Oleg Dozmorov
Translated by Philip Nikolayev
Romanticism
Of death, again? A boy was once alive, better than us, so throw away your magazines and thrive a hundred years. The specter of sublimity won't rise afresh, there's nix. Why do you still sigh and romanticize, innocent kids? On the bloodstained slopes of the Caucasus is our Romanticism, with its windswept truckloads of human carcasses, lice, rheumatism. Don't even start, it only ends in terror. Style is a war. Style is, forgive my bathos, a whole era. Need I say more and do you crave an ugly yet elegiac untimely death, hastening down the sensuous, lyric, tragic star-studded path? * * * I now shut down the poetry shop and open a store of mishaps, evil and common human sins, etc. along those lines. I buy off old debts and stock unwon victories, and if you are one to call me a huckster, come and help my huckstery, bring me disaster and mishap. Then - faster! - escape. * * * "...to learn to react to the world in a verbal fashion, and what's more, in rhyme and in time to the appropriate meter prescribed by ages of tradition: is that not, among the available lots, a most glorious and well glorified destiny?" The world composes another dirty spring. Tajiks are sorting through Russian garbage with stoic solemnity, and I envy them for some reason: they're people. If only I could forget Russian, leave and live away, far, where we ourselves are Tajiks and there are no dictionaries, encyclopedias, books or need for literacy or orthography, the only extant words being I, you, he, cheese, telephone, flatbread, maize. To lead a basic life, to find a job and a place to undress and fall asleep in. One day we'll come back and it's all Islam here, as everywhere else in this blessed world. Two or three friends will recognize us. At the cemetery, revisiting the beloved graves, we'll parse the tombstones slowly, like epitaphs in college-level Latin.