Yevgeny Aleksandrovich

"A poem can be finished," wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti many years ago, "a translation can only be abandoned."

But can an original poem ever truly be finished either? Even great poets are notorious for returning to old poems throughout their careers and tinkering with them, re-working them constantly until it is difficult for anthologists to work out exactly what the definitive version is. All a poet really does is drag thoughts or scenes or ideas from the subconscious and translate them into words in one of our flawed, limited human languages, and perhaps this is the same thing all along.

My plan now is to publicly abandon several of the poems I wrote in Russia last winter on my blog over the course of the next few weeks. I'm used to surfacing in this medium only at the occasional poetry reading at a bar or café in Berlin, where the words fly by at a merciful rate and the audience only has a chance to reflect on the poem once the flurry of sentences has vanished into the ether. Nothing needs to be fixed, and you can ad lib or change bits that didn't work for next time. It's a different, rather more daunting prospect to hang the words out to dry, but here we go.

Poem number one was written on Christmas Eve in St. Petersburg and is addressed to the Siberian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. I'd been reading an old Penguin edition of his early poems, and knew absolutely nothing about him apart from that. I typed it out in Olya's mother's warm little kitchen as we hid ourselves away from the brutal Russian winter, using the few pages of verse ('Zima Junction', about his hometown, being the apparent masterpiece, but my favourite was 'In Georgia'), a translator's introduction written in 1962, and an old photograph of an angry young man smoking a cigarette as my research material.

Here it is, then. Unfinished, perhaps, but I hope that these poems collectively will serve to explain what I'm trying to say in the awkward silence that I fall into whenever people ask me, "Well, how was Russia?".

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich

The ash-cat tangles
with emptiness on the linoleum
Crumples the autumnal pages on
discarded Yevtushenko

The tight bay window
Holds a wheeling barrage of snow
Stifling the year-heavy cobblestones beneath
Sighs disrupt the dust
in the used light

Cream cupboards scrubbed cleaner
and the gas flame
chewing patiently, blue gold
at the charred rear of the squat silver saucepan

Yevtushenko!
You’re young!
and wearing a cigarette
and a tie clip
Pale and Irate, writing the blonde truth
Lacking Mayakovsky’s sinister
handsome shotgun darkness

And the
Introduction
tells me you were attacked 21st June 1957 in Komsomolskaya Pravda
A publication which I actually saw yesterday
behind the smeared glass of
the counter as I waited in line at the shabby
Vassilyostrov post office with its bored ponytails
Who don’t chew bubblegum but should
Writing raucous rhythms in saliva as they spit
Davai, davai
Give me your documents
A tragic old Siberian song
Heard once upon a time in bearded mouths
At Zima Junction

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich, your name is a tug of war of the consonants
I, too, would like to be “a fearless spokesman of his generation”
(Any generation would do)
And I’m jealous of your adjectives

- Yevtushenko 52 years and 6 months and 3 days after they slandered You
Are you still muttering new words
above the anemic linoleum
of some lucky girlful Moscow kitchen?

Or are you a literary footnote deep
Beneath the subdued, lamp-bitten courtyards
In this one evening’s surrendering light
And unbroken snow?

It would be easy enough to find out.