Winner, Diana Der-Hovanessian Prize, selected by Eric Hyett
O Stratford genius, come to us! Return To Avon wreathed in fog and filthy air, Where heroes swelled with greatness on the stage, With hardihood and hoary-headed wisdom, And come to us now as unexpectedly As in the sixteenth century. Step Into our world adorned in Flemish lace, An old doublet, Hessian boots worn down On boards well trodden. Formerly you were Favored by kings — a jester and a god Playing your parts to strutting savages. Three witches whisper, whisper while they spin. These are your progeny, your children trying To call you to us in this louring hour When Birnam Wood marches on Dunsinane, When Polish marshes ripple in the wind, And when a rainbow hung above the Volga, And where between the Ilmen and the Don A conqueror of the world confronts his fate. They have fallen, millions of them, legions, Mingling still more bones with Tatar bones, With Lithuanian bones, and with French bones There, where once — on the field of Kulikovo, Once on the wide Poltavian steppe, and there Where once on the Nevà our own first emperor Cast his envious eyes westward to Europe. They who have fallen will not rise again. They sleep in a barbarian embrace, They sleep well with the Poles of Gedimin, With the Old Guardsmen of Napoleon, And over them will rustle . . . may it be soon, The Russian grain . . . But he who shakes the age, His life can not be rounded without you. O Stratford genius, batten onto him, Lead him among your frightful swarm of fates And cue his last confessional tirade! Three witches whisper, whisper while they spin. A subtle thread, a whisper indistinct: The Birnam-Kursk that rustles around the tyrant And bends the oaks, while still the thread runs on. They sleep no more in that imperial palace Constructed in the time of Alexander, Here lived the whiskered savage with his medals, In nineteen-eighteen here they tortured people, And built a hospital in ‘thirty-one. Now parquetry is overgrown with moss, From the brocaded walls portraits of beauties With asiatic eyes may still look down. And now the forest stirs. He ventures out On a foul Russian day to hear the uproar: Will the old women tender him a dagger? Will they assign him to another’s knife? Or whirl him hence to banishment and exile? Or take him in a cage to wicked Paris Like a beast? The threading runs from darkness Into darkness, and the twentieth century Is indistinct: Tragedy leaves us cold. Poetry, like a mother eagle, dead, Lies in the ashes, music itself is dumb, Love will not burn, and even thought grows scant. Only blood flows. There is blood. We are all in blood. Water in blood, earth in blood, and air In blood. And he who never in his life Ate carrion, like us, stands blood up to his breast. O Stratford genius, o you powerful soul, Who reveled in blood, come to us and help us Quickly end this journey steeped in blood. Paris, 1942
J. Kates
J. Kates is a minor poet, a literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation and a Käpylä Translation Prize. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems: Mappemonde (Oyster River Press) Metes and Bounds (Accents Publishing) and The Old Testament (Cold Hub Press) and two full books, The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books) and Places of Permanent Shade (Accent). He is the translator of The Score of the Game and An Offshoot of Sense (Tatiana Shcherbina); Say Thank You and Level with Us (Mikhail Aizenberg); When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree, Secret Wars, and I Have Invented Nothing (Jean-Pierre Rosnay); Corinthian Copper (Regina Derieva); Live by Fire (Aleksey Porvin); Thirty-nine Rooms (Nikolai Baitov); Psalms (Genrikh Sapgir); Muddy River (Sergey Stratanovsky); Selected Poems 1957-2009, and Sixty Years (Mikhail Yeryomin); and Paper-thin Skin (Aigerim Tazhi). He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of six books of Latin American and Spanish poetry.