76
A sudden lurch—forward, back,
once, twice,
and they’re off
a booth on wheels,
a puddle,
garden,
clay,
clay,
sandy loam,
loamy clay,
and now—
nothing but
telephone poles
pummeling my eyes.
77
I take delight in peacetime even more,
when I compare
with how things are in war.
In war you might drop by the med-tent to get warm,
take off your kitbag,
loosen your belt,
little by little
the muscles of your heart will slow,—
it’s cozy in the med-battalion,
so quiet,
so nice,
you don’t want to leave,
and you’re dog tired;
so you sit,
and listen closely in the hush,
to
the whistle of the kerosene lamp:
it whistles,
then goes quiet;
to
the ticking
clocks.
279
I keep it old school.
Reading Aksakov.
Painting paintings,
concrete-abstract ones.
I want to forget
what the world is like.
I teach myself
not to hope for much.
Meanwhile, it’s winter.
The houses are lit up
with colored windows,
and the streetlights
are so fuzzy-looking
that looking at them tickles.
27 Nov 1963
406
“The pheasant exploded
like a firework . . . ”
Or this, from Renard:
“The partridges unfurl
like umbrellas.”
Like, like, like.
I just don’t see it.
I only mistook something once in my life,
thinking bombs detonating on snow
were bushes and trees.
17 November 1965
413
It happened once,
and stayed with me,
and I cannot forget it,
how I was trudging from the station,
all bloody, through the snow.
Coming toward me
was a girl,
she was maybe five.
With a whack of her broom
she swept me aside.
1 February 1966
from Prosthesis Factory
Yan Satunovksy
translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Philip A. Redko
Satunovsky is, above all, a delight—a personality. From the first words of a poem, he leaps from the page to sit beside you, shoot the breeze, maybe get a little profound, maybe just make you cackle along with him. Funny, moving, lewd, vicious, sweet, defiant, and always attentive—to the moment, to memory, to the strangeness of his own thoughts and feelings. In an unpublished essay written in the 1980s, his friend and fellow Lianozovo poet, Vsevolod Nekrasov, remarked of Satunovsky’s poetry: “It manages to catch awareness in the very act of becoming, speech in the act of arising; it catches the very crux of who he is . . . I don’t know of anyone else who can catch his own self at poetry this way.” Satunovsky never falsifies, never normalizes, never squeezes anything into a mold. If a huge leap, associative or even seemingly random, occurs to him in the moment, it goes in the poem—so that even a very short poem can end up far from where it started. He jumps between languages, too—his Russian is transformed on a molecular level by words, syntax, and intonations from his other tongues, Ukrainian and Yiddish, and if that weren’t enough, he liked to sprinkle in bits of languages he encountered while fighting on the Eastern Front, or which he didn’t know but was just curious about. As for structure, he avoided the regular stanzas favored by the Soviet poetic establishment, inventing—as though on the spot, a little differently for each poem—free verse forms that manage to be as earthy as anecdotes and yet intensely musical at the same time.
We worked on these poems both long-distance and—too rarely!—in person, with long lulls and short, productive bursts, always trying to be faithful not just to Satunovsky’s language, meaning and (where possible) rhythmic and acoustic effects, but also to his casual intensity, the bewildering shortness of the epic leap from ordinary speech to poetry.
We worked on these poems both long-distance and—too rarely!—in person, with long lulls and short, productive bursts, always trying to be faithful not just to Satunovsky’s language, meaning and (where possible) rhythmic and acoustic effects, but also to his casual intensity, the bewildering shortness of the epic leap from ordinary speech to poetry.
Yan Satunovksy (1913–1982) was a poet, translator and children’s book author. Born in the Ukrainian part of the Russian Empire, he fought for the Red Army in WWII and worked as a chemist in Soviet engineering. Living outside of Moscow in the early 1960s, Satunovsky connected with the unofficial writers and artists known now as the “Lianozovo School.” Outside children’s books, his poems were not published in the Soviet press during his lifetime, but they did circulate illegally in samizdat and tamizdat.
Ainsley Morse teaches in the Literature department at the University of California-San Diego and translates from Russian, Ukrainian and the languages of former Yugoslavia. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the post-war Soviet period, particularly unofficial or underground poetry, as well as the avant-garde, children’s literature and contemporary poetry.
Philip A. Redko is an editor and translator based in Sofia, Bulgaria. With Ainsley Morse, he edited and translated Yuri Tynianov’s Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film (Academic Studies Press, 2019).
