Goodbye to Friends
- Goodbye to Friends
In your long jackets, broad-brimmed hats,with notebooks of your poems,you disintegrated long ago in dustlike fallen lilac blossom.
Yours is a country free of ready forms,where all is mingled, fractured, dislocated,where there’s no sky—only a grave mound—and the moon’s orbit never changes.
A synod of soundless insects singsin a language foreign to our ear,and a beetle-man holds out a tiny lanternto greet acquaintances as they appear.
Are you at peace, my comrades?Free of all memories? At ease?Your brothers now are ants and roots,dust pillars, grass-blades, sighs.
Your sisters now are pinks, sprays of lilac,chickens, little chips of wood;and your language has no powerto recall a brother left behind.
Your brother has no home yet in the landwhere, shadow-light, you lighted long agoin your long jackets, broad-brimmed hats,with notebooks of your poems.
1952 [End Page 160]
Nikolay Alexeyevich Zabolotsky (1903–58), the son of an agronomist and a schoolteacher, spent his childhood in the remote province of Vyatka. He studied in Moscow and Petrograd, and in 1928 was the primary writer of the manifesto for the modernist literary group OBERIU, or “Association of Real Art.” Many of the poems in his first collection, Columns (1929), are vignettes of some of the grotesque aspects of city life. In 1933, his poem “The Triumph of Agriculture”—about a utopian world in which the joys of Communism are shared with cows and horses—was seen as satirical, though it may have been intended as a sincere vision of a better future. A large collection of poems, already in proof, was subsequently canceled, and he turned to translations and children’s writing in order to make a living. Zabolotsky’s concern with the place of human beings in the natural world remained constant. In 1937, he published seventeen poems on nature and philosophy, for which he was charged with producing anti-Soviet propaganda and sent to Siberia. During the sixty-day journey in a crowded cattle truck, Zabolotsky composed “Forest Lake,” a poem he especially valued. In 1946 he returned to Moscow, where he was reinstated into the Soviet Writers’ Union; he continued writing and translating until his death.
Robert Chandler is the author of Brief Lives: Alexander Pushkin (Hesperus Press, 2009). His translations of Vasily Grossman and co-translations of Andrey Platonov were published by NYRB classics. He has edited anthologies of Russian short stories and Russian magic tales for Penguin Classics. Together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, he has recently completed an Anthology of Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky (Penguin Classics, 2014). His translation of stories by Teffi will be published by Pushkin Press in summer 2014 in a collection entitled Subtly Worded.
