Ilya Selvinsky
I Saw It

You don't have to listen to folktales,
    Or believe what you read in papers,
I saw it myself. With my own eyes.
    Do you understand? I saw it. Myself.
The path's here. Over there is the hill.
    Between them,
                             running like this,
                                                        the ditch.
And from out of this ditch anguish lifts.
Anguish without end.

No! Worlds can't tell...
    One has to scream! To sob!
Seven thousand shot down in a frozen pit,
    Rusting over like ore.

Who are they? Soldiers? Not soldiers.
Partisans maybe? No.
Here lies lop-eared Kolya —
    Eleven years old.

And here's his whole family. The farm called "Joyous."
The whole of "Made-by-Us" — one hundred and twenty households.
From nearby stations, nearby villages —
All, like hostages, thrown into the ditch.

They lie, sit, slither over the edge,
Each one with his own gesture, unmistakably his own!
In each corpse, winter has arrested the precise emotion
Death brought to the living.
And the corpses rave, threaten, hate...
This dead quiet buzzes like a meeting.
Whatever attitude they were dumped in,
With their eyes, their bared teeth, necks, shoulders,

They still confront their executioners,
Crying out: "You'll never win!"

Here's one. Lightly dressed.
His breast bared in protest.
A foot shod in a torn boot,
The other shining, a lacquered artificial limb.
Large, light snowflakes keep falling...
A young cripple has torn open his shirt.
He seems to have cried out: "Shoot then, you devils!"
Choked. Fell. Stiffened.
But sentrylike, in this graveyard of death,
Juts a crutch, driven into the earth.
And the dead man's rage has not grown rigid:
It calls to those at the front,
It has raised this crutch, like a staff,
A landmark to be seen from afar.

An old woman. She died standing.
Propped up among the corpses, dying there.
Her face, kind, open,
Convulsing darkly.
The wind makes her rags flutter...
In her left eye sealing wax has congealed,
But the right gazes far off, into the sky
    Through gaps in the clouds.
And in this reproach to the Holy Virgin,
Is the end of an age of faith:
"If there are Fascists here below,
    Then, there can be no God."

Next to her is a mutilated Jewess,
A child by her side, as if asleep.
With what care is the mother's gray scarf
Wrapped around the child's slender neck.
Primeval strength of a mother!
Going to her execution, walking under fire,
One hour, one half-hour, before the end,
She saved her child from a cold.
But even death itself is no separation for them:
The enemy has no power over them now,
And a red stream
                            flows
From the child's ear
                                into the palm
                                                     of the mother's
                                                                             hand.
How terrible it is to write of this.
                                                  How strange.

    But I must write! I must!
Fascism can't be simply joked away now:
You've taken measure of the fascist soul's baseness,
You've seen through those "sentimental" Prussian dreams,
So,
      through their
                           blue
                                   waltzes,
Let this cupped mother's hand burn.

Get going! Brand them! You stand up before butchery.
You've caught them in the act — expose it!
You see how, with their armor-piercing bullets,
The executioner destroyed us,
So thunder, like Dante, like Ovid,
Let nature itself begin to sob,
If
   all this
              you yourself
                                  have seen
But not gone mad.

Yet silent I stand over the terrible grave.
What are words? Words are dust.
There was a time I wrote about my sweetheart,
    About the trilling of nightingales.

Would such things fit here?
    Would they? And yet
I must try to find the right words.
    Even for such a subject.

What of this? My nerves are strung tight,
But the lines... they're dense and clotted.
No, comrades: language
    Has no words to match the suffering.

It's too customary, therefore pale,
Too refined, therefore bare,
Each cry that escapes the lips
Is too dependent on grammar's iron rules.

Here one would have to... have to summon a gathering
Of all the clans, from standard to standard,
And take from each all its humanity,
Everything that has burst through time —
The crying, wailing, sighing, groaning,
The exultation of invasion, the creak of marching boots...
Isn't this
             the speech
                               of fathomless anguish?
Aren't these the words we're seeking?

But we've other speech,
Hotter than any words:
Buckshot blasts the enemy to hell,
The batteries thunder prophet-like.
Do you hear the trumpets at the front?
Confusion... Cries... The brute evildoers blanch.
They run! But there's nowhere they can run
    From your bloody grave.

Let's go. Let your eyelids descend.
Like grass, spring up to cover this.
Whoever saw you will bear
All your wounds from here on forever.

The ditch... Can a poem tell of it?
Seven thousand corpses.
                                        Jews... Slavs...
No! Words cannot tell this tale.
Fire! Only fire!

Translated by Daniel Weissbort