Ural taught me not to know elementary
things. I talk to nonsense. Am I no one’s,
someone’s, no one’s? Leaves circling off
the poplar—like the daisy ending with not.
My friend Nonsense taught me not to know a damn
thing. In a sailor’s shirt, à la your neighbor, the ex-con,
I roamed. God only looked at me through the moon—
like a guard through the bellybutton of the peephole.
Even when our vastness throws the horizon (like Frost—
his shovel, in a hurry to talk with a friend),
goes to me, licks my hand like a good dog,
winks with the blush flushing its cheek,
all I see, remember, and hear—people running
through the factory, the scream stopping us,
the corpse swinging under the ceiling in the dark
shop. And its shadow like a pendulum in my eyes.
March 1993
Last Will
—for V. S.
Let’s agree to this: when I die,
you will put a cross on my grave.
It will look like all other crosses
but we will know, my friend,
it’s just a signature. Like illiterates
leave their mark on paper, I want
to leave a cross in this world.
I want to leave a cross. Because
I was at odds with this life’s grammar.
I read my fate but understood nothing.
I am accustomed only to the blows—
the blows, from which—like teeth,
the letters spill out of my mouth.
And smell like blood.
November 1993
A Farewell to Youth
How I spent my childhood and youth in pain,
how I loved without understanding love,
composed dense verse, sang bitterly,
accepting almost no verb rhymes,
how I chose rhythm, scattered metaphors,
wrote all night in a neurotic style,
and in the morning, tired, went to school,
where I was the best underachiever.
It seemed the densest is the closest to truth,
the closest to life, to death, to people—
and this went on for many, many days,
but, youth, you melted with the snow
and revealed the world as simple as a wound,
which broke something in me forever, something
remained, a vacant lot, a graveyard with a church,
something in me remained forever.
So my mind now accepts a lot
of what my soul does not,
so I, exhausted in an empty battle,
am now cold and coldly observe
the disparate parts of being—
but in these parts, I must admit
I probably already have
a cracked impression of the whole.
And I must live with this impression
forever, without suffering, without
anguish, and listen to the water
bubble in sleepless radiators, drowsy,
lean over the snow-white page
in desolate night—containing
this whole darkness, this whole emptiness
inside myself, I haven’t lost my mind.
March 1996
*
This is how frost covers the granite
and earth turns to ice—
I want to leave forever
this city covered in memory.
I will drink the warm station beer
I will see a cloud over my head,
I will hear the desolate music—
I am saying goodbye forever.
I want more sky, warmth, humanity.
Poet, more black grief.
No discussions about eternity, i.e., that
which doesn’t exist.
It happened over winged Kama,
black and blue, in exactly that place
where Mandelstam screamed at Pushkinists
his free, toothless song.
The ex-con rips off his coat,
knocks out the window with his fist
(like Grigoryev partying in a Gypsy camp),
and stands barefoot on the broken glass.
For a long time blood flows across the floor.
For a long time blood drips off his fist.
While the sky bursts in through the hole
and the clouds rest on his head.
I was born—I still can’t believe it—
in a maze of factory yards,
in that pigeon country
forever divided into thieves
and cops. That’s why I hate
diminutive suffixes and say yes
when my friends knock
and ask for vinegar
with a smile.
Those people who squat
and can stay like that to the end,
hate homewear, bookshelves,
and pictures of dad.
Memory dumpster—miscellaneous,
miscellaneous.
Someone already dead once said, ugliness
is the beauty that our souls
cannot contain. There is too much to contain.
The trains stand in the station—
it is time. A boy says goodbye to his mother.
He is probably drafted, poor soul. So
write to us, son, we are worried. At farewell,
the dawn is more terrifying
than the sunset. So let’s kiss.
Poet, more black grief.
