Maxim Amelin
Translated by Derek Mong & Anne O Fisher
Half Enraptured, Partially Indignant
Half enraptured, partially indignant, toting my antiquarian lyre- old thing I procured for pennies at Tishinsky market- and unimpeded, with news I move from town to village (both far removed and near as neighbors), I foot this distance. Having once recalled the cerise-clad, spear- wielding warriors with ill-will and thin lip service, then to hasten into the distance, reel the goal actively closer, this stands in for standing in one place, unmoving- this I know for certain. And when trees cleave at the crack of lightning's arrow, all shattered save one side branch, this remnant will persist as the new cut trunk, so vigorous. As for the muses, brown- eyed girls, I'm neither their first lover nor yet their last one- I'm not so dim I'd tie their dowry down, then disperse that prized speech without proper accounting, some cache I'd vainly blurt away, a flurry of word and then... what? Well, to hell with all that- I'm not heir to their budget-free trust fund and seized by spending. Still, that chasm's not a great one, between Homer and Herostratus, between the mighty and the meek. In erecting housing projects, they snatched the last gravestones and took them away, a cemetery's leftovers-moss- covered and decayed. How decisively time erects and razes, leaving every stone upturned. Alexandria! You who preserved verse through such unrest and storm, a hundred times are you blessed. Still, love and faith thin quickly, and through hope alone can a person live on- wordless splinter of a garrulous generation-one who wiggles his lips like a gasping fish: "If we wipe our memory clean of its lingering garbage, what then will ever remain?"
Translated by Matvei Yankelevich
*** "Long before any signs could augur that you and I - called by Divine order up from the void - would join the living, the trees wept amber tears for us because they knew that we would pass some day..." The elegy's beginning ends abruptly. For its continuation, alas, I've lost the inspiration to drag out line for useless line in vain, at least as long as shaggy waves - heirs to the golden fleece - leave these rocky tears over the sand. * * * Shuffle to work like a melancholic, then back again, with a skip and a jump, swim with the current right into the whirlpool, autumn and winter and summer and spring stroll down the boulevards, all the while knowing: can't catch the light, the creator won't come bearing new laws in the place of the old ones, can't bring to life those lost hearts and those minds hungry for only the feed at their feet, so do what you will, they won't change, and I am nothing more than a mutable form of being and existence in time. * * * I would like to have my own place on the dead shore of a living sea, where the winds, Notus and Boreas cuff the heavenly bells during their spats making the sky's bronze wail over the waves, where it's never warm, only cold or hot. A golden sunset is a salve for weaker eyes pink, turquoise, and the Milky Way, keeping sickness at bay, calming the mind. My fine-tuned ear will not be horrified by the thunderous sounds of the verb-filled, song-loving chasm. Familiar, since childhood, its every call. I - a rare carrier of these two tongues - mangle the lofty dialect when human language has hit a wall, speaking in song, having turned words inside out and laid them flat. What's left for me to do? The valley can't fathom difficult speech, so my voice fell on empty ears. Why not half-live and half-escape, serving a family of dual origin, a flowing bird or a fish that flies, in my own place on the outskirts of time.