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     THREE EXCERPTS
     Yan Satunovsky
      translated by Alex Cigale

      I hear repeatedly:
      what poverty of diction!
      Yes, poverty, poverty;
      abasement, the barracks' rot,
      drabness,
      the dampness of death;
     and perpetually fear: there, that's how….
     yes, poverty, and nothing else.

     ***

     … I respect your social activity,
      your concern for the harvest of wheat and honey;
      but what is the source of your certainty
      that I will understand and forgive everything?
      no, Sasha, no, I will not inquire
      about the year of your birth:
      poets are like mushrooms in the woods;
      I too am younger than Rimbaud.

                                                              Nov. 27,1973

     ***

           I am not a member of anything.
           Not even of the Writers' Union.
           I feel neither comfort nor discomfort,
           none of the above, neither here not there.
      The night, like a black caterpillar (and why not?)
      or a black butterfly (what's key is the color),
       the night, what time is it? About six o”clock.
      Thank God, the windows across are lit already.

                                                                Dec. 24, 1977

 

for the original language version, click here.

Yan Satunovsky (1913-1982) was one of the key contributors of the Lianozovo School, which employed vernacular Russian as the language of its poetry. Like many of the "unofficial" poets of his generation, Satunovsky took shelter in producing some twenty books of children's verse. Five of his "Children's Rhymes" where set to music by Sophia Gubaidulina, the renowned Tatar-Russian avant-garde composer.  Satunovsky passed away without publishing his serious poetry but having collected it in a typescript of 7 copies, which he titled Chopped Prose. The excerpts above appear in Chopped Prose and are translated from a subsequent anthology, Samizdat Veka (Minsk-Moscow: Polifact, 1997). 

Alex Cigale’s poems and translations can be found in The Cafe, Colorado Review, Global City Review, Hanging Loose, McSweeney's, Zoland Poetry, Stranger at Home: American Poetry with an Accent, and in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry. New poems are forthcoming in Gargoyle, Many Mountains Moving, and North American Review. Born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine in 1963, he has lived in New York City since 1975, apart from six years at the University of Michigan where he won a Hopwood Award.

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