Refugee
- Refugee
Arseny Tarkovsky, Philip Metres, Dimitri Psurtsev, poetry, Russia
You granted me some salt for the journey, Sprinkled so much white it made me crazy. Holy Kama winter, you burn like light. I live alone as wind in a winter field.
You’re stingy, mother. Just give me A little bread. The silos are rife with snow That I can’t eat. My bag is heavy: A stone of sorrow for a slice of calamity.
The frost is consuming my feet. Who needs me? I’m a refugee. You don’t care whether or not I breathe.
What should I do among your pearls And the chill wrought silver On the black Kama, at night, without a fire?
—November 13, 1941 [End Page 362]
arseny tarkovsky was born in Elisavetgrad, Ukraine (now Kirovograd) in 1907. He was a noted translator of Turkmen, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, and other Asian poets. During World War II, he served as a war correspondent for the Soviet Army publication Battle Alarm, receiving the Order of the Red Star for valor. He wrote some of the most stunning and intimate poems about the war, which, unlike many popular war poems of the time, viewed war through an unheroic lens. He died in 1989, just before the Soviet Union fell.
philip metres is the author and translator of a number of books, most recently Sand Opera. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and five Ohio Arts Council Excellence grants. He is professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, OH.
dimitri psurtsev is a Russian poet and translator of British and American prose writers and poets — Dylan Thomas, A.S. Byatt, John Steinbeck, Dana Gioia, and others. His two books of poetry, Ex Roma Tertia and Tengiz Notepad, were published in 2001, and translations of his poems appeared in the Hudson Review. He teaches translation at Moscow State Linguistic University and lives outside Moscow.
