Misha Semenov 

Übersetzer:in

You say it creaks? Well, take the paper,
Fold it into a diligent square,
Adjust it well so that this door here
Won't open up when it so cares.
 
Unprepossessing urban snowflakes
Flutter about in the stone well
And that is all, it seems, but wait—
There is one little debt left still.
 
For man has still another chore:
To recollect all that he didn't,
On the way, say, to the drugstore,
In silence's pulsating rhythms.
 
And, from under the drugstore's cobra,
To look at evil's joyous hour
Without evil, not out of kindness,
But because life is over.

                                        To Czesław Miłosz

'Twas then I fell for foreign rhymes,
ones that rustled so stridently some dubbed them “hissing…”
And from there, I suppose, did arise,
many misfortunes of mine, fortunes too. And now I'm

a seasoned translator, professional of sorts,
spending nights rustling pages of Dal's* musty tome,
reveling in the chirping of archaic words.
and muttering out loud as if over a book of Tarot.

But I'll give thanks, though I don't know to whom
not to myself, nor to God, not to chance, nor to blind divination,
that, as I whisper at night to the Paris outside of my room,
I still hesitate, pausing in awe before hammering out each translation.

No, not to myself, nor to God, nor to chance, nor to a call from above—
but to that tongue which believed my sincere declaration of love.



_{* Vladimir Dal's Dictionary of the Russian Language, which contains tens of thousands of old words and expressions.}

O city, city, o city, city,
To rush into your window in the ice!

As I was getting out of Bologoye
I wound up stuck on side tracks there,
And now in my straightforward poems
All’s empty, empty, bare, so bare.

And a soft voice, like a wild dove,
Sliding through the celestial silence of the ether
Refuses to descend to me, stays far above,
Fails to relieve my hunger and my fever.

Forgotten backroads county, wayside and wild,
All crossings closed, all movement paralyzed.
My light-filled city, the iron child,
The cold of spring, unfaithful light.