Ilya Kaminsky

@ilya_poet

Translation is the art of failure
-Umberto Eco

Poetry is what is lost in translation
-Frost

Poetry is what is found in translation
-Octavio Paz

Every great age of poetry is the great age of translation
-Pound

Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated.
-Shakespeare

Ilya Kaminsky

 

IV. Marina Tsvetaeva 

In each line's strange syllable: she awakes

as a gull, torn 

between heaven and earth. 

I accept her, stand with her face to face. 

-- in this dream: she wears her dress 

like a sail, runs behind me, stopping 

when I stop. She laughs 

as a child speaking to herself:

"soul = pain + everything else." 

I bend clumsily at the knees

and I quarrel no more,

all I want is a human window 

in a house whose roof is my life. 

Ilya Kaminsky

BETWEEN BOMBARDMENTS

Come on
skylark
you door-to-door salesman overselling a song
claiming
it is fresh—
it was not
it was not
moistened
by your, or anyone’s, throat

Ilya Kaminsky

 Town Watches Them Take Alfonso

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Now each of us is
a witness stand:

Vasenka watches us watch four soldiers throw Alfonso Barabinski on the sidewalk.
We let them take him, all of us cowards.

What we don’t say
we carry in our suitcases, coat pockets, our nostrils.

Across the street they wash him with fire hoses. First he screams,
then he stops.

So much sunlight—
a t-shirt falls off a clothes line and an old man stops, picks it up, presses it to his face.

Neighbors line up to watch him thrown on a sidewalk like a vaudeville act: Ta Da.
In so much sunlight—

how each of us
is a witness stand:

They take Alfonso
And no one stands up. Our silence stands up for us.
 

Ilya Kaminsky

 

Photo credit: Cybele Knowles, 2013

from Deaf Republic: 14

Each man has a quiet that revolves

around him as he beats his head against the earth. But I am laughing

hard and furious. I pour a glass of pepper vodka

and toast the gray wall. I say we were

never silent. We read each other’s lips and said

one word four times. And laughed four times

in loving repetition. We read each other’s lips to uncover

the poverty of laughter. Touch the asphalt with fingers to hear the cool earth of Vasenka

Deposit ears into the raindrops on a fisherman’s tobacco hair.

And whoever listens to me: being

there, and not being, lost and found

and lost again: Thank you for the feather on my tongue,

thank you for our argument that ends,

thank you for my deafness, Lord, such fire

from a match you never lit.

Notes:
These poems are from the unfinished manuscript Deaf Republic. This story of a pregnant woman and her husband living during an epidemic of deafness and civil unrest was found beneath the floorboards in a house in Eastern Europe. Several versions of the manuscript exist.—IK