Climate

IN THE LAND OF THE LOTUS-EATERS BY DMITRY BOBYSHEV

Art by Fanny Beury

Translators’ Note

We became acquainted with Dmitry Bobyshev during a conference dedicated to the four poets known as “Akhmatova’s orphans,” held at Princeton University in the spring of 2024. This poem is part of a cycle, «Звезды и полосы» (“Stars and Stripes”), which Bobyshev composed between 1980 and 1983, soon after emigrating to the United States.  

 

“In the Land of the Lotus-Eaters” presents a set of images, majestic and repellent by turns, which attempt to capture the strangeness and promise of American culture, geography, and modernity. In building his poem around the image of the lotus-eaters’ island, Bobyshev makes use of a topos with a long literary history that extends from the Odyssey to Alfred Tennyson (whose poem on the topic was later rendered into Russian by the Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont). Its inhabitants are in a permanent, blissful state of forgetfulness, severed from the past, their former homes and loved ones, and reality itself, which has been replaced by the narcotic fantasy of “the lotuses’ ample and wondrous delights.”  

 

If the America of Bobyshev’s poem is a land of plenty and possibility, it is also a place of startling and grotesque contrasts: the text conveys this not only at the level of figurative imagery, but also by moving between various rhythms and registers (anapests and dactyls, marked archaisms, modern colloquialisms and neologisms).  

 

We were fortunate to be able to translate this poem with the guidance of both Dmitry Vasilyevich himself and of poet and translator Ilya Kaminsky, and we wish to thank both of them for sharing their invaluable perspectives on the text with us.

Emma George and Kathleen Mitchell-Fox

In the Land of the Lotus-Eaters

Translated from Russian by Emma George and Kathleen Mitchell-Fox

Hand of America, 

its fortress of bones: 

the crow-black cliffs of New York, 

          the gray planes of New Jersey, 

           Pennsylvania’s yellowish mounds, 

            Vermont’s valleys of marble, 

          Massachusetts’s rusty granite. 

 

Ten fingers open for business, 

the heart skips a beat 

in surprise.  

          A fist curls 

          gripping a massive bat: 

          it’s a hit! — 

          and the Urals  

          are split. 

 

That’s not why, though; no, no! — 

reaching the terminal impressions 

and imprints — 

          a catch! — at the continent’s edge 

          is the craggy left  

          antipode; 

sinistra in a red 

catcher’s 

mitt 

          binds the coasts together, 

          fixing them dexterously 

          with the right,  

                  it’s evenly handed democracy 

                     — yessir! 

 

Both palms lifted upward  

that continent-cauldron; 

within it, the living earth stirs: 

           plastic-wrapped chickens turn somersaults, 

           lotuses, 

                  sweetcorn swells.  

                      The suspension boils smoothly, —  

money simmers like foliage, 

every face melts together 

           into one motley Über-Face, 

           into one meta-Message, 

expressible 

in undersea slang 

as icy-slick 

as it’s nimble, you see… 

             It’s so funny to speak, 

                     but sing tonically, tongues, 

            your brand-new nation. 

Good job they’re not from that Blighty: 

            that chap always 

            inhales, unsatisfied, 

            inane and habitual, 

            he’s gone limp in his lisp… 

 

But, those who have tasted 

the lotuses’ ample and wondrous delights 

speak in utt’rances strange: 

              they join hands in a circle, 

            and part with their memories, 

            relinquish their grief. 

Layers of insult 

beneath a great influx 

of labor and comfort, 

eroded,  

            together with terror, 

            they descend from the mountain’s bent back  

            like bloated bark.  

 

So, then: you, lotus-eater,  

drink your fill 

from that font 

            of life, 

            just life, 

            quietly good, 

            human. 

У пожирателей лотоса 

By Dmitry Bobyshev

 

Пясть Америки, 

крепость ее костяка: 

вороные утесы Нью-Йорка, 

            серые грани Нью-Джерзи, 

               Пенсильвании желтые груды, 

                мраморы в падях Вермонта, 

             Массачузетса бурый гранит. 

 

Десть открыта для дела, 

а сердцу врасплох 

как не ёкнуть, 

            Представляя кулак 

             и массивную биту: 

            удар! – 

             и Урал 

             перебит. 

 

Нет, совсем не затем! – 

где конечные вмятины 

и отпечатки – 

            хвать! – за край континента 

            скалистая левая 

            противоперсть; 

шуйца в рыжей 

бейсбольной 

перчатке 

            крепит вместе, 

            сжимая надежно, борта 

            со десницею, 

            равнодержавная, 

            – есть! 

 

Обе длани воздели 

материковый котел; 

в нем живая земля шевелится: 

            кувыркаются куры в обертках, 

            лотосы, 

            пучится кукуруза. 

            Плавно варится взвесь, – 

деньги вскипают листвой, 

и сплавляются лица 

            в пестрое сверх-лицо, 

            в надглагольную весть, 

изъяснимую 

на подводном наречьи, 

столь же скользко-ледовом, 

сколь подвижном, как видишь… 

            Так смешно говорить, 

            но тонически пойте, язы́ки, 

            ваш новый язык. 

Хорошо, что не Бритиш: 

            тот всегда 

            с недовольным подсосом, 

            с обиженным даже сюсюком, 

            в котором обмяк и обвык… 

 

Но иначе рекут 

все вкусившие лотоса 

тайно-сытную сладость: 

            в круговую поруку вступая, 

            расстаются как с памятью, 

            так и с тоской. 

Наслоенья обид, 

под наплывом труда 

и комфорта 

изгладясь, 

            вместе с опытом страха 

            слезают с хребта, 

            словно толстая корь. 

 

Вот и черпай от пуза 

и ты, лотофаг, 

этот кладезь 

            жизни, 

            просто жизни 

            спокойно-хорошей, 

            людской. 

  • Dmitry Bobyshev (b. 1936) is a poet, literary critic, and translator, who began writing poetry in the mid-1950s in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). Bobyshev’s early poems were published in samizdat (self-publications which did not adhere to Soviet-era strictures on “official art”). In the early 1960s, Bobyshev found creative kinship with other nonconformist poets, particularly Joseph Brodsky, Anatoly Naiman and Evgeny Rein; together, they were known as “Akhmatova’s orphans” for their personal and creative commitments to the poet Anna Akhmatova. In 1979, Bobyshev emigrated to the United States, where he continues his poetic career. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the author of numerous poetry collections, including «Зияния» (“Hiatus”; Paris, 1979), «Полнота всего» (“The Fullness of Everything”; St Petersburg, 1992), and «Петербургские небожители» (“Celestial-Dwellers of St Petersburg”; New York, 2020).

  • Emma George is a translator of Russian poetry and fiction. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, focusing on 18th- and 19th-century Russian literature. She has previously translated poetry by Dmitry Bykov, Ivan Stavissky, and Demyan Kudryavtsev (forthcoming in the Slavic and East European Journal) and prose by Andrei Sen-Senkov.  

     

    Kathleen Mitchell-Fox is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is writing her dissertation on concepts and strategies of “voice” in Russophone radical poetics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her article on the contemporary poet Varvara Nedeoglo is forthcoming in the Slavic and East European Journal.