An Oak Leaf, Solitary

 by Brett Rutherford

     after Lermontov

A single, solitary leaf of oak,
sensing disaster imminent
and prematurely brown,
breaks free of its tall parent
and in a fit of panic
hitches whatever breeze
comes first, and from it goes
above the treeline to cloud-
top, to where the Boreal
gods make annual rounds
from Arctic to Tropic.

Though he is young,
he has dreamt the death
of those who came before him,
     a holocaust,
hecatombs of his brothers piled.
From bark and root he knows
all history, an acorn chronicle
dating to Titans and Olympians.

In sight of the great inland sea
there grows a most splendid chinar —
an ancient sycamore — round top
a perfect hemisphere, million-leafed,
green, yellow, brown branded bark smooth,
rain-swept to glossy sheen, proud tree
which in the warm Crimean clime
has grown to the height of giants of old.

It is a citadel and a city of birds,
an avian metropolis of a thousand songs.
Men honor it, and spare the axe
for under the shade of one such,
Hippocrates taught medicine, and Socrates
befuddled the mind of Plato!

“Tree of Wonder! Give me shelter!”
So speaks the pilgrim leaf at edge of shade,
begging a restful interlude from sun
and from the decaying elements. “Regard me
as one from the desolate North, too soon
apart from my oaken sire, too young
to know what fraught danger awaited me.

“I trusted the wind, defying gravity.
I have been taken I know not where.
Dried up, my strength has abandoned me.
One day among your wholesome leaves so green
I would pass in your kind shadow.
Tales I can tell them of wonders seen.”

The sycamore is silent. Birds sing
oblivious, obsessed with love and feeding,
feathers of every hue a-flutter among
the broad leaves and spreading branchlets.
One song he understands: a lark
goes on and on about a mermaid
it has seen within the nearby bay.

“That was no mermaid,” the oak leaf offers.
“Fair bird, it was a submarine, a thing of war.
Iron arrows it carries, and a wall of fire
it can unleash upon both forest and city.”
But on the lark sings, of a golden palace,
and talking fish in a jeweled sky.

“Tree of Wonder! Heed my warning!”
So speaks the rasping and withered guest.
“The sky is full of metal birds. Bombs fall
and flatten towns full of innocent people.
Lunatics rage. Wheeled juggernauts
stake out imaginary lines and kill
to defend them. Humans’ hot breath
has swept the Polar Regions and set alight
dry woods and wolds. The gods themselves
would have not meted out so cruel a thing,
as they would smite the smiter first. Instead,
every last shrub will be crushed beneath them.”

Finally, the sycamore replies,
in voice as sweet as the oak had been stern:
“Always have I been tall, and green, and free.
If some thieving wind tears off a leaf,
     or branch, I grow a new one.

“Nest-builders have many times told us
of dark times coming! Stupid birds!
Every hawk is the death of them.
‘End of the world!’ they chatter on,
endlessly migrating north and south,
never content with where they are.

“We have no need of your bad messages.
Perfect we are, and perfect we shall be.
Does not an ocean nourish our roots?
Is not the sky the biggest sky of all?
Are not my birds the biggest crowd ever?” —

“Tree of Wonder!” Please remember!
Have not wars come and gone? Have not
your kind been burned and plowed under?” —

“Always have I been tall, and green, and free.
Be on your way and find some other shelter.
Sun blesses me, rain falls on me, the moon
dashes up and over to lull my sleep. Begone,
you dusty and malformed, tawny orphan!”

“Fool!” cries out the oak leaf. “I flee
your hateful shade on the next breeze upwards.
Just as you shed your bark, so too
you shed all troubling memories,
as innocent of history as a new-born babe.”

All the high sycamore counters
is its same idiot refrain:
“Always have I been tall, and green, and free.”

Mikhail Lermontov’s short lyric poem, “An Oak Leaf,”(1841)  is famous. It personifies the poet as a drifting oak leaf, flying from Russia into the warm clime of Crimea (part of the poet’s military life). The mysterious tree Lermontov calls the “chinar” is not so exotic as it seems, for the chinar is the sycamore or plane tree, whose "Western" variety is now a common sight in parks, public places and streets. My goal in making a new English adaptation of a poem is to make it into something new, so here I have expanded Lermontov’s original and made the sycamore tree into a narcissist speaking lines out of today’s headlines. And the oak leaf carries a warning of climate change, the last thing Donald Sycamore wants to hear.

 

 

Not the Lady You Thought She Was

 by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from Marina Tsvetaeva

Not the lady you thought she was
as she comes out of the narrow aisle
of the nearly-perfect cathedral,
to where the crowds scream for her
in the shadow of the onion-domes —

Freedom! Look at those diamonds
she took from princes and aristocrats.
All will be well, she tells them.
But the chorus was only practicing:
the Liturgy of Requiem is still to come.

