"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.

Human Side Podcast 14: Shalamov / Crazy Days in Budapest

Discussion of a forthcoming Human Side Press translation of gulag poetry from Varlam Shalamov (fall 2018), followed by talk of Budapest in the late '90s and a Hungarian female stalker.

"The Letter Carrier's Satchel" by Varlam Shalamov

a translation of "СУМКА ПОЧТАЛЬОНА" from Колымские тетради

Frigid, the hours at nighttime,
In monstrous disquietude,
To the sky I send up my call sign
from the seventieth latitude.

Warming at a fire somewhere,
May a bearded geologist,
Locate my position there
On this cursed mountain,

Where, like Tannhäuser and Venus,
A captive of barren snows,
Having lived twenty years in a cave,
Misery, the only dream I know.

Still, longing to break free,
my shoulders like Samson heaving,
to bring down this vault of stone,
so many years I've imagined leaving.

          *  *  *

I held on to that fairy tale —
Until that fairy tale was dead.
Its human caress
had long since fled.

A moth in a snowstorm,
She was hidden,
To the light she came,
To the window bidden.

The flakes of snow
Became moths in crowds,
A flutter of wings let loose
From the low clouds.

Out into the snowy distance
With a tear on my cheek,
Through my fingers the delicate
White pollen sweeps.

          *  *  *

In memory are great evils disguised — 
In number and degree unperceived.
While in life lies, only lies,
In it we can no longer believe.

Maybe, the cities are gone,
Gone too the orchard's trees,
Only the power of ice lives on,
and the briny seas.

Maybe, the world — is only snow,
A road lit by stars.
Maybe, the world — is only taiga,
In God's mind, not ours.

          *  *  *

I — Archimedes — fishing upon the sand,
In the swift shadows of the mind,
On a crumpled, tattered page in hand
Have this poem's last line signed.

I — Archimedes — will not avert my gaze
from these vague stanzas' theoretical resolution.
In those moments of life in my last days —
Another line in this poem's evolution.

I know for me this is no game or test,
But deadly. It is for life itself played.
I — Archimedes — will not let my pen rest,
And this notebook must not be mislaid.

"Red Lily of the Valley" poetry by Varlam Shalamov

a translation of "РОЗОВЫЙШ ЛАНДЫШ" from Колымские тетради

Upon a saint's tomb laid
Placed above a headstone
A wreath of flowers in braid,
In the purest blood soaked.

With glossy, sagging petals,
Heavy with dew.
Displaying delicate tendrils,
in all its beauty on view.

And shy and clearly scared,
blossoms to the earth bowed,
like a child's trembling hands
hanging from its boughs.

But these pinkish clusters
Among rags of pale-green
Will tomorrow flower in bluster,
Into a blazing, fiery scene.

And, like a bloody tear,
Like Macbeth's ghost,
It will draw our eyes here,
in its tumult engrossed.

From these eyes blood flows,
And turning to the setting sun
We are before it froze,
by some shame unknown.

As if we could live another way,
and read from other books.
And not from a graveyard bouquet
was it the truth we took.

And we kiss the petals,
And to something make our prayer.
They tell us: Its all nothing special —
Of our smile they are unaware.

I hear it, like grass growing,
These new flowers breaking through.
I feel it, into words transposing,
and compose this poem for you.

"The Blue Notebook" by Varlam Shalamov

a translation of "cиняя тетрадь" from Колымские тетради

Cave dust, blue mold
stains my verse.
Born of so many Sundays —
Peaceful and terse.

These poems, as animals, quickly grew
by the snow's cold baptized
in the frigid dark, in the marshy damp.
And after all they survived.

Of ancestors they do not boast,
For heirs not a care.
Theirs is only the granite cell
Through the years unaware.

Now, by a birdsong aroused
Not a nightingale in call alone,
But a scream, always of dreams
From the comfort of forest and stone.

Forgive me these analogies
Anyone, who knows this life of mine,
knows from zoology it is derived
with sanity always on the line.

            *  *  *

Frail, lonely and naked,
without firelight blind.
In a lilac, polar gloom
I am confined.

To the pale darkness I entrust
my poems all.
No longer on my mind
sins large and small.

With lungs torn by cold
with a mouth sealed tight.
With teardrops like stones
with sweat frozen white.

I speak these poems,
I cry them out unbade.
Trees and pebbles, the deaf,
little by little more afraid.

From far mountains the tiny echo
I listen for,
and hearing it my chest fills easily
I breathe once more.

                   *  *  *

Do not judge us too severely.
Better to be merciful.
Our way we will find,
A path narrow but defined.

Along the cliffs go musk deer
Let's go above those clouds,
Hand in hand up to where it is clear,
Poetry we need, a bridge made aloud.

These verses we build
now solid and true.
Though they sway in the wind,
once they were flimsy all through.

Stepping out onto the wobbly bridge,
Pledging only this book we make,
Whatever the envy or anger,
Will not us to Heaven take.

                *  *  *

A timid imagination,
Come up here to me.
Cope with the dizziness,
After all, it's not easy.

Awaiting you unfamiliar words
But at the mountain's base,
That land — it's only foundation,
We've long known that place.

From here one can further see,
With widest sight ...
How the plains offend me,
This — the mountain's birthright.