Sample Poems

Issue 7

Sample Poem

Names with asterisks link to bios.

Untitled

To Mother

Edward Hopper: Western Motel, 1957

Song Sent to Hor khang from Prison

from Ficticia, II

written 1977

Gennady Aygi (1934–2006) was a Chuvash poet who wrote over twenty books of poetry in Russian and Chuvash, including In the Name of the Father, Now Always Snows, Field-Russia, and Veronica’s Notebook. Aygi, who lived and wrote in Moscow, is considered a classic of the late-Soviet avant-garde and was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1991. Chuvash is listed as an endangered language by UNESCO and is little known to Western readers. Aygi’s Russian work has been widely translated, but “To Mother” is one of the first English translations of his Chuvash poetry.

To Mother

Do not confront me when I come home:
Open the door, leave the garden.
I have left my needlework on the bench —
I’ve had stockings that fasten for a long time.

Put the spade in the corner,
Place the pencil stub on the window.
I have read the envelopes in my pocket a hundred times:
That is why in places they are faded, the endings blackened out.

You will not be able to reproach me again:
Shamefully, he forgets that I was at home as I ought.
They will barely chide a man when they let him go . . .
When I come home do not confront me.

translated from Chuvash by
Sarah Valentine

Sarah Valentine received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Slavic Department at UCLA. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Slavic and East European Journal, and ReDactions: Poetry and Poetics and her book, The Poetics of Gennady Aygi, is forthcoming in 2008.