Evidence both seen and invisible has so accumulated
That it cannot be ignored
And I know what my duty is.
I believe that nothing that has been reported can ever be erased,
And everything unreported likewise will not go unrecorded,
And everything that can be known is somewhere known,
If we are vigilant, and if we have done our duty.
I will tell how once returning home
On an evening when snow was beginning to fall
Seeing the light far off in his window
He began unaccountably to weep
And for a time could not go on.
It lasted only moments and he has forgotten it but there is no denying it.
I will denounce my neighbor for it is my duty
As smiling boys do their duty to wild birds:
Once, he cut a cabbage in half, and saw that the two halves
Were a demon’s face and its reflection;
And he saw that each face also had two halves, left and right,
And he wondered if symmetry was the deepest truth about the world
Or if he only wondered at it because of his own division,
Himself a creature struck in two as by a swordcut
One half the inexact mirror of the other.
I will write if I can find paper and a pen
Though there have been sudden shortages lately of these things
Shortages that are certainly someone’s fault
But around here we have done all right without these and other things.
If I can find no paper or pen, I will write in the wet sand
With one arm of a broken pliers;
I will sew letters together with hawthorns and straw,
I will write in spit on the pale undersides of leaves,
I will write with the torn hieroglyphics of moonlight on water.
It is my duty as a citizen not to keep these things hidden
But to bring them to the attention of those who need to know.
She sat down, on a box of books waiting to be unpacked, and read it again. She wondered what the duty of smiling boys to wild birds was; she wondered what words in the poem gave the sense of desolation and cold that she found in it. Something more than the “snow beginning to fall.” Bezlyubye: lovelessness.
She slipped the book back into the space it had left.
Did it seem to be a poem by him, was it what she would have expected? She couldn’t tell. She thought of him standing before their class and reading the poem by Pushkin; is that how he would read his own poems, this poem?
She went out of the bookstore and turned left the few steps to the Castle; went to the counter and asked for coffee; sat with it before her, still seeing the page she had read. She wondered if there are some poems that are moving or touching simply because of the things to which they refer, the griefs and terrors that stand behind them. Would that be a bad kind of poem, would it be too easy to do that, to evoke those things that the reader will surely be thinking and feeling, though not because of anything you wrote, only because of the world in which you wrote? And would such a poem be different for readers who read it in another world, as she did, overhearing it maybe, something not intended for her ears at all?
She turned halfway around on her revolving stool just to feel it move, and found herself looking at Falin. He was sitting very near, in a high-backed booth, and he was looking at her. It was hard to believe she hadn’t seen him when she came in. Maybe he had been summoned here by her thinking about his poem; or maybe she had been made to ponder his poem because he was himself so close by.
“Professor Falin,” she said. She was about to go on, so sorry about today, when he raised a finger and wagged it No.
“Not professor,” he said. “No. I profess nothing. I have no, no…” He was stuck.
“Degree. Ph.D.,” she guessed. He nodded and shrugged as though that might be it.
“Well, um,” she said, and he watched her search for some other form of address.
“Innokenti Isayevich,” he said, smiling as though he knew this was well beyond this American girl to say, and he pointed at the booth seat opposite him. She got off her stool and slid into the seat somewhat mousily (could feel her head duck and her shoulders contract, why should they, but they did) and pressed her hands into her jacket pockets.
“Not in class today,” he said. “You were sick?”
“Asleep,” she said, unable not to.
“Ah well.”
The counterman, before Kit could protest, placed her (cold) coffee before her. “I,” she said. “I just now, just a little while ago, read your poem. It was printed in a book, an anthology…”
“No, no,” he said, smiling again. “No, not my poem.”
“The one about denunciation.”
“My poem,” he said, “was a poem in Russian. The poem in the book was a poem—perhaps a poem—in English. This I believe you read.”
“Was it a bad translation?”
“I can’t say,” he said. “There were no rhymes, and my poem rhymed, and had a certain meter. The one there had no strict meter that I can perceive. It was free verse. Two poems could not be the same that differ so much.”
“But I could see the poem in it, a little. What it was about.”
“Ah. My poem and this one are about the same things. Perhaps. But even so they do not say the same things about those things.”
“It was just so sad.”
“I point out one small example,” he said. “Where this translation said I will denounce my neighbor my poem said only I will write about my neighbor.”
“Why would they translate it that way then?”
“Because the translator was clever enough to know that in my country now, if we say someone has written about someone else, we mean the person has supplied to authorities information or just speculation, enough perhaps to have him investigated, even arrested. We say of someone, I don’t trust her—I think she writes. So the poem may be read in that way, and that is why the translator chose this word denounce. But to write, in Russian, is still also to—to just write. Write letters, poetry.”
She had never tried to translate poetry in any way except literally, as though cracking a code in which it was hidden, a chest or safe more beautiful than what was kept in it.
She said: “I don’t see why it couldn’t be translated more accurately.”
“Perhaps it could.” He moved the papers and things before him square with one another, his cigarettes and box of matches, notebook, a small book bound in pale green linen. “But it would then be different poem in English. Still not mine.”
She thought this was too chaste, or too abnegating. It was too sad to think of too. She knew there were poets everybody said were impossible to translate (Horace, Pushkin) and others that weren’t (Shakespeare), but she didn’t know why they said that, or what made the difference.