"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.

"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.