By A Roman Road Forgotten

I started this translation many years ago and stopped after three stanzas, feeling not up to the complex challenges posed by this powerful poem of protest. This is Yevtushenko's equivalent to Shelley's "Ozymandias." The poem resonates not only with its time, but with the present. The poet was in Syria in 1966 and was taken to see a stretch of a Roman road. No one knew who built it or when.
We know a great deal more now. The road was called the Strata Diocletiana, and was built under the order of the Emperor Diocletian from 284 to 305 CE. So it is a late addition to the vast road system that ran all over the Empire, some of it maintained for more than 800 years. Talk about infrastructure! This stretch of Roman roads held the Syrian territory, which included Judea, together connecting Palmyra and Damascus all the way down to Arabia.
Yevtushenko wrote this in 1966. Brezhnev was in power. Every word he said and wrote was carefully watched by the state, ever since he wrote his famous poem about "Babi Yar" five years earlier. Things had to be said carefully, by indirection, or not at all. The sight of the ruined road of a forgotten Roman regime may have seemed a gateway into a poem that could say much, yet seem to be about a remote time and place, about "imperialists" the Soviet authorities could not object to his portraying as corrupt and evil.
The poem resonates now, too, since Syria is once again a battle ground over which sinister and arrogant empires and faux-empires are fighting. Fighters may be creeping along this 1700-year-old road at night. As as we have to deal with a wanna-be Emperor of our own, the poem is an urgent warning about hubris from these parts.
I have translated this fairly close to the original. But it is an adaptation, with such liberties as the moment induced. I have also added a few lines here and there to add factual details about the road's identity and Diocletian's name. Since it is known now, we had might as well name the Emperor and place the road in its historical moment, not Rome in its glory but Rome a hundred years from its end.

Enough said: here is the poem, in my first draft translation.


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BY A ROMAN ROAD FORGOTTEN

Translation by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from a Russian poem by Evgenii Yevtushenko

By a Roman road forgotten,
not far away from Damascus,
dead-faced mountains wear away
like masks of an ancient emperor.

Fat snakes that warm themselves
draw back their heads in coils,
bask their scales in the sunlight,
keeping their self-important secrets,
as if they had been with Cleopatra!

This was a road of damascene,
that rarest of steels for swords,
trade route for pearls and rubies,
rubbed clean by the bodies of slaves.

Legions marched in to invade,
profiles like Roman coins,
breast plates of bronze concealing
the venereal plagues of the armies.

Wheeled chariots once swayed
(before their wood was torn for cook-fire),
leaning beneath their drivers
like the crested coifs of empresses.

Laying the flagstones was the death
of slaves untold, each stone the back
of one fossilized workman,
an easy-ridden-over cenotaph.

Grown tired of his hot and Syrian exile
(too warm to even think in Latin),
the elegant patrician puts down
his lemon ice, to swab himself
in the finest Etruscan oil.

"Who cares if we crush this rabble
till nothing is left but skull and bones?
We Romans will not die like worms,
and the road will always save us."

Words not heard by the Arab mason,
dutifully pounding his hammer
to a slave-song obstinate,
a Syriac slave-song full of cunning.

"Thinking only about the flesh,
you have forgotten the gods.
Your death I hammer here,
and the road's death too."

Empire, decayed at the roots,
crept on, agape with gore;
veined, not like a tree,
but as a patchwork of blood.

Against resisters the Romans did
what they did best: the fire and tongs,
but torture victims sewn together
can only hold out so long.

The Romans took to sleeping naked,
their haughty togas put aside,
and so it was the Empire died,
and as well the ruined road I stand on.

They passed off their crimes to others
with the ease of the forger's art.
Some mile stones have only
the distant Emperor's name,
and some say nothing since
Diocletian had many worries,
least among them those awful Christians.
Who dies making the road is no one's
business. The road is not to blame.

But generations of wild grass
have had their way with it.
Only ghosts and goatherds walk
the dead Strata Diocletiana.
The road that engendered crime
Is now itself outlaw and criminal.

Let all the roads to executions,
and all the highways to tyrants' follies
come at the end to this ultimate payment:
forgotten, forever, in the highest weeds.

Damascus-Moscow 1967-68.