Not the lady you thought she was,
she laughs, taps toes to the merry tune
of the Marseillaise, and sings along.
Then, crossing the barricades, the whore
leans her head upon the soldier’s medaled chest.

 

 

 

Waiting for Someone to Come Along (for Kiev)

by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from “Высока луна Господня”  by Fyodor Sologub

God’s moon shines on high
above the still and silent city.
They have all gone
to the underground shelters,
so it is hard for me.
Nothing to do, my food quite gone,
I am exhausted today.

The old houses in this narrow lane
curve in upon themselves and stare
each into the other’s windows.
We all peer out. Not one
of the others dares to bark.
The heat is off, the lights
have been extinguished.
Alone and bored and freezing,
we take our cues from the moon
that watches and says nothing.

The street, swept clean
of children, bottles, litter,
is empty and dead.
Nothing rattles about
to make it worth our while
to set up a collective howl.

Where have they all gone?
Why did they look at the sky
like frightened rabbits
when hawks are around?
There are no footsteps, nothing
crunches into the newly
fallen snow. I sniff the street
with alarm: nothing at all,
not even a scent
from the edge of a boot-print.

Waking or sleeping, how can we do
our jobs if no one is there? The quick step
of the hurried-home, the sly tread
of the house-thief, the happy stride
of the returning traveler: the signs
for which we live and what we warn of —
just who are we waiting for
when no one is here to tell?

Hours ago an unmarked truck
went by, and then a tank,
and then the sky lit up.
Who could we tell? What was
the point of putting up a ruckus?
Were those who drove by
without regarding us friends,
or enemies? Who knows?

I have found my way out

through an open coal chute.
I am the only one, it seems

who can come and go at will.

Out here in the cold I am alone.
The eaves are little shelter
when the wind grows cold.
This cannot go on. I must do
something! Something!
I shall sit beneath this window
and howl my lungs out.

God’s moon shines on high
above the still and silent city.
Sadness torments me.
Soon I shall be too weak
to continue this alarm
about nothing and for no one
in particular. What is wrong with me?

Please break the silence!
Sisters, sisters, come to your windows.
Part the curtains with curious snouts.
No one is coming! We have been
left behind! Look! The sky explodes
with yellow and red flashes!
Bark, sisters, bark at the moon!

They Killed My Russia (1918)

 

by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from Fyodor Sologub, 1918

They have killed my Russia already,
and placed her in an unmarked grave.
Here I must choke back my weeping,
feign happiness amid the evil crowd.

Sleep in your grave, my Motherland,
until, in some long-awaited spring,
lightning will shoot from sunken loam,
and in a flood, our dreams will live.

How long must these funereal vigils
go on, disguised as celebrations?
How can we not betray our sadness
as the parade of triumph rolls on by?

Which One Are You

by Brett Rutherford

WHICH ONE ARE YOU?

after Akhmatova’s “Muza”

Ah, welcome guest, my Muse!

I wait up for you, whom no one

can compel. The candle is lit.

The pot of tea is enough for two.

There is champagne for the finish

when we have done with poetry.

All that I am or ever hope to be

is in this night’s expectation.

Freedom and glory — and youth, too — 

I offer up, when with your flute

you arrive, and the lines fill up

in perfect symmetry and flow.

I wait. Wait. At my unlocked door

that ever-so-light twice tapping

fails to come no matter how far

I lean into midnight’s silence.

Instead, from above, a wind howls.

The shutters flap-clap and shear off

from the trembling house-side. The tea

in my cup shows rolling waves.

Then, hooded and winged, one comes,

in somber and terrible robes,

tattered with cold eternity.

Oozing through the torn window screen

her bulk swells in until it fills

entire the moonlight’s trapezoid.

The room is small. She seems to take

full half of it. I huddle down.

Gentle Euterpe, laurel-browed,

this is not you, the expected!

Her silver veil she puts aside.

Her eyes fix mine with calm resolve.

Her tablet and stylus laid down,

she places one hand over mine,

the thumb-and-double-digit hold

upon my pen now led by hers.

“Millions already dead,” she says.

“And millions more to come. Commence!”

My hand shakes. I tremble. “Why me,

the merest lyric poet, why me?” —

— “Because they have not killed you yet.

And because you can.” The blank page

is filled with lines. I write till dawn.

It is done now. She moves to go.

“Which one are you?” I ask. — “The one

who whispered into Dante’s ear

the cantos of his Inferno.”—

All I can say is, dumbly, “Oh!”

Note: Anna Akhmatova's Russian poem, "The Muse," is only eight lines long, and it is one of the most perfect lyric poems ever written in any language. I have never dared to translate it, because the English version by Stanley Kunitz is so fine that I could not imagine it done better.

