Igor Severyanin
Prologue

“While you were traveling the usual path, he seeks
The snows of unattainable peaks."
— Mirra Lokhvitskaya¹

Mirra Lokhvitskaia’s ashes are now entombed,
Her cross exchanged for a mausoleum,
But her ecstatic parade of trees
Remains magnificent, as before.

When sick Fofanov² wrecked himself in spring,
Singing in his creaking voice,
That May princess then came to him
And wrapped him in his burial shroud.

Alas, and emptily, on the fringes of
Olympus’s dreaming woods,
Pushkin for us became Derzhavin:
Our age demands its own new voices.

Dirigibles now fly everywhere
With propellers growling through the air
And assonances have cut down rhyme,
Like sabers striking in the moment’s heat.

We are sustained by transient trenchancy;
Our spoiled whims would have us be
Withdrawn yet cold, yet still inspired,
Creating wonder with each new word.

We can’t abide cheap imitations
Or their familiar tones and shades,
But expect, like hallucinations,
Amazing utopias to shake the peace.

Sophistication has turned the spirit stale,
Culture’s grown moldy like old Roquefort,
But I believe the fan shall still wave
And, like strings, the amphora’s juices will burst forth.

The Poet’s coming: he’s close, he’s close;
He shall sing, his voice shall soar.
And turn all the muses of times gone by
Into his odalisques and concubines.

And inebriate with this harem,
He’ll go out of his soulless wind,
While the people leap into triremes
And water nymphs rush into every home.

Oh, century of senseless contentment,
Of the leafless but shaking spring,
Of a modernized ancient Greece
And decaying novelty.

____
1. Mirra Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya (1869-1905), Russian lyrical love poet. The epigraph is from her poem “Vy likuete shumnoi tolpoi....”
2. Konstantin Mikhailovich Fofanov (1862-1911), Russian poet noted for the transparent purity and musicality of his verse.

Translated by Bernard Meares