The Feast, and Old Women, and Beads
- The Feast, and Old Women, and Beads
The Feast
If he reads the stars,or lays out stones, like cards,and boils up sand and needlesto learn what comesout of all that now is—even so, he will discover very little.
Life—is a young wine.No matter how much you drink,it will not dull your mindor loosen your tongue.Better not even to start.
But when the candles are snuffed outand everyone leaves to go homeor nods off at the table—then it’s frightening to thinkfrom whom you sought counsel,and what matters you discussed,where you have been, and why. [End Page 242]
Old Women
As patient as an old artist,I love to look long and hardat the faces of devout and spiteful old women:their mortal lipsand the immortal strengththat has pressed their lips together.
(It’s as if an angel sits there,stacking money into columns:five-kopeck pieces and lesser ones . . .Shoo!—he says to the children,birds, and beggars,—shoo, he says, go away:can’t you see that I’m busy?)
I look—and I draw a picture in my mind:myself before a dark mirror. [End Page 243]
Beads
My grandmother’s lapis ring,my great grandfather’s books—theseI can give up, I think.But somehow these glass beadsare more than I can bear to lose.
They are bright-colored, simplelike a garden of peacocks, andtheir heart is made of stars and fish scales.
Or a lake, and fish in the lake:first a black one dives up, then scarlet,then the tiniest fish, a flash of green—he will never come back now,indeed, why should he?
I love not the poor, nor the rich,not this country, nor any other,not the time of day, nor time of year—but I do love what is all seeming:it is a mysterious form of joy.It has no price—and makes no sense.
from Old Songs, 1980–81 [End Page 244]
Olga Sedakova emerged from unofficial poetry circles in the post-Soviet period and has now published more than a dozen books of poetry and prose. A teacher of Dante, Pushkin, and contemporary Russian poetry, she has also created a dictionary of Old Church Slavonic words and has written essays on philosophy, literary criticism, and theology, as well as cultural commentary. Her work has been translated into many languages, including French, Hebrew, Danish, Greek, Serbian, and German, and she has translated into Russian the work of Dickinson, Mallarmé, Rilke, St. Francis, Petrarch, Dante, and others. A recipient of the Andrei Bely Prize, the Vladimir Solovyov Prize in the Vatican, the Solzhenitsyn Prize, and the Officier d’ Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République Française, she lives in Moscow. The poems in this issue of NER will appear in In Praise of Poetry, to be published by Open Letter in spring 2014, translated by Stephanie Sandler with Carolyn Clark and Ksenia Golubovich.
Stephanie Sandler, who is Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, is an American scholar of Russian poetry and a translator of contemporary Russian poetry. Author of Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (Stanford University Press, 2004) and editor of collections on sexuality and the body in Russian culture, and on ideas of the self in Russian history, she has also written widely on contemporary Russian poetry. Her translations include Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version, with Genya Turovskaya (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). The poems by Olga Sedakova that appear in this issue will be published by Open Letter in In Praise of Poetry, translated by Stephanie Sandler with Carolyn Clark and Ksenia Golubovich, in spring 2014.