Only now, after decades of living with this poem, and opening all my featured readings with it, did I come to realize that there is an unexpressed secret hidden in this poem. The "turn" in the poem is when the poet asks her Muse, "Are you the one ... whom Dante heard dictate / the lines of his Inferno?" She answers, "Yes."  In Akhmatova's Russian the final word is not da, for "Yes," but ya, for I am, rhyming with dikotovala (dictate).

A spine-chilling line. But why, we ask, does Akhmatova interrogate a Muse she would seem to know so well? My answer is that this Muse is a stranger, not the one she expected.

Euterpe, the muse of lyric poetry, is a gentle maiden who carries an aulos (flute) and wears a laurel wreath. Instead, her guest is, unexpectedly, Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.

Sometime later in her life, Akhmatova would be challenged to write about the horrors of Stalin's rule, when a woman standing in a line to learn the fate of prisoners challenges her, "Can you describe this?" So "The Muse" is prophetic of what a lyric poet would be called to do, and which she did in her long poem, "Requiem."

Finally, I saw a way to adapt this poem on my own terms, elaborating on it to make plain that Akhmatova's visitor is not the one she expected, and is in fact a terrifying one.

All the lines came to me yesterday upon waking. They are unrhymed eight-syllable lines, except for the final couplet. I did not think I would ever find an equivalent to Akhmatova's last two lines in English, but I think the almost unvoiced "Oh!" is a nice way round it out, and should be very effective in reading aloud.

Who Cares to Listen to Songs? (A Russian Poem)

     Translated by Brett Rutherford
     from the Russian of Anna Akhmatova

Who cares to listen to songs

now that the prophecy of bitter days is true?

Hear me, old songs: the world has ceased

its being marvelous.

So hush, and do not break my heart.

Like swallows, not long ago

you led the morning out, ignoring its risks.

Now songs must lead a desperate life,

begging for crumbs at strangers’ doors.

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.


*** ***
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.

Go Into Exile, or Remain and Suffer?

Many Russian poets and writers fled into exile to get away from Lenin and Stalin. Most Russian exiles were miserable and depressed. Many Russian writers and poets who remained were imprisoned, or murdered. Anna Akhmatova remained, and her brave lyric poems are Russian icons now. Here is my translation/adaptation of her poem about the choice of fleeing or remaining. Food for thought as some of us think of leaving the United Snakes.

ANNA AKHMATOVA: I'M LIKE A RIVER

Adapted from the Russian by Brett Rutherford

I'm like a river
this heartless epoch turned
from its accustomed bed.
Strayed from its shores
this changeling life of mine
runs off into a channel.

What sights I've missed,
absent at curtain time,
nor there when the house lights dim.
A legion of friends
I never chanced to meet.
Native of only one abode —
city I could sleepwalk
and never lose my way —
my tears preventing eyes
from seeing the dreamt-of
skylines of foreigners!

And all the poems I never wrote
stalk me, a secret chorus
accusing me, biding the day
they'll strangle me.
Beginnings I know,
and endings too,
and living death,
and that which I'll not,
if you please, recall.

Now there's a woman
who's assumed my place;
usurping my name, she leaves
me only diminutives to end
my poems with: I'll do the best I know with them.

Even the grave appointed me
is not my own.
Yet if I could escape my life,
looking straight back at what I am,
I should at last be envious.

Subjects: Russian poetry, Akhmatova, translations, exile.

Anna Akhmatova: I'm Like A River

Poet Anna Akhmatova braved it out in Soviet Russia when she could have fled, as many others did, to Romantic, if impoverished, exile. She endured the Stalin years, and was terrorized and spied upon. Friends vanished, and her son was arrested and killed. In this severe little self-analytical poem, Akhmatova accuses and defends herself. She knows that her work was her life's end. This is my own adaptation from the Russian original.


I'm like a river
this heartless epoch turned
from its accustomed bed.
Strayed from its shores
this changeling life of mine
runs off into a channel.
What sights I’ve missed,
absent at curtain time,
nor there when the house lights dim.
A legion of friends
I never chanced to meet.
Native of only one abode —
city I could sleepwalk
and never lose my way —
my tears preventing eyes
from seeing the dreamt-of
skylines of foreigners!
And all the poems I never wrote
stalk me, a secret chorus
accusing me, biding the day
they’ll strangle me.
Beginnings I know,
and endings too,
and living death,
and that which I’ll not,
if you please, recall.
Now there’s a woman
who’s assumed my place;
usurping my name, she leaves
me only diminutives to end
my poems with: I’ll do the best I know with them.
Even the grave appointed me
is not my own.
Yet if I could escape my life,
looking straight back at what I am,
I should at last be envious.

