No Where, Now Here

You Are Big in Love You are big in love.                                 And bold. My every step is timid. I’ll cause you no harm, and can hardly do you any good. Seems you are leading me off the beaten path through a forest. Now we’re up to our waist in wild flowers. I don’t even know                              what they are, these flowers. My previous training is of no help here. I’m uncertain                       what to do or how. You’re tired.                      You ask to be carried in my arms. You are already in my arms. Ahead of us stretches all that is pure,                                                            early, young,            and what bids us journey on. How quiet you are!                                As you breathe,                                                         your high bosom raises your dress. “Do you see?                       What a blue sky! Can you tell                     what birds sing in the forest? Well, what are you waiting for?                                                    Well?                                                             Carry me then!” And where shall I carry you? Yevgeny Aleksándrovich Yevtushenko, 1955 English translation by George Reavey

Untitled #8, from the series Languor. Photo: Donavon Smallwood.

People

People No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. Nothing in them is not particular, and planet is dissimilar from planet. And if a man lived in obscurity making his friends in that obscurity obscurity is not uninteresting To each his world is private, and in that world one excellent minute. And in that world one tragic minute. These are private. In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. It goes with him. They are left books and bridges, and painted canvas and machinery. Whose fate is to survive. But what has gone is also not nothing: by the rule of the game something has gone. Not people die but worlds die in them. Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures. Of whom, essentially, what did we know? Brother of a brother? Friend of friends? Lover of lover? We who knew our fathers in everything, in nothing. They perish. They cannot be brought back. The secret worlds are not regenerated. And every time again and again I make my lament against destruction. Yevgeny Aleksándrovich Yevtushenko English translation by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi

Step by Step, Siena, Italy, April 5, 2022. Photo: Stefano Marmino.

By the way, unrhetorically speaking

Talk You’re a brave man, they tell me.        I’m not. Courage has never been my quality. Only I thought it disproportionate so to degrade myself as others did. No foundations trembled. My voice no more than laughed at pompous falsity; I did no more than write, never denounced, I left out nothing I had thought about, defended who deserved it, put a brand on the untalented, the ersatz writers (doing what anyhow had to be done). And now they press to tell me that I’m brave. How sharply our children will be ashamed taking at last their vengeance for these horrors remembering how in so strange a time common integrity could look like courage. Yevgeny Aleksándrovich Yevtushenko, 1960 English translation by Robin Milner-Galland and Peter Levi

René Magritte, Decalcomania, 1966. Courtesy of WikiArt.

The Inexpressible

The Inexpressible I want what’s inexpressible! Impudent, I play with fire without a queen My queen-reason is under the knight’s hooves What joy to lose to the fire! What flaming in the uncombed night From slender you, as from a candle! How you’ve fired-up The idea of sin! I writhe but the cry of my flesh is bliss The heretic is already freed by the fire Gul’ripshi New York Paris Madrid in flames And someone dear to me burns in them But if from the heretic’s fire The flame leaps to some poor bastard’s roof All the heretic burns for Shall be forever damned to hell For truth, when you burn down the scene of someone nearby, Is no longer truth but a lie. Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko English translation by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Anthony Kahn

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko † (Gangnus, Zima junction, Siberia, USSR, July 18, 1932 – Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, April 1, 2017). Photo: irkipedia.ru.