Take Me to Stavanger

Description

A Bilingual Collection of Poems for a Dispirited Society  Amid the din of Russia’s patriotic sentiments and Instagram instants, is there any room left for the voice of a poet? Despite the many entertainments and distractions of modern life, Anzhelina Polonskaya’s spare but cutting poems in Take Me to Stavanger declare a wholehearted “Yes.” This bilingual Russian-English volume makes a refuge for the poet and her readers, plumbing the depths of contemporary melancholy and ennui. Beautifully crafted idiosyncratic dissections of a strong individual who refuses to go along with the currents of popular culture or political jingoism invite readers to slow down and pay attention.  

In Anzehlina Polonskaya’s devastating poetry, “there are only two seasons: winter and winter. / And only black and white have rights.” Anglophone readers who have wondered where they might find a contemporary inheritor of the tragic and visionary poetry left us by Tsvetaeva, Ahkmatova, and Mandelstam need look no further. It’s burning bright in these musical, sharp, and expert translations by Andrew Wachtel, who here serves again as Polonskaya’s ferryman from Russian into English. These poems go for broke, and break the sound barrier between languages and cultures. They lament, they leap, they keep pushing beyond, looking for common ground. Everywhere we turn in them, we find life as it coldly stares through death. “And what’s in the hourglass / if not soot? / I want to sleep and forget the words. / I couldn’t find asylum there . . .” As much as we ever have, and more so now, we need to hear from the voice of conscience in Russia. In your hands is living testimony.

—Joshua Weiner, author of Berlin Notebook: Where Are the Refugees?

Anzhelina Polonskaya is a Russian writer and artist from Malakhovka, a small town near Moscow. She is the author of A Voice, To the Ashes, and Paul Klee’s Boat, all of which were translated into English by Andrew Wachtel. Her poetry has also been translated into German, Dutch, Slovenian, Latvian, and Spanish. 

Andrew Wachtel is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He translates from Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Slovene. His translation of Anzhelina Polonskaya’s Paul Klee’s Boat was shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

TAKE ME TO STAVANGER  Take me to Stavanger.  

With limpid northern eyes  

I’ll live amidst the ice.  

Perhaps after all the losses  

and partings,  

the ice will warm me.  

My soul, you’re hanging on strings.  

I’ll unhook you tenderly.  

A clump of grass by the lazy lagoon.  

Who knows?  

Perhaps a house,  

without a trace of heat.