Three Poems (Fedor Svarovsky) Translated from Russian by Peter Golub

The Funeral of Mekhos

Four tall white robots
Lay you into your grave
Elan Mekhos
My love
Forgive me
Says Kazanal Issyck
(According to ancient Mamla tradition
These last words cannot be too serious)
You loved marmalade and tea
With caramel soothed your tongue
You were just like
Us
Only better
Eternal peace be with you
As they say, Kaas da Utas
Sleep, your honor
Until the resurrection of the body
Until the end of universal darkness
Let ashes ashes rest here now
And grasses rise tomorrow
In the new world, there will be no evil
With the Eighth Cycle, darkness recedes
Alright, enough:
Koolook in Mamla
Shoosle Doo Rion in Camde
Salolma Koot in Keriodi
And Koo-oo Dde Kravva in ancient Keno
Though we know
It all means
The same thing
Let
Your broken lung be my open hand
Your tired liver my own mind
Your still heart, I, your wife


Visitors in Exile

1.
She drifts into sleep
Beneath the weight of the familiar paws
And heavy head
Of the hound
The radio emits
Quiet
Hazy music
And undecipherable voices
On the couch
In front of the ultraviolet lamp
In red sunglasses
With sunburned skin
He sits
As if in a bivouac
On a foreign planet
He looks
Like an insect
Afraid of burning his cornea
Of the radiation
He falls asleep
With his face to the sky
So as to catch any passing ship
All the same
He wears the glasses
So as not to go blind
Upon waking in the morning
Exhausted
Like a plant that needs more water
Than its environment can provide, thirst
And hunger, are constant companions
And fear as well
Of missing the tiniest variance
In what seems an absolutely empty ether
Even in sleep
Tightly clutching the transmitter

2.
They live in a rented room
In a grey nine-storey building
At the edge
Of the metropolis
She says
She is the exiled heiress of a small kingdom
In the Pleiades
He claims to be an AWOL military robot
Who found himself on this planet
As the result of by a strange series of events
Beginning with love, then
A rare manifestation of will
And finally, truancy
They would most likely forget these memories
If they could
And leave the incompatibility
Of their origins
In the past
But she cannot
Shrug the habit of constant comparison
Between what was
And what is
He, of course, has a perfect memory

3.
Even the hound
Thinks he is an exile
From another distant galaxy
He licks his wounds
And using only his mind
Moves the bones of cows and sheep
They have lain before him
There was nothing extraordinary
When they picked him up
On the street
In December
And now he preoccupies himself
With the stick, the rubber hedgehog, the old sock
The home planet is clear
In his mind
As is its destruction
His memory of tall buildings
Crumbling into dust
Still brings nauseating fearOf death
Of shame
When it passed over them
Leaving no time
To say good-bye
So
The hound too
Dreams of erasure
To forget
To lose his celestial gifts
And knowledge
But there is no way
And this unseen suffering
Caused by that parting with the past
Gnaws
At the shorthaired alien

4.
She is always dreaming of something:
For instance, April comes
The unending blizzard ends
With the arrival of the birds
Now
The Earth's sky is clear
Light clouds hover
Soon
The reconnaissance ships will drift by
Some will come down
They will need water and uranium
Grass, salt, garlic, nicotinic acid, flour
Medicine
She says:
We will go with them
Leave our clothes and furniture
Behind,
To find a place near a window
(God how I want to see that dark expanse
Pierced with the light of the stars)
We'll go to Messier 81
3Σ Gaulete has the most beautiful oceans and mountains
You know that site−Gardens of the Universe
I recently read an article about all sorts
Of decent jobs
Gardening, farming, even gathering wild plants
There are lakes everywhere
Full of warm
Pristine water
There, I swam as a little girl
When my father would fly us
To a large wooden house
Up in the north
You wake up
And the silence surrounds you
When he left me alone in the house
I would dive from the window
And turn on my back so as to slowly drift
Down, bright-green plants swayed in the current
And with my eyes to the surface
I would sink until my back touched the sand
Then I would gradually ascend
Toward the house, quivering
In the overgrowth and twisted branches
The rays of light would pierce through
The undulating shadows
Through, the mirror
Membrane of the water's surface
Down to the bottom of the lake
To my shimmering
Bare
White
Knees