That Moment

A prisoner in Stalin's camps kept this notebook, made of wood and birch bark, hidden under his straw bedding. He wrote on this page, from memory, a 1917 poem by Anna Akhmatova. Below, I have made my own version of the poem followed by a few lines of my own about the photo.

I know precisely when it happened --
Monday, the twenty-first. At night,
the roofs of the city enshrouded in mist --
and what -- some idling fool decided
there was a thing in the world called love.

And look at us -- from boredom
or laziness, we bought the lie
and we live it thus: daily we
look forward to meetings; nightly
we dread the moment of parting.
And, oh, we fall slaves
to every passing love song.

But, gradually, this thing I know
will be passed on to everyone,
and a hush will descend.
I figured this out by accident,
and since, have parted ways
from the self I was formerly.
                                             --- Anna Akhmatova, 1917

              ****

Somewhere, a nameless man,
a cipher in an unmapped gulag
makes, and conceals
   beneath his dank straw bed,
a birch-bark notebook.
With god knows only what for ink
he writes this poem from memory.
"Akhmatova," he sighs. "I love her."
They have never met. Her bleak work
and its desolating music
his one last link to things of beauty.

Alexander Pushkin: The Demons

A new paraphrase/adaptation of a Russian poem from 1830.

The clouds whirl, the clouds scurry.
The moon, unseen, lights up
from above the flying snow.
Gloom-ridden sky, gloom-ridden night:
on my life, I can’t find the way.

I drive, I drive on the endless steppe.
The little bell’s ding-ding-ding
flies back to me, fearsome,
fearsome in spite of one’s self,
lost bells amid an unknown plain!
— “Driver, don’t stop! Keep going on!” —

“It’s impossible, sir. It’s a heavy go
for the horses against all this snow.
And my eyes are swelling shut, sir.
Who can make out where snow ends
and where the land begins?
All the roads are covered, I swear.
Kill me if you like. I’ve stopped,
for not a track is to be seen.
We are lost! What would you have me do?” —

“What have you been following, driver,
if you can see no road?” —

“Some Demon of the steppe, my lord,
is leading the horse and me. I thought
I recognized a turn or two, but no,
now we’ve been turned aside. We’re lost!

“Look, there ahead beyond that drift
he huffs, and spits at me. My God,
he’s almost led the stumbling team
into a steep ravine! Back, back!

“Did you not see him, sir? He stood
as thin as a weird mile-post before us.
(Here, take this cloth and clean
your fogged-up spectacles!)
Look there — that little spark was him,
and now he’s gone into the empty dark.”

The clouds whirl, the clouds scurry.
The moon, unseen, lights up
from above the flying snow.
Gloom-ridden sky, gloom-ridden night:
on my life, I can’t find the way.

We have no strength to go onward:
there, look, our tracks again:
we have gone in a full circle!
The little bell is suddenly silent,
in a fog so thick it cannot tremble.

The horses stop. What is that in the field?
“Who knows, sir. It’s just a tree stump.
No, Bozhe moi, I see a wolf!”
The snowstorm becomes furious,
the snowstorm howls and wails.
The snorting horses make sounds
of terror and try to break the reins.

“There – farther on — the Demon.
I saw him jump, sir. See there:
just those two eyes float deep,
red lamps inside the gray-white
nothingness of sky and snow.”

Then comes a sudden silence,
a narrow path made visible
lures on the horses; the bell
makes tentative tinkles. I see
a line of phantoms assembled
on either side of us,
in the midst of the whitening plains.

Onward we go, the driver’s
whispered litany of Bozhe moi,
Bozhe moi and the silver ding
of the blessed sledge-bell
our only prow and pilot.

Endless and formless,
the Demons watch us
in the dim play of the moonlight;
they are are legion as leaves
on the ground in November.

How many are there? Where do they go
en masse in this blizzard night?
And, oh, they are singing. Hush, driver!
Listen to that plaintive melody!
Are they off to some hobgoblins’ burial?
Is Baba Yaga at last to be married?

The clouds whirl, the clouds scurry.
The moon, unseen, lights up
from above the flying snow.
Gloom-ridden sky, gloom-ridden night:
on my life, I can’t find the way.

In faith the driver and the horses
plod on in the narrow passage,
the right-of-way the Demons grant us
as they swarm and swarm around us,
some walking on snow and treetop,
some leaping into the storm itself.

Home, if I make it there, will not be warm
enough, nor will any bright song erase
the funereal chant of the Demons,
whose mourning rends my heart.

Bozhe moi, ding-ding-ding,
Bozhe moi, ding-ding-ding
Bozhe moi, ding-ding-ding

1830, Translation and adaptation by Brett Rutherford, 2012