Poems Found In Translation: “Lera Yanysheva: St. Petersburg (From Russian Romani)” |  |
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Posted: 14 Oct 2016 07:38 PM PDT
I am not including an audio recording of the Romani text. I was unable to make one. I couldn't make it through reading the whole poem aloud without my voice cracking.
This poem is based on real events. Since 2003, Romani neighborhoods in and on the outskirts of St. Petersburg have been repeatedly attacked by Neo-Nazi skinhead groups, with the reaction of the police and the public seldom rising above indifference. The poem is an anti-prayer. It is the voice of a woman who does not ask for intercession, because she has learned there is no point. Like Job, it simply asks: what the fuck. Stepping back from the narrative thrust of the poem, I notice its antagonistic dialogue with the life of Christ as related in Christian mythology. The pleas echo Christ's words on the cross and in Gethsemane. The speaker points out in none-too-subtle terms what she and the Virgin Mary have in common. When she thinks sees her son alive stepping out of the Metro (i.e. coming up from underground) in a moment of confusion which makes her question her own sanity, it is a kind of non-Resurrection which turns the myth of Christ's Resurrection on its head. If the point of miracles is to make one believe, this un-miracle serves to make her even less sure of what she can believe. The speaker of this poem — after calling out like Job, but receiving no such answer as he did — turns at the end of the poem to the city of St. Petersburg, and by extension the nation which it represents, implying that these people wouldn't have done a damn to help Jesus himself, anymore than they did to stop these Nazis. The story of Christ and of the Christian God rings hollow. So too can the beauty of the titular city itself no longer be anything but intolerable to look at. (The Romani text literally says she cannot look upon beauty, without specifying whose beauty or of what sort, or whether it's beauty in general. Yanysheva's Russian translation of this poem, however, makes the thrust of the final line more clear-cut.) All St. Petersburg's beauty, and all the wonderful memories it has given her, are now belied by the seediness, callousness and inhumanity it harbors. Like the Christian God, if He even exists, St. Petersburg itself is cruelly unfeeling. In the final direct second person apostrophe in the penultimate stanza, when the speaker says palso že mánca 'djáke tu kerdjan? "Why did you do something like this to me?" it is not entirely clear whom, or what, she addresses. This place, this city, was her home in every sense of the word. It, too, has forsaken her. St. Petersburg By Lera Yanysheva Translated by A.Z. Foreman I take the route he used to stroll along, till I　 See the same shop he used to stop in every day.　 Oh God do I feel sick. My heart's all shredded. Why?　 Why did you have to take my little boy away?　 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　God oh God! We lived an honest life 　　　　　　　　　but you of course would know. He'd not hurt anyone.　　 　　　　　　　　　　Everyone knows he was too sweet. For two weeks he was laid up in a coma 　 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　and then...Oh 　　　 God! He had just turned twenty.....　 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Skinheads jumped him in the street. I crawled across the floors of all your churches on my knees,　　 Groveling while my boy lay in that hospital, 　　 And stayed up for his sake each night to offer you more pleas. 　　 Why? Answer now! Why did you just ignore it all!　 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　God oh God! I'd dreamt of my son's wedding day, of welcoming a wife.　 Instead I got prepared for him to die...and now today....　 O Blessed Virgin, what on earth still justifies my life?　 You...you know what it's like to lose your son this way.　 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　God oh God! I press my palms against the shop's display glass...no more pleas, 　 Just thinking: how could I deserve what you have done?　 Then I look over at the Metro exit and....I freeze..　 I'm losing it. I could have sworn that was my son. 　 I grew up here, got married here, and found a calling here 　 Singing to their applause. The times were good to me. 　 Yesterday, God I held this Russian city dear.　 Today, it's got a beauty that I cannot stand to see.　 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　God oh God. The Original:
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