Boris Ryzhy
Translated by Philip Nikolayev
In Memoriam: Boris Ryzhy (1974-2001)
* * * "Got neither cash nor wine..." - Adamovich Let's walk, my friend, along an empty street where frozen clementines of streetlamps hover and snow covers the distance like a sheet and all the stores have shut their doors forever. Show windows, neon glow, ditches and pipes. "It's all so gruesome, hopeless, literal. And what do you, my friend, expect from life?" - "Sadness: it's in the nature of the beautiful!" All that being quite so, we pass black walls. "What do you figure will happen to us tomorrow?" A monstrous and eternal mannequin follows us with two perfect eyeballs free of sorrow. "Suppose he knows that storefront rose is dead, or his own ugliness, or the world's fears?" - "He knows that there is happiness, my friend, yet you and I can't see it for our tears." * * * Yellow marble: a communist boy scout with his bugle, or is it his coy snout, in a foul city park in September (falling foliage in what I'll remember) where I roam as if dreaming, absurd character in insoluble dreams who feels bitter wherever he roams in an era of tyrants and words. The long vista looms desolate, dressed in a nylon and emetic light. Brother, what can this lowlife of a poet say by way of a farewell tonight as he brushes a leaf with his hand from the face of a faceless boy scout? Trusty bugler, we're beat, sound the lights out. Play your part to the end.
To V.S. We shall agree as follows: when I'm dead you'll place a cross on my grave, and we'll know between the two of us, friend, that though it looks much like all other graveyard crosses, it is in fact a signature: just as an illiterate leaves a cross on paper, so I would like to leave a cross in the world. I wish to leave a cross. I was at odds with the grammar of life and reading my destiny I understood nothing. All I know and am used to are blows, the kind that cause letters to fall like teeth out of the mouth, smelling of blood. * * * The township that I have dreamt up and populated, personally setting the clouds afloat overhead, is currently on the blink because it's affected by the idea that life is short and then you're dead. The music shuts down in spite of the eager singer, the electrician's curses won't help the lamps light up, the model appears progressively uglified in the mirror, and all things turn to crap. Relax, ladies and gentlemen, life continues, all in flight and afloat, and that which you call me is walking at ease down the autumn street while the breeze shakes all the leaves behind me, straining its sinews.
To Oleg Dozmorov
Proprietor of the best bari, boxerii, philologist and poet, mighty as a wild Ryazan boar, but highly subtle on the subject of verse, receive this panegyric, my brother elegiac and idyllic! When you beat up on those poor waitersiii I wondered how it's possible to have at least a dozen talentsiv, to own the hardest fist of all, and, when deciding fight or flight, to grab a length of pipe and fight. They just kept yelling, "Stop it! Stop it!" You, letting drop, "Thou shalt not steal," raged like an utter hellfire torrent or a hurricane at full zeal; you raged, my dearest friend, no less than Tolstoy at the door of death. Then you poured me a couple of pints and brought some salted beer nuts and sounded two or three stanzasv in the ensuing fearsome silence. And you'll recall what I said to it: I see again God and the poetvi! We have no method of foreknowing the distant echoes of our wordsvii, yet life is fun nevertheless and I'm again hell bent on going to that sole bar in our whole nation where I loll in good conversation.viii
1 O. Dozmorov indeed owned a beer bar, although its precise name could not be ascertained. Nonetheless, the poet's great-grandson, in his most recent interview, to Poems and Poets magazine, said that the bar either had no name at all or was named "Chez Fyodor."
2 In fact, O. Dozmorov never trained in boxing, as can be learned from a glance at the poet's Memoirs: "<...> twenty seven years, a third of my life, were spent at the wrestling gym <...>." B. Ryzhy, on the other hand, was trained in boxing and, in a contemporary's apt phrase, "liked that sport so much that he was prone to call 'a boxer' anyone to whom he happened to take a liking, and subsequently believe it too!"
3 Allegations of his battery of those waiters were never officially confirmed.
4 O. Dozmorov was a splendid musician and also drew in tempera; moreover, see note number 2.
5 It is unknown what stanzas those are.
6 B. Ryzhy took especial pains over this couplet; roughly two hundred variants survive. As his wife reminisces, "<...> for a whole month, Borya was composing two especially important lines, having kicked me and the children out of the house for the duration <...>."
7 An allusion to F. I. Tyutchev's "We have no method to predict / How our word will resound, or where... / But, brethren, do we even care..."
8 Clearly a use of poetic license. "<...> the said Dozmorov's bar is perpetually filled with a din and a racket. Girls scream and guys guffaw. Cusses pile upon cusses. Two powerful cassette recorders are playing simultaneously, and everyone is dancing. My God, how I love this haunt of vice, where I am always awaited by my <...>" (from B. Ryzhy's diary).