Four Poems by Dimitri Psurtsev

Translated from the Russian by Philip Metres

[God, your clouds above me]

To L.

God, your clouds above me
Float into the distance. It’s good
To know, but it’s bliss to not know
Where we are fated for failures,
Where future days approach, ending
The dream of the days gone past.

How many in that distant smoke
Once sang, raised a ruckus, laughed for us—
Days that have not completely forgotten
About us, visiting us like a strange host
Of motley-bright visions and words
As real as the steppe made out of water.

We summon the hot air and dusty brass
In order to praise you. But under the waters,
Hot sounds and dusty oration will run and pass,
Just another, deeper, cooler riverbed current
Along the earth’s body. This is how
It needs to be, and we need to be silent.

In failures and dreams, a secret abides.
Happiness arrives when dreams and earth
Mingle. Words melt, falling into the ground.
Those words we have yet to say are good
To know, but a bliss to not know.

Л.

Боже, Твои облака надо мной,
Вдаль уплывающие от меня.
Знать хорошо, но блаженней не знать,
Где нам ошибку дано совершить,
Где наступают грядущие дни,
Где дней минувших кончается сон.

Сколько их нынче в далёком дыму,
Певших, шумевших, смеявшихся нам
Дней, позабывших про нас не вполне,
Нас навещающих странной толпой
Пёстро-прозрачных видений и слов,
Столь же реальных, как степь из воды.

Воздух горячий и пыльную медь
Мы призываем, чтоб славить Тебя.
Но под водою прольются водой,
Донной прохладой по телу земли
Жаркие звуки и пыльная молвь.
Значит, так нужно, и нужно молчать.

Главная тайна в ошибках и в снах,
Счастье - в смешении снов и земли.
В землю ложатся и тают слова;
Те, что сказать нам ещё предстоит,
Знать хорошо, но блаженней не знать…

[Like God’s grace, this rain]

Like God’s grace, this rain,
Taking ages to come
Splashing in the night’s dark,
Giving drink to dry fields.

The blue skies whiten.
Wind withers. In the silence
An invisible mirage sings,
Snuggling us into its dream.

We’ll live awhile in this dream
And won’t return. Still,
In this world, other dreams abide—
And God, of course, is everywhere.

Как Божья милость этот дождь,
Который медлит к нам придти
И, плещущий во тьме ночной,
Сухие нивы напоить.

Белеет синева небес,
Сникает ветер. В тишине
Поёт невидимый мираж,
В обнимчивый склоняя сон.

Мы побываем в этом сне,
И не вернёмся мы назад,
Хоть в мире есть иные сны,
И Бог, конечно, есть везде.

[I’ve never drunk tea in a raspberry tavern]

--after Kustodiev’s “Moscow Traktir”

I’ve never drunk tea in a raspberry tavern,
Where a mongrel cat with mangy rat fur
Drinks milk from a saucer,
Or having caught with her claws on the fly
A golden pancake, now eats it, while
The daring coachmen slurp from their saucers
And life sings under the samovar sun.

But I’ve been driven in a raspberry bus
By an old bald driver on a bumpy road
Through sleeping village after village,
Where women wrapped in gray scarves—
Silvered by a sliver of snow, a veil
Of the eternal—kept boarding and departing.
And because of this, on this plain,
Where many had lived and died before me,
I was ready to live and die also.

Не пил я чай в малиновом трактире,
Где кошка беспородная, с крысиной
Смешною шёрсткой млеко пьёт из блюдца
Или, поймав когтями на лету,
Ест золотистый блин, тогда как чай
Извозчики лихие пьют из блюдец,
И жизнь поёт под солнцем самоварным.

Но влёк меня малиновый автобус
С шофером лысым, старым по дороге
Негладкой среди спящих деревенек;
Входили, выходили бабы в серых
Платках пуховых и посеребрённых
Тончайшим снегом, вечности налётом, -
И по причине этой на равнине,
Где жили до меня и умирали,
Жить стоило, а после умереть.

[How tired is this Russian poet]

How tired is this Russian poet,
how old, how myopic, how deaf.
Yet a young muse still draws him
to sit before the grotto-shed.
His stanzas are archaic,
his dictionary atavistic.

But in his brain, a stain of snow,
white and breathing now,
fulfilling all desires,
gathering together a swarm
of outlines. It can flow like a stream
of all poets, and no one’s better.