1997
Four Poems
Boris Ryzhy
translated from the Russian by Olga Mexina
Listen to an excerpt of the original Russian read by the translator:
I began translating Boris Ryzhy more than ten years ago. At that time, I was in the middle of my MFA in poetry at the University of Houston. I worked from Стихи (Poems), a volume, a volume of approximately 300 selected poems published posthumously in 2003 by the Pushkin Foundation in St. Petersburg, Russia. Стихи presents a selection of Ryzhy’s work from 1993 to 2001. I chose the most compelling and representative poems from each period in terms of voice and historical sentiment. The poems in this selection simultaneously represent Ryzhy’s strongest work and fully embody the era, providing American audiences with an opportunity for a lyric immersion both into Ryzhy’s unique poetics and voice as well as into the circumstances of the historical period.
The foundation of my translator’s philosophy is what Vladimir Nabokov would call “a kind of V movement,” where the letter shape symbolizes full immersion into the language of the original work and then the embodiment of the original voice in the process of an inter-semiotic translation. I began in total immersion, falling in love with Ryzhy’s work in 2000. In the third and final state of “impersonation” and “expression,” my first decision was to exclude rhyme and work in free verse. This was a difficult decision, although as I realized later in the process, the right one. Ryzhy’s poems, constructed in classical style using plain language, exhibit piercing emotional and psychological intensity. In this way, the poems are both high and low in register, highlighting the specificity of the Russian nineties as well as tracing the Russian poetic tradition. I was trying to recreate the substance of the original poems rather than their form. I did try to keep the original line breaks where it was possible with regard to meaning. In Russian, there is no strict tonal division between passive and active voice. Russian sentence structure is not rigid and word order changes with various meanings. Often, I had to translate a line into the active voice in English, but that in Russian, is neither passive nor active. My goal was to keep the voice of the speaker: a vulnerable human voice channeling life in its fleeting joy accentuated and framed by suffering.
The foundation of my translator’s philosophy is what Vladimir Nabokov would call “a kind of V movement,” where the letter shape symbolizes full immersion into the language of the original work and then the embodiment of the original voice in the process of an inter-semiotic translation. I began in total immersion, falling in love with Ryzhy’s work in 2000. In the third and final state of “impersonation” and “expression,” my first decision was to exclude rhyme and work in free verse. This was a difficult decision, although as I realized later in the process, the right one. Ryzhy’s poems, constructed in classical style using plain language, exhibit piercing emotional and psychological intensity. In this way, the poems are both high and low in register, highlighting the specificity of the Russian nineties as well as tracing the Russian poetic tradition. I was trying to recreate the substance of the original poems rather than their form. I did try to keep the original line breaks where it was possible with regard to meaning. In Russian, there is no strict tonal division between passive and active voice. Russian sentence structure is not rigid and word order changes with various meanings. Often, I had to translate a line into the active voice in English, but that in Russian, is neither passive nor active. My goal was to keep the voice of the speaker: a vulnerable human voice channeling life in its fleeting joy accentuated and framed by suffering.
Boris Ryzhy is a major Russian poet of the perestroika era. His poetics and voice are a unique synthesis of the Silver Age in Russian poetry—before the October Revolution—and the period of Russia’s tumultuous 1990s—after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He is the last poet of the perestroika era. Ryzhy’s speaker simultaneously observes, embodies, and critiques. Many of his criticisms simultaneously ring true and sound like predictions of the future. Born into a family of Russian/Soviet intelligentsia and growing up on the streets of Yekaterinburg (then called Sverdlovsk), he won a boxing championship in his teens and worked as a geologist until his death by suicide on May 7, 2001.
Olga Mexina is a writer and translator. Born in what is now St. Petersburg, Russia, she lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is a PhD candidate at Florida State University and Interviews Editor for Southeast Review. Mexina’s poetry was a finalist in Narrative’s Sixteenth Annual Poetry Contest, The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition in 2024, the 2025 Bridport Prize, the 2025 ALTA Travel Fellowship, and was an Editors’ Final Round Pick for the 2024 Plentitudes Poetry Prize. Mexina’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative, Boulevard, Red Wheelbarrow, and elsewhere, and her translations have appeared in various magazines including Resistance and Opposition Arts Review and Angime. Her book of translations of Boris Ryzhy’s poetry is forthcoming from Zephyr Press in early 2027.
