One of my most
pleasurable poetry discoveries of recent months has been
Katherine E.Young's collection,
Day of the Border Guards (University of Arkansas
Press, 2014), a book that addresses the author's long experience of
living and working in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. Katherine, who
I was lucky enough to meet at a reading she gave in Cheltenham
recently, is also an accomplished translator of Russian verse into
English, and her deep knowledge of and love for Russian literary
culture in particular are a hallmark of this collection. And yet the
tone here is never academic; rather, the poems are constructed around
the lived detail of everyday existence in Russia's past and present,
closely observed, yet never exoticized. I have many personal
favourites in the book, but Katherine has been kind enough to allow
me to showcase the following poem.
Pushkin Museum of
Fine Arts
But how little they
resembled the gods
who wore winged
crowns in allegorical paintings,
those dissidents who
frowned through scotch-taped glasses
and shook their
fingers at my naïveté.
No more than I
resembled Icarus
falling from the
sky, my failures even
more ordinary. What
amazed me then:
the armies of the
everyday who woke
each morning and set
patiently about
making something of
their lives, despite
every conceivable
incentive to do
nothing. Onetime
ploughmen throttled combines,
the torturer’s
chauffeur strained his back
changing a flat,
printers inked metal plates
to print the
newspapers office workers
used to wrap up
fish. On the Koltso,
trucks belched
smoke; and up in space men floated
in expensive
delicate ships and watched
the earth in blue
radiance whirling away.
Of 'Pushkin Museum
of Fine Arts', Katherine writes:
'I first went to the
USSR as a student in 1981 – all the poems in
Day of the BorderGuards are in some way connected to the years I lived and worked in
the Soviet Union and then Russia. I started studying Russian because
I wanted to be an astronaut and meet up with cosmonauts in space: I
had this naïve, idealistic notion that meeting face-to-face with
Soviet citizens could somehow help bridge the Cold War gap between
America and the USSR. And, in fact, meeting Russians – all the
peoples of the USSR – was illuminating, but not always in ways I’d
expected. Quite often, Soviet citizens turned out to be just as
mulish, obstinate, and unempathetic as Americans! Some of the most
mulish and obstinate among them (with good reason, of course) were
the dissidents and refuseniks whose lives had been twisted and ruined
by the Soviet system: they could be even more strident in their
anti-Soviet rhetoric than Americans. This was an uncomfortable
discovery for me, because I instinctively distrust people who see the
world in black and white. In later years, I’ve experienced a good
deal of guilt for harboring such mixed feelings about the dissidents,
for preferring moral ambiguity to moral certainty, for not fully
understanding how much they suffered. But at the time, I found the
very Soviet-ness of the USSR in all its strangeness, its casual
cruelty, its cheerful stagnation, to be curiously compelling. This
poem explores my fascination with Homo Sovieticus, particularly the
generation of women who lost millions of potential mates in the
Second World War, women who held the nation together from sheer force
of will, almost completely uncredited (nor do they receive their due
in my poem, I’m sorry to say). While the poem pays obvious homage
to WH Auden, its final line comes from the nineteenth-century Russian
poet Mikhail Lermontov’s phrase “The earth sleeps in blue
radiance…” from “Alone I set out on the road” [“Выхожу
один я на дорогу”]. I discovered new meaning in
Lermontov’s phrase when translating Inna Kabysh’s
“Yuri Gagarinwas a great Russian poet”. Elsewhere Kabysh has written eloquently
about the unimaginably difficult everyday existence of Soviet and
Russian women, but her poem about Gagarin (the first human in space)
speaks particularly to the kind of idealism and optimism felt by a
young American girl who wanted more than anything to grow up and
become a celestial ambassador.'
The American poets
who get a hearing on this side of the Atlantic are few in number
compared to the productivity of US poetry, and we often rely on UK
publishers to act as gatekeepers, selecting for us the books we will
engage with. Clearly, British poets and readers have much to gain by
looking further afield in the US poetry scene. In that spirit, I can
wholeheartedly recommend Katherine's book,
which can be ordered inthe UK.
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