Tomas Venclova (#poetry)

Azovstal

Hail to you, forgotten Goddess of History!

With your rocket-shell retinue, slaughtered soldiery,

We recognize you--emerging--that day of fear,

When caterpillar treads and helicopters cross the border.

 

Then we grow accustomed to your rule. At first:

A high-rise's ruptured chest, trees ablaze on the coast,

Blasted train junctions, the endless steppe's theatre

Where, mired in black earth, Mazepa was cursed by Peter.

 

For Death is still young--she needs agility, time--

To train, master her craft--slowly takes aim,

Flails for a while: the body greeted by shrapnel

Only after the fifth try--after, a dead lull falls.

 

A drone traces an invisible path in the air.

The twenty-year old guard slowly leads an elder

Behind a fence's shelter--what matter he's a civilian--

For both, the last few meters will only lengthen.

 

A pea coat's owner abandons one site of ruin--

Occupies another. A satellite docked in the heavens

Impassively looks on. Cannon blast a nitrogen cistern;

Ten blocks have been taken--gloria nostra aeterna.

 

How distant the harbours and train stations of salvation!

Facing the checkpoint: friend or foe? It's unknown--

Will they shoot or let you go--chickens left by the gates

For looters, goats loose in the yards--turn the gaze

 

To the map with unmarked Trostyanka, Merefa, Irpin--

With their torn-off roofs thrusting up through nettles,

And caught in the throat: the stench of those no longer,

While children learn to say 'traitor', 'rifle', 'hunger'.

 

A bullet, not a seagull, incises the low tides' line,

Beyond a broken window, a mirror reflects clear skies--

Descendents born in shelters observe it with fear,

For not God's kingdom, but a sky of nuclear threat is near.

 

Clotted blood stains. The bass and alto of explosions.

For every Thermopylae there will be an Ephialtes.

Bid them farewell--for honour or shame, you don't know:

The path's cut off--in the end, the Medes will break through.

 

So then, Goddess of History, war remains war

In a hostile city: a sunshine-struck boulevard.

A student under a linden grinds a cigarette into sand,

Repeats the old line: "How sweet it is to hate one's fatherland".

 

And the soldier--his comrades won't recall his patronym--

Subsists on stale air in the underground labyrinth,

Yet when his words cease, stone and concrete will repeat

The defiant riposte Cambronne hurled at the attackers.

 

-Tomas Venclova (tr. Ellen Hinsey & Rimas Uzgiris)

 

Azovstal is the steel works in Mariupol where Ukrainian troops resisted the Russian assault in 2022 far longer than expected.

 

Tomas Venclova (b. 1937) is a Lithuanian poet. While Lithuania was still under Soviet control he was not allowed to publish his own poetry, and worked as a translator into Lithuanian from various languages. In 1977 he helped found an organization to advocate for the rights awarded by the Helsinki Accords of 1975, and was deprived of his citizenship and exiled for his efforts. He ended up a professor at Yale.

 

Venclova is sometimes touted a possible recipient for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but at the age of 89, his moment has probably passed. 

 

The Grove of Eumenides came out from Bloodaxe Books in the UK last year. 

 

The orginal Lithuanian text and a different English translation can be found here. The stanzas rhyme AABB in Lithuanian, and the English translators use slant rhyme to preserve some of that feel. 

 

Some other notes: 

 

Ivan Mazepa was the hetman of the Cossacks allied with Peter the Great until Peter decided he was no longer going to defend Ukraine from Sweden during the Great Northern War. He was anathematized by the Russian Orthodox church, but is now a Ukrainian hero.

 

Gloria nostra aeterna - (Latin) our eternal glory.

 

Trostyanka, Merefa, Irpin - Ukrainian towns attacked in Russia's initial assault on Ukraine in 2022.

 

Ephialtes was the traitor who showed the Persians (Medes) how to get around the pass at Thermopylae and fall upon the Greek defenders in the rear. He was proscribed by the Greeks and later killed.

 

How sweet it is to hate one's fatherland - a quote from the Russian poet Vladimir Pecherin (1807-1885)