Or transforms, when winter wind howls,
a cat’s ears into a squirrel’s,  
a beast into a frowning princess
as she rifles through her treasure chest—
so that in a yellow chamber, at night,
you’ll crack it like a nut.

Как устал этот русский поэт,
Как он стар, как он глух, как подслеп.
Его муза ведёт молодая
Посидеть возле гротосарая.
Стих его допотопно строфичен,
И словарь его атавистичен.

Но в мозгу его – снега пятно,
Там белеет и дышит оно,
Исполняет любые желанья,
И любые роит очертанья.
Оно может потечь как ручей
Всех поэтов, а лучше ничей.

А зимой, только ветер завоет,
Кошке беличьи ушки настроит:
Без улыбки на зверьем лице
Что-то ищет царевна в ларце,
Чтобы в полночь средь горницы жёлтой
Как орехи бы что-то колол ты.

Born outside Moscow in 1960, Dimitri Psurtsev has spent the bulk of his life in and around this megapolis, working as a literary translator and university teacher. Along the way, in between his many literary translations from English, he has written and published three volumes of poetry. When asked about poetic influences, Psurtsev has emphasized that one’s writing is more than the sum of influences: “Despite all possible influences, you can only be what you are. Your own life, your personal history, your wife and children, the landscape, the smell of a grove where mushrooms grow, the cats and dogs you had when you were a child, the feeling that you are a part of your people.” Psurtsev adds, “I almost avoided writing up to the moment when I knew I would express something of the Inexpressible, that mystic domain where all real poems seem to come from and where each poet has a place and doesn’t have to fight for it. Also, we have a rich literary tradition in Russia, and you should be terribly sure you have something to say before you just open your mouth.”

He has certainly passed the test. According to poet and critic Anton Nesterov, “[Psurtsev’s poems] are like pebbles in a stream that glisten and shimmer in the rays of the sun—and this illumination comes from both Russian and Western poetic traditions. It is their light that makes the meanings flare up with many references: to Derzhavin, Zabolotsky, Brodsky, to Yeats and Dylan Thomas. This is a kind of metaphysics of everyday life that creates culture.” Of Psurtsev, literary journal Znamya editor Olga Ermolaeva writes, “This solitary, free, and wayward poet has resolved to write as he wants and say what he thinks. As a result: the lovely neoclassical Russian writing of Dmitry Vladimirovich Psurtsev literally fascinates with freshness, some special sweetness of authenticity and the poet’s own rightness.”
Part of the tradition of poets holding fast to the work of the spirit, while the powerful continue to steal the future, Psurtsev’s poetry situates itself at the nexus between the elemental and the eternal, the earthly with the human dream. In this selection, the poet offers a prophetic and primal vision of a human life, seen as if from a far distance, where the muddle of human concerns—bus rides in the country, poets puttering in gardens—plays its brief cameo against the backdrop of the daily grandeur of long-awaited and sudden rainfall, the stretch of broad plains, and the squalls of winter. Nature is always abiding at the edges of human consciousness.

Finally, a brief word about the translation. Characteristic of Psurtsev’s poetry is the employment of archaic and Biblical diction and Russian folklore, often situating scenes of ordinary life as part of a continuous and perhaps timeless past. If his earlier work actively eschewed rhyme (but not meter, the heart of Russian poetry remaining syllabotonic), as a protest against the mechanistic expectations of rhyme in Russian poetry, he gradually recuperated rhyme in his later poems. For me, translating Psurtsev has meant grappling with how his poetry is read and feels in Russian—situating itself both inside the tradition and yet resisting its lulling normativity. Silent rhymes in Russian poetry speak loudly against the backdrop of an almost entirely rhymed poetic corpus. (Until quite recently, free verse was in fact an exotic species mostly unseen in Russia.) However, in the American poetry context, rhyme functions in an almost inverse fashion except among the redoubtable formalists, who continue to carry the banner. Thus, how to create the effect of Psurtsev’s poems, to a certain extent, is a question of form—to show both his unusual hybrid approach and his return to rhyme in later poems? Working with lineation, stanza, and shape, as well as finding ways of combining his blend of high poetic language, archaisms, and conversational speech, I have tried to bring his poetry’s fascinating freshness, his shimmering simplicity, into American English. Or, to put it another way, my goal, in conversation with Dima, is to aim in English for that impossible possibility, where, in Psurtsev’s own words, “all words became flesh.”

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), and Sand Opera (2015). His work has garnered the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Fellowship, two NEAs, seven Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and Core Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Published January 15 2023