Mesopotamia Read online

  I know how to fight off attacks and trauma.

  But I still have so much love left

  that it could stop the plague at the gates of the city.

  “I know how the fire dies down in a woman’s voice.

  I carried that poison in my own pockets.

  But I still have so much tenderness and anger

  that it could raise lepers and hanged men from their graves.

  “So they will follow me through the golden nights—

  tired clowns, defenseless sleepwalkers.

  So what if you have no idea where to begin?

  So what if nothing comes of things between us?”

  She listens to me, slightly swaying.

  She walks out and then returns.

  She is silent, agreeing with me about everything.

  She smiles, not believing a single word I say.

  May your delicate throat never get cold

  and may your night songs never end.

  The devil will stand over you with a bronze military horn,

  blocking the fierce tides at your headboard.

  Let the smell of wind never disappear from your T-­shirts,

  let it play in your hair forever.

  I will live in the sound of Sirens, like worries,

  recognizing your breath in their harmonizing voices.

  I will eat bread in detention centers,

  sleep with black refugees in gyms,

  find your aroma in the dry air and

  overripe earth like a testimony at midnight.

  I will sing of this ruined country,

  disintegrating from the poison in its blood,

  I will remind everyone who passes by of their guilt,

  I will chew the twilight rich with color.

  The sun rises in the east every morning past the market,

  there is a different reason for each loss,

  there will never be a silence like the one over your building,

  there will never be a moon like the one just past your

  shoulders.

  May you be warmed by wine someone else opened,

  may tenderness fill your careless speech:

  children will learn to love when they learn a kind of love

  they can understand, untranslated, whether summer or

  winter.

  What will you remember about these times?

  Memory washes out all the voices,

  memory doesn’t remember any names, any titles,

  but you must remember, remember each of us.

  Remember how we were in love with your face,

  even if you didn’t like it, remember it,

  even if you didn’t believe how serious our diseases were,

  even if you didn’t doubt the hopelessness of all our attempts,

  even if you can’t remember our names,

  even if the colors of our banners annoyed you,

  the language of our declarations of love,

  the biographies of our saints,

  the weapons, wine, and books in our houses.

  Remember everything we wrote to you in our letters,

  remember how many of us died in faraway towns,

  remember how many of us were broken and sold out,

  remember at least one of us,

  even in the passing.

  Remember how we’d catch your words,

  remember our failures and our amazing feats,

  our loyalty, our courage, our fears,

  and carry our love with you like old sins.

  Whether you want it or not, there will be nothing without

  you.

  Our hearts rest on river bottoms like naval mines.

  Remember each retreat, remember each attack—

  if you can, remember everything till death, at least.

  And then she says,

  “I know how this will end:

  it will end by everything finally ending.

  I will suffer, you will keep catching more and more of the

  dead,

  releasing the ones you caught before.”

  But I tell her,

  “No one will suffer.

  No one will ever suffer again.

  Why does poetry even exist,

  why do canals and shafts open up into the air?

  “Why do we fill the emptiness

  with poetry and holiday carols, why prepare escapes?

  Any decent poet can use words to stop

  the bleeding.”

  Then she asks,

  “Why do these decent poets behave like children?

  Why do they live like aliens and die like criminals?

  Why can’t they end that

  at least?”

  So I say, “Because it’s hard to live with other bodies,

  because the holy men of words have their own

  incomprehensible plans,

  because there are no decent poets left,

  just thieves and charlatans.

  “They chant the pain away in animals and children,

  catch feathers entangled in branches,

  just live, choosing

  between death and unemployment.”

  That is why everything will end by starting again at the beginning,

  falling into the throat and lying on the retina,

  filling us with love and oblivion,

  instantaneously

  at conception.

  It’s all up to us.

  You touch the atmosphere and disturb the equilibrium.

  Everything we’ve lost, everything we’ve found,

  all the air that passed through our windpipes—

  what sense does it all make without our pain and

  disappointments?

  What value does it have without our joy?

  After all, it’s all about your fingers.

  You touch her clothes and know nothing

  can be taken back, a name spoken once

  changes the voice, coils around the roots of words,

  so you struggle from now on with dead languages,

  as you attempt to use them

  to communicate with the living.

  You touch her things and understand: behind each word,

  behind each deed stands the impossibility of return.

  Courage and sorrow push us forward—

  love is irreversible, and we can’t decipher most

  dark prophesies and visions.

  What happens to us is only what we wanted,

  or only what we feared. The question is

  what will win—desire or fear.

  The night will ring with music in the web

  of our fingers, the room will fill with light

  from the dictionaries we’ve brought.

  After all, everything depends on our ability

  to speak the dead language of tenderness.

  Light is shaped by darkness,

  and it’s all up to us.

  Because we have to make this road ourselves

  to the very end, because this road is not the last one,

  we celebrate work, