Maximilian Voloshin
The Poet`s House

The door is open: welcome, all who come!
All roads, all journeys meet in this my home.
Through its chilly cells, in limewash white,
the breeze transmits the waves' muffled thud
against the low beach, wafting bitter wormwood
and the brittle voice of the cicada.
From tall windows we watch the molten sea
that burns like marble in its span of azure,
and circling hills fused by the prickly sun.
The silver wormwood on the barren scree
claws at the air in whirlwind clumps of grey.
This land of meditation, prayers and tombs
yields around my house a meagre crop
of low ailanthus and acacia shrubs
along a hedge of tamarisk. Beyond
this leafy border, tattered by the wind,
the jagged profile of a mountain, sheer,
occludes the bay with an Alcaic verse:
a metre asymmetrical, severe.

Here Caucasus and Balkan ranges meet.
These meagre coastal lands inherited
from earliest times a lurid legacy:
volcanoes spat their fire from deepest chasms
and shook their smoking torches in the sky.
There the sea-cliffs' profile a likeness shows
of my own forehead, cheek-bone, brow and nose!
Like a ruined Gothic minster it looms,
thrusting skyward indomitable spires.
And from its legendary basalt fires,
shooting high and far their molten rock,
a wall arises from the dove-grey gloom
o'er the sea... Yet neither artist's palette
nor halting tongue can tell of Karadag.
Much have I seen, and much homage paid
in canvases and literary toil
to the great wonders of the universe...
My chest is now too tight for such deep breaths;
too narrow, now, my larynx for these words.
The grinding jaws are shut and riveted.
Dark silence reigns among the cooling depths.
But here above, with spasms and convulsions racked,
down ages long the whole earth's out of joint.
This same dire incubus and fatal passion
bears bitter fruit in human culture too,
in tribal strife and shifting population.
Close to my heart, these coasts still dream
of the Achaeans' ships and their tarry keels;
the voice of Odysseus calls out to the dead.
A dense Cimmerian murk overlays
with oblivion the forgotten shades,
blackening and cloaking all paths and glades.
Metres deep, stones fill the alluvial bed,
with potsherds, tombstones, skeletons and ash.
Into a single stratum the rains wash
fragments of Neolithic ware,
the finest shell of Miletian clay
and the vertebrae of transient races,
their names forgotten, erased their faces.
Sarmatian sword and Scythian arrow,
an emblem of Olbiya on the Bug;
a bright Venetian bead, the tawny glaze
of Tartary, a funerary glass jug.
A decorated Arab plaque we find
embedded in an ancient guard-post wall
and, speaking to us among the random
stones, parts of a Byzantine capital.
Such rare remains are here in this rich soil
for archaeologist and numismatic! —
from Roman clasp and Hellenic coin
to a button from a Russian soldier's tunic.
Among these lands of folded rock and sea
the culture of the human race had not
been hollowed out by mouldering decay.
Here, for centuries, life to its source was closer
until we came — and, with us, Russia.
Since the era of Great Catherine
we've trampled o'er a Muslim paradise,
felled forests, seen ancient ruins razed
and plundered and destroyed a whole domain.
Orphaned houses yawn upon the land,
the garden slopes deserted and uprooted stand.
The people — gone. Wells have run dry.
The sea devoid of fish. The fountains mute.
The doleful race, behind its torpid mask,
invests the hills of Homer's own country;
its mountain ranges, muscle, cartilage,
now pitifully stripped and naked.
And now, in recent tragic years, the shades
of those once hailed by Ulysses are drunk
again with wine and blood. Conversions forced
by threat of fire, at point of sword;
famine, intestinal strife and war,
stale dregs of the elder, wasting Horror.
That time, my eyeless and neglected house
served as refuge and as sanctuary,
and welcomed only those who fled
from hangman’s noose or firing-squad.
The Red commander, the tsarist Whites —
fanatics of faiths irreconcilable,
sought here beneath the poet’s roof
asylum, safety and soft counsel.
To stem their fratricidal ragings
with reason and persuasion oft I came.
Somewhere, in a printed list of blood,
I even read my own doomed name!
Yet, while many trembled and denounced,
Fortune did not forsake my house:
it was not seized, nor by some villain burned,
nor sacked by thieves, nor sold by friend.
The storm abated, fires gradually burnt out.
Life and this house came to me, a gift
unlooked-for, entrusted to me by Fate,
a pledge of my adoption by the earth.
My house’s bosom is open to the sea,
my studio like an apse that faces east;
and once again a stream of human kind,
undiminished, pours across its threshold.

Enter, dear guest: and at my door shake
off the worldly dust, the mouldering mind...
The lofty features of great Queen Tiye
welcome you, sternly, from the dawn of time.
My dwelling is poor, the age uncouth.
Yet, for walls, my bookshelves rise around us.
Here historian, poet and divine
gather at night and debate deep truth.
Like an organ their weighty voices sound,
yet e’en the shy whisper is not stifled
by winter storm nor growling wave,
nor by the dismal groaning of the Sea.
Long sealed are now my lips… So let it be!
Better to have one’s words retold by heart;
better in secret letters to declare one’s part.
Handwriting’s better than the printed page.
The honour was both yours and mine
to «frequent this world in a savage time»,
becoming sadder and wiser than we are.
I’m no outcast, but a stepson of Russia,
and in these days I am her mute reproach.
This lone retreat my deliberate choice,
a land of voluntary exile where,
in these years of wanton ruin, lies
and degradation, I could persevere
to lofty insight and find peace of soul.
Learn my country’s simple catechism:
as Greece came and went, as did the Genoese;
so Europe too and Russia will not last.
The vicious scourge of civil tumult
will fade and evaporate on the breeze.
New nets are set in life’s creeks and currents;
the days decay, and man advances.
Yet sky and land remain eternally
the same, so: seize the day! And bless the blue
horizon that encircles me and you.
Be simple as the wind, relentless as the sea,
and, like the land, be full of memory.
Love the distant vessel’s swelling sail,
the waves’ song o’er the mighty deep below.
The pulse of life, of every race and age,
lives in you this moment. Always. Now.

Translated by Graham J. Harrison