By Gennady Gor, Vladimir Sterligov and Pavel Zaltsman for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote , part of the Guardian Books Network

Three Russian poets shine words into the blackness of 1942 when a million people died under siege by the Nazis, in this extract from a new anthology Written in the Dark





Fresh from launching our Fall 2016 issue yesterday, featuring exclusive writing from 31 countries, by such authors as Stefan Zweig, László Krasznahorkai and Anita Raja, we present a selection from “Written in the Dark,” a new, groundbreaking anthology out from Ugly Duckling Presse. The poems gathered therein were written in 1942, during the most severe winter of the Nazi Siege of Leningrad, in which one million perished. Charles Bernstein compares these poems to “the sparks from two sticks of wood, creating a fire that warms even in an apocalypse.”

— The editors at Asymptote

. . .

Gennady Gor

The creek sick of speech

Told water it took no side.

The water sick of silence

At once began again to shriek.

translated from the Russian by Ben Felker-Quinn, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Matvei Yankelevich



. . .

Vladimir Sterligov, 1942

But I am king. In a white shirt

I lie, towering in consciousness,

And soar my flag of pale-blue body

through the barrier of ceiling,

And laugh, that it is not for us to walk through walls.

While twilight trundles tangles in the sky

Around the houses, naked trees,

And twitches its white snows,

Swaying suddenly the corridors of space,

As if with hands it touches objects,

As though there was no ban against it,

As though their skin were torn away.

. . .

Snowdrifts, snow, the frigid wind,

Square ice forms in the depths of glasses.

Today the third of them died quietly,

That family of shriveled idols.

Tomorrow morn to building’s depth

Will crawl the foot of soundless death.

translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse



With plaintive, ardent reverie, / We drink these soundless words Pavel Zaltsman

Dinnertime Ode to Chub

by Pavel Zaltsman

O chub, O golden, sterling chub,

O’er this hungry world suspended,

Most bejewled, expensive grub,

Brimming priceless fat, transcendent!

Whose scales are more transparent,

Whose mold more finely etched?

—Yours! Yours alone!

You’re even far too delicate.

Amber fat hangs from your seams

That has absorbed the smoking peat.

We want it, oh, how we dream

To warm ourselves by its lifegiving heat.

Who else could have such eyes:

They hang, run through with string,

As on a widemouthed glass

The drunken dewdrops cling.

With plaintive, ardent reverie,

We drink these soundless words.

Our heads fog as we crane our necks to see

The shop’s concupiscent boards.

With this I flatter you and plea,

As o’er this dying world you hover,

O smoked chub, impart to me

How I may be a lucky burglar.

translated from the Russian by Charles Swank and Matvei Yankelevich

Click here for more information about this anthology from Ugly Duckling Presse.

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Gennady Gor belonged to the avant-garde circles of Leningrad in the 1930s, but was ostracized for his alleged formalism. After the Siege and his return from evacuation in Perm, he became a well-known scholar, collector of the art of Northern ethnicities, and science fiction writer. He was renowned in Leningrad as an art historian and mentor to young writers. The poems included here were written between July 1942, when his evacuation began, and 1944. He spent the first winter months of the Siege with his in-laws.



Vladimir Sterligov was an artist in Kazimir Malevich’s circle and a close friend of leading members of the OBERIU, Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. Sterligov was wounded at the Leningrad Front in January 1942. He was released from the hospital with a diagnosis of distrophic exhaustion and emaciation and remained in Leningrad until his evacuation to Alma-Ata in June 1942. After the Siege, Sterligov returned to Leningrad, where he became a prominent figure in the world of unofficial art, founding and leading—with his wife, the painter Tatiana Glebova—an informal “school” that sought to carry forward the principles learned from Malevich and other early avant-garde artists.

Pavel Zaltsman, an artist, belonged to the circle of Pavel Filonov, one of the elders of the Leningrad avant-garde. His professional life was spent working for film studios, first in Leningrad and later in Alma-Ata. Having lost his parents to the famine, Zaltsman was evacuated from Leningrad in the spring of 1942 with his wife and daughter. He stayed in Alma-Ata for the rest of his life, where he worked in film studios, made art, and wrote poems, a diary, and two novels. Zaltsman wrote poetry for thirty years, from 1922 to 1955. Only in recent years, through the efforts of his daughter, has his prodigious output of drawings and paintings before and after the Siege become known to scholars and a wider public.

Ainsley Morse is a literary translator and scholar of Slavic literatures. Her academic and translation interests include Soviet-era poetry and prose, contemporary Russian literature and Yugoslav literature.

Ben Felker-Quinn is an educator, community media-maker and poet from eastern Pennsylvania. He lives in Philadelphia.

Charles Swank graduated from Hampshire College in 2012. He is currently a graduate student at Princeton University in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His interests include 20th century Russian and Czech literature, literary theory, and translation.

Matvei Yankelevich’s books include the long poem Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square), a poetry collection, Alpha Donut (United Artists), and a novella in fragments, Boris by the Sea (Octopus). His translations include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Ardis/Overlook), and (with Eugene Ostashevsky) Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), which received a National Translation Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a founding editor of Ugly Duckling Presse, and teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-born American poet and translator. His books include The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (Obnazhenie Priema), Iterature (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (Ugly Duckling Presse). He has edited an English-language anthology of Russian absurdist writings of the 1930s by such authors as Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms, and translated (with Matvei Yankelevich) Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets). His PhD dissertation was on the history of zero. He teaches the humanities at New York University.