"The Burial" by Varlam Shalamov

a translation by Maxim Botkin

In the new year I found a home.
A place to die without tears alone.
Its door does not close,
Thick with ice forever froze.

In this house a white mist spreads,
through the walls it blows,
settling near my bed,
it licks at my toes.

A brick is my candlestick,
and as the night nears,
from it the candlelight flicks,
and shadows and vestiges appear.

Yet in no way do I seem dead,
I still eat and drink,
Thus I shake my head,
For what am I alive, I think.

At last one morning it was said,
over our shared, frozen bread:
Perhaps it is a kind of dead,
that to the earth cannot be fed.

Ammonal into the rock we hammer it,
the gravedigger's rite.
The fuse is then lit,
on the mining dynamite.

Without clothes, without underwear,
Into this hole I disappear,
Bony and stripped bare,
There is no other grave here.

Not dirt, only handfuls of stone,
Flies about my face.
Anxious days, bitter nights alone
The circle unbroken in this place.

         *   *   *

With verses this sincere,
I can start a fire,
turning to ash all men near,
to be spread about this mire.

Yet, when I am no longer cold,
These lines I am unable to behold.

But should another
biting snowstorm break out,
with that cold that smothers
and lingers about

I will again in that blizzard dire
with these lines rekindle a fire.

         *   *   *

With this triumph at my side,
in spite of any bear or fox,
with my bicycle I ride,
along this highway of rocks.

Here, for a stenographer of the land
a story in clay and sand:
a suicide note
forgotten, yet close at hand.

Buried in these roadside ruts,
anywhere geologic pits were cut.
All of us, who could not speak out
who's mouths were kept shut ...

But who to read these hieroglyphs,
some Champollion yet unknown,
To decipher these voiceless myths,
To hear their human moan.