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Air Raid
This new translation of a leading contemporary Russian poet confronts English excavating its muteness, stutter, and curse. Translated by Valzhyna Mort. The Siege of Leningrad began in 1941 and lasted 872 days, resulting in the most destructive blockade in history. Already shaken by Stalin's purges of the '30s, Leningrad withstood the siege at a great human cost. AIR RAID takes us through the archives of memory and literature in this city of death. Polina Barskova's polyphonic poems stretch the boundaries of poetic form--this is what we're left with after poetry's failure to save nations and people: post-death, post-Holocaust, post-Siege, post-revolution; post-marriage and post-literature. How does language react to such a catastrophe? How does a poet find language for what cannot be told? This new translation of a leading contemporary Russian poet confronts English excavating its muteness, stutter, and curse. Poetry.
- GenresPoetry
160 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2021
35 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 2, 2022
The poems of Air Raid are often built upon phrases found in documents made available to researchers after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Letters, notes, and other ephemera written either during the time of Stalinist purges or during the near 900-day siege of Leningrad. [examples tagged; comment]. Other poems are based on archival materials from collections outside Russia.
The prelude to the poems that make up “Air Raid” imagines apartment residents congregating when the mail arrives, only to find the following marks on their letters:
Postmark:
“returned mail” “urn mail” urrrrrrrr
“doesn’t reside at this address” doesn’t doesn’t this
“unable to deliver”
DE
FRANKLY SPEAKING I’M WORRIED ABOUT YOUR SILENCE
Already 10 hours
Already 10 years
Already years your silence worries me
Although this poem ostensibly concerns the siege of Leningrad, would any part of it change if the topic were victims of Stalin’s purges? Whether by their own government or by Nazi forces, Soviet citizens were targets of deliberate annihilation. Here is a response to Nazi atrocities from the point of view of a Polish Jew, “Aladdin,” a poem in the cycle “Hampshire College Archive. Personae.”
A blackened milk tin
contains a letter of Israel Lichtenstein
written in the year of 1942 obviously.
Naturally, in the Warsaw Ghetto
two weeks before his departure to Treblinka.
Naturally.
The letter reads:
I accept oblivion for myself and my loved ones.
(My wife, whose name here is meaningless,
leave her here now nameless and faceless)
ready to become pearl string of teeth,
a chestnut lock in a mattress, a shadow.
Yet, we really wish
that whoever finds this letter inside a milk tin
resembles our daughter—Margalit.
Today, she turns twenty months.
O, she’s an extraordinary child!
Let me tell you, what a little talker, our Margalit!
Whether Barskova bases her poems on archival material or writes from creative empathy, she discovers places of hopeful persistence and joy, with love as the propelling force.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
The prelude to the poems that make up “Air Raid” imagines apartment residents congregating when the mail arrives, only to find the following marks on their letters:
Postmark:
“returned mail” “urn mail” urrrrrrrr
“doesn’t reside at this address” doesn’t doesn’t this
“unable to deliver”
DE
FRANKLY SPEAKING I’M WORRIED ABOUT YOUR SILENCE
Already 10 hours
Already 10 years
Already years your silence worries me
Although this poem ostensibly concerns the siege of Leningrad, would any part of it change if the topic were victims of Stalin’s purges? Whether by their own government or by Nazi forces, Soviet citizens were targets of deliberate annihilation. Here is a response to Nazi atrocities from the point of view of a Polish Jew, “Aladdin,” a poem in the cycle “Hampshire College Archive. Personae.”
A blackened milk tin
contains a letter of Israel Lichtenstein
written in the year of 1942 obviously.
Naturally, in the Warsaw Ghetto
two weeks before his departure to Treblinka.
Naturally.
The letter reads:
I accept oblivion for myself and my loved ones.
(My wife, whose name here is meaningless,
leave her here now nameless and faceless)
ready to become pearl string of teeth,
a chestnut lock in a mattress, a shadow.
Yet, we really wish
that whoever finds this letter inside a milk tin
resembles our daughter—Margalit.
Today, she turns twenty months.
O, she’s an extraordinary child!
Let me tell you, what a little talker, our Margalit!
Whether Barskova bases her poems on archival material or writes from creative empathy, she discovers places of hopeful persistence and joy, with love as the propelling force.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
Displaying 1 of 1 review