator can possibly reproduce every significant element of a given text. Poetry compounds that challenge, because reading a poem well entails thinking like a person of faith reading a sacred text—you must assume that every feature of the language is significant and every choice was a deliberate one that could not have been made any better. When confronted with this level of interpretive activity from the reader’s consciousness, a word that was a static Newtonian object in prose becomes an unstable quantum object in a poem, one that can occupy multiple valances simultaneously. How is the translator to navigate this ever-escalating granularity of demands? Beauty. If translation is a hierarchy of conflicting demands, beauty is what sits enthroned at the top of the pyramid. The one irreducible feature of the original, which the translator must never forego, is the fact that it is beautiful.
Aleksey Porvin, poet: This may sound like a truism, but beauty is found in struggle. The political situation in the world today, and especially the conflict in Ukraine—and that country is significantly connected with my own family’s origins—have forced me to think about truth and untruth, violence and peace, more deeply than I ever had before, about overcoming repressive premises in politics and art, and about my role as a poet in that entire spectrum of collisions. To a great extent, it is literature that prepares a person for the great drama of life, but at our present moment, literature, and poetry in particular, do not shy away from using violent methods on the human consciousness. Violence is intolerable to me, and in the poems where I succeed in minimizing its influence and reaching the balance of expressing what is truly essential, what I undergo is not beauty, but more likely the possibility of beauty—of the beauty that glimmers beyond the dream of a just world order. In other words, beauty is a promise and simultaneously an elusive balance on the path to total freedom from repressive contexts.
Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler is a poet and translator, best known for his work on English renderings of novels by great contemporary Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan, published by Deep Vellum and Yale University Press and positively reviewed by journals including the LA Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Little Star, Trafika Europe, and Two Lines. Wheeler is also an editor at Two Chairs, an online poetry magazine.
Aleksey Porvin is a Russian poet born in 1982. English translations of his poems can be found in numerous journals, including World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Fogged Clarity , The Cafe Review, and The New Formalist. Porvin is the author of three collections of poems in Russian – Darkness is White (Argo-Risk Press, Moscow, 2009), Poems (New Literature Observer Press, Moscow 2011), and The sun of the ship’s detailed rib (INAPRESS, Saint-Petersburg, 2013). His first book of poems translated into English, Live By Fire, was published by Cold Hub Press in 2011. Poems by Porvin have recently been short-listed by Andrey Bely Prize (2011, 2014). Aleksey Porvin is the winner of the Russian Debut Prize (2012).
Poems in Russian voiced by Alex Averbuch