5.
He watches TV
Until 4 a.m.
Drinking cognac
Filling his glass higher and higher
As if
Its effects only diminished with the night
For some time he debates going to sleep
At 4The robot, drunk and tired, wakes the heiress
Who is still loudly talking in her sleep
She hides her face, presses
Into the back of the couch
--Shhh, don't yell
Come on, please
Off to bed
You can't sleep on the couch
In your clothes
You know how you'll feel in the morning
She mechanically gets up and goes to bed
Where she falls into more dream
More spring on Earth
But the temperature drops
And a tremendous wind
Picks up
Turning into a blizzard
In the dark sky above the metropolis
An imperial spaceship heads for the blue planet
Pushing through the darkness
At tremendous speed
Leaving a long trail of incandescent particles
It is unaffected by weather
Highly resistent to gravity and electromagnetic fields
The pilot navigating the ship
Is familiar somehow
As if he were an old childhood friend
Who had grownup
Changed
Into a man
But then she recognizes
His nose and brown eyes
The robot appears by her side
(For some reason he's wearing velvet pants
And a velvet topcoat
The sleeves of his blue shirt are too long)
He takes her gently
By the hand
He checks the monitor
It's Tamaduaran, he says
We're savedShe stares at him
Uncomprehendingly
That ship, he says,
Belongs to Captain Lorador
A relative of the dog
Yes
The ship
Was controlled
By a hound


Two Robots

Two
Robots
Swam
Across that wide river
Amidst heavy fire
Petka and Chapayev
Guns roared
Shrapnel simmered
Sinking
Into the water
One of them was hit
And drowned
Before nightfall the other managed
To reach the center of operations
And delivered
The confidential report
As a result
Four divisions
Successfully withdrew
From ambush
"Piotr, Piotr"
Said the marshal,
"You really have no idea
What you've done for us
You're a commander now
Everything has been arranged
In Petrograd
You're a hero
But
Keep your wits about you
We're at war Piotr
As for Chapaev
Honor his memory by fighting."
Later
Petka
Sat on the shore (smoking and crying)
"Ah
Chapayev
Metallic
And inorganic
With shoddy RAM
And scrambled Boolean sets
They truly don't make models like you anymore
At the factory
I remember
How they called you scraps
It is my loss now
You were like a brother to me
As a robot
You know
How much
This means

Peter Golub is a writer and a translator of contemporary Russian literature. He edited the online project New Russian Poetry for Jacket Magazine in 2008, and has published several books of original and translated work. A translation of Andrei Sen-Senkov’s book, Anatomical Theater is due out in 2014 (Zephyr Press). He is the recipient of a PEN Translation Prize and a BILTC Translation Fellowship. He lives in San Francisco and is an editor with St. Petersburg Review.
Fedor Svarovsky was born in 1971 and emigrated to Denmark at the age of 19, where he received refugee status and lived for six years. In 1997, he returned to Moscow where he continues to work as a journalist. Author of three books, his poems have appeared in such leading journals as Novyii Mir and Vozdukh/Air. English translations of Svarovsky’s poems by Peter Golub are in Jacket Magazine, Diagram, Two Lines (Feb. 2012,) Absinthe (blog, March 6, 2013), and by Stephanie Sandler in World Literature Today. In 2011, Svarovsky participated in PEN’s New Voices reading series at the National Arts Club in NYC, through CEC ArtsLink. Russian Originals are in Novyi Mir, Ural, and Text Only. 
Other translations of Svarovsky by Peter Golub, are in Jacket, The Diagram, Two Lines (Feb. 2012,) and an essay in Absinthe (blog; March 6, with an essay.) Another, translated by Stephanie Sandler, is in World Literature Today. Alex Cigale's translations of Svarovsky are in Eye of the Telescope, and forthcoming in Star Line 34.2.
[N.B. We (Alex Cigale and Peter Golub) have just had word that our Selected Svarovsky in English is forthcoming in 2015 from Coeur Publishing. AC]
-- Fedor Svarovsky

Three Poems (Ned Balbo)

Red Eft

                   A helicopter hovers

toward white sky, along the shore,

in close surveillance of the beach

on which we lie among so many,

with not much left to say, sand rippling

toward us from the sea.

What do you see, not see? If I open

my eyes again, I’ll find you

lying still, or reading, sea glass

gathered in a heap, sunglasses

hiding what you’re thinking. And while

swimmers call out to friends who rise

to shake the sand from blankets,

this darkness—almost a deep red—pulses

slowly, like the surf.

Somewhere in a Golden Guide,

I read about Red Eft,

salamander mountain-spawned,

a small life, streak of blood.

Never seen one, never will. And now

the helicopter’s back, black shadow

drowning out the ocean

—Crumpled Styrofoam, dried kelp,

a horseshoe crab’s unlucky armor.

How long will we lie here, struck dumb,

paralyzed by heat, unwavering

sun and pulse of waves, so much

unsaid, withheld between us?

Nothing gained, I change position, find

my arm is touching yours.

I may just open up my eyes.

I may just say a word or two.

Instead, I only drift away

and think about red eft, red eft,

small life, a fading coolness

that you lift, cupped in your palm,

as you walk across white dunes, and paper

blows up toward the sky—

                                             A mirage,

a shimmer of heat above white noise.

Suicide of an Old Man

                       New York Times, December 7, 1879

The facts are few. It happened in Elmira.

The laborer, well-to-do—an immigrant,

or not, we’ll never know—was touched by fire,

a fit (what else to call it?), that turned saint,

sinner, or soul between, David Fitzgerald

toward his end. What labor had been his?

What symptoms or behavior had been herald?

To what force did he finally answer, “Yes,”

seeking the means—smashed bottle, carving knife,

straight razor freshly rinsed—to cut his throat

to-night from ear to ear, taking the life

he must have valued once? (Or maybe not.)

Insanity’s no answer, though the text he

features in records his age: Near sixty.

Previously unpublished

The Yankee Clipper

       For my adoptive father Carmine, Southside Hospital, October 2000

I tilt your chin, blade gliding in its pass

across smooth skin, tracks edged with shaving cream,

bed raised, your pillow white, smeared window glass

bleached by October sunlight. Razor’s rim

dabbed clean, I trim your mustache, tiny fleece-

hairs falling. Outside, dead leaves—copper, flame,

brass, verdigris—still cling to branches high

over the cars of 27A,

Main Street, Bay Shore, no ocean-view in sight.

I towel off your face. You look years younger,

i.v. measured digitally, your weight

past guessing, weeks since fortified by hunger.

Can I swing the tray out, switch the light

off, on as day wanes? Don’t you lift a finger.

“Can’t wait to get out.” Your iron-gray hair’s

gone white, all white as snow. By now, the cars

flick on their headlights, traffic thinning out.

The Yankee Clipper was an s.o.b.,

Newsweek informs us as I read aloud

excerpts for entertainment. Skeptically,

you listen, straw-slurps, shake your head, or nod

when I recount heroics, Italy

his father’s birthplace, struggling fisherman

who found the day’s catch sickening a son

meant not for boats but bats. Eyes hard, he’d stub

the dirt with one foot, step up to the plate.

He wasn’t perfect, either?  Join the club.

But now, you’re tired and need to sleep—at eight,

all visitors must leave, and in the Sub-

way Series soon to come, the Mets will bite

the dust in five games. Gore will win and lose.

DiMaggio? “No one could fill his shoes.”

From The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems  (Story Line Press, 2010)

Ned Balbo’s third book, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Story Line Press), received the 2012 Poets’ Prize, and the 2010 Donald Justice Prize selected by judge A. E. Stallings. Lives of the Sleepers (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), received the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize and a ForeWord Book of the Year Gold Medal. Galileo’s Banquet (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 1998) shared the Towson University Prize for Literature. The recipient of three Maryland Arts Council grants, Balbo has received the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. He is co-winner of the 2013 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for his translations of Baudelaire’s “Le Mort joyeux.” More poems in Iowa Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Poetry. 

-- Ned Balbo

Three Visual Poems (Márton Koppány)

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Translation (2009); Dream (2007); Still Life—for Carmen Racovitza (2012) [latter from Addenda]. 

My inclinations have always directed me towards the (actual, ever-changing) limits of verbal communication. But I don't distrust/need/enjoy words more or less than the empty spaces between them, the sheet of paper they are written on, the rhythm of the turning of the pages, unknown and forgotten symbols, fragments, natural formations like clouds—each of them and any combination of them may be an invitation. When I feel easy and ready to make something, I experience their complete equivalence.

Márton Koppány (b. 1953) lives in Budapest, Hungary. He started writing "visual" poetry at the end of the seventies and since then his work has been widely published and exhibited. His latest book in print is Addenda, Otoliths, 2012. Two other books from Otholits are Endgames and, with Nico Vassilakis, From the Annual Record of the Cloud Appreciation Society. His poems were included in three recent anthologies of visual poetry and language art: The Last Vispo (Fantagraphics, 2012), A Global Visuage (edition ch, 2012), and The Dark Would (Apple Pie Editions, 2013). Read interviews with him in Very Small Kitchen and 3AM Magazine.

-- Márton Koppány

Two Poems (Halvard Johnson)

Operative Light

1.

Facing the music snatches of dialogue he said,
"Does your head hurt?" she said, "No"
moments when everything seems personal summery clothes
make me nervous sweet defilements something wholly primitive
       
2.
Carrying my scrapbook giving in to nothing killing people
because I like to woken by a sudden shock of pain
nobody gives us anything hair combed back from her forehead
coming to our rescue shining water under the streetlights
       
3.
Plunging downward drifting down beside her familiar,
troubled world wanting to say it out loud living on credit
extending one hand toward the sun a little like standing
on the corner shaving the dog for the summer
       
4.
Slapping the surface of the table having been dead
for years now jumping up to see if you were really there
sitting on the church steps balancing the dream against
the falling light glad that you're okay
       
5.
Sitting with the gun across his knees massaging his knuckles
moonrise white over water listening to her pretending
to listen to him flights to some distant cities true, but separate
clear as could be in the silent air thinking of the evening coming up

Old Man in Sky

On the chosen day, September 22, at precisely 8:44 GMT,

the old man appears just where the sun would normally be.

The earth--its surface--unfurls itself from its globe and perks

up its ears, waiting . . .

Looking something like a Mercator projection, but without

the distortions, the edges lean forward making the whole thing

sort of concave like. The old man explains that he, looking

just a tad like George Carlin, but with more hair, has finally

found the time to come around and see what wonders he hath

wrought here. He says things seem pretty much okay, on a planetary

scale. Folks are being born and dying in pretty much the right

proportions. All in all, he says, he is pleased with his handiwork.

But, he asks in conclusion, Vas you effer in Zinzinnati?

Halvard Johnson's newest, Remains To Be Seen, is just out from Spuyten Duyvil press. Older, Changing the Subject, is with Red Hen Press (2004). Older still, Eclipse (1974,) was the third of four originally issued by New Rivers Press between 1969-1979. Another recent two, are with Hamilton Stone Editions,, where he is on the editorial board. He lives, and writes, with Lynda Schorr, in San Miquel de Allende, Mexico, and is our fearless leader/dispatcher of Truck (I feel privileged to have had his ear at the conception of this "self-propelled vehicle".

--Halvard Johnson

Dear Abby (Lynda Schor)

Dear Abby:

Every time I ask my friend Sally if she wants to hang out she says she has something else to do.  A few weeks ago she said she had to go out.  About an hour later while walking around the block I noticed her car was there.  I knocked on the door.  Sally said she was getting ready to leave and besides she was on the phone.  Does it take an hour to get ready to go out?  I don’t want to lose an old friend, but I’m not sure she really is a friend anymore.  If she is why does she keep ditching me?  My husband Lyle and I have a fourteen-month-old child together.  My two children from an earlier relationship and Lyle’s son make up our family of six.  Lyle and I make good money and we both collect child support from previous partners.  What bothers me is Lyle won’t let me see his paychecks or combine our joint incomes in a joint account.  I contracted herpes-2 after a one-night stand ten years ago.  Since the age of seventeen I have times when I feel really happy and I’m talking to friends on the Internet all of a sudden I feel a wave of sadness.  And I remember bad things, like when my best friend died when I was little.  I don’t know why this happens all the time.  What do you think?  My husband thinks my herpes-2 is a constant reminder of my promiscuity.  I get very angry at this, but then I remember that stress can trigger an outbreak.  I try to remember that the virus doesn’t change who I am inside.  I don’t think I’m a bad person, do you?  I didn’t say anything about his gonorrhea, did I?  I was in the parking lot of a shopping center when I noticed a woman two cars away yelling and hitting a little girl.  The girl seemed to be about six or seven.  I wrote down her license number.  I checked with several state agencies and fund out that although slapping may be legal in Virginia the state policy is open to interpretation.  Should I report her?  I got into my car, pulled up alongside them and called out, Are you okay?  The little girl was crying and straightening her dress.  Yes, she’s okay, the woman snapped.  This kind of behavior really bothers me.  I frequently see adults slap, pinch and berate their children—sometimes babies in strollers.  These adults seem to be out of control and everyone ignores them.  Sometimes I walk slowly by these people to let them know I see what they are doing.  One time I reported a woman who was slapping and scolding her Down syndrome daughter, who kept yelling, I’m your friend.  My mother died when I was seven.  She suffered bad depression toward the end of her life.  I actually scare myself sometimes.  But I don’t think my depression is bad enough to see someone about.  Do you?  My best friend Sheila was recently married and I was a bridesmaid.  About two months before the wedding Sheila called to say that the junior bridesmaid dress she had selected for one of her attendants was too small—size 8 for a girl who was size 12.  She wanted to know if there was anything I could do to alter the dress because it was too late to get another one.  After a lot or work and many long hours over a four-week period I finished the alterations.  Neither Sheila nor the junior bridesmaid offered to pay me for the work so I thought it was because I said I’d do it as a favor to Sheila.  A few days before the wedding I was still deciding what to give her as a wedding gift but everyone I asked said that altering the dress was enough.  Well Sheila didn’t see it that way.  On her wedding night she called me several times demanding a gift of money.  Even after her honeymoon she called and said I’d been disrespectful not to give her a gift.  Was I wrong not to give her a separate wedding gift?  My husband’s mother wants to spend a lot of time with him.  She likes us to have dinner at her apartment only a mile away.  If we can’t then she still likes my husband to.  If he can’t or doesn’t want to she gets very hurt.  She tries to make my husband feel guilty.  I tell him that’s what she’s doing but he still feels bad.  At my job I get hit on right and left by men in their fifties.  I’m not talking about cute or even simply annoying remarks, but constant lewd suggestions and requests for my phone number.  Would it be right to report these guys?  I don’t want to risk my job.  And here is an embarrassing problem:  My job requires me to make public appearances and often I am “dressed to the nines.”  I admit for dramatic purposes I sometimes apply too much makeup.  I have always been told I am beautiful and have even done some modeling.  The problem is people think I’m a man.  Once I was cornered at a festival by an angry group of people who had been fired up by one drunkard’s insistence that I was a drag queen.  You know I’m a woman—I have kids for heaven’s sake.  The first few times it happened I tried to brush it off and regain my composure—once I stopped crying.   But lately it’s getting ridiculous.  I am mistaken for a cross-dresser even when I wear very little makeup.  At five-foot-seven and a hundred and twenty pounds I’m hardly manly.  A week doesn’t go by without this happening.  My husband says I should just blow it off that people are just jealous.  But my confidence is in the cellar and I’m at my wit’s end.  I’d like to cower somewhere but my job won’t let me.  The other night my Lyle brought home a male friend for dinner without letting me know beforehand.  They both drank a lot of wine.  Then my husband wanted me to go to bed with the two of them.  Of course I declined, but I was really put out by this new wrinkle.  And neither of them even offered to do the dishes after I did my best preparing a nice meal for them.  If my husband’s mother hadn’t called to berate him for not visiting her who knows where this could have gone.  My son wants a dog, but my husband says, No way.  He becomes enraged when I bring it up.  I said it would be good for our son and he said he’d rather have a dog around than my son (who is my child with a previous husband).  Then he said it’s either him or the dog.  Now I feel I must get a dog as my first priority is my son, isn’t it?  It isn’t right for him to keep bringing up my herpes—2, either.  The other day I found my son in bed with my husband in my son’s bed.  I don’t usually walk right into his room but I needed to get something.  He said my son hadn’t been feeling well and he was just taking a nap with him.  My son seemed upset.   He asked if this meant he couldn’t have a dog.  I don’t know what to believe Dear Abby.  What would you think?

Lynda Schor's most recent book, Sexual Harassment Rules, and an older one, Seduction, are out with Spuyten Duyvil press. A half-dozen of these are here, on the Truck. Her interview with Carol Novack can be found in The Mad Hatters' Review 7. Prints of her artwork are at Hamilton Stone Review, where she also serves as Fiction Editor. She lives, and writes, with Halvard Johnson, in San Miquel de Allende, Mexico.

-- Lynda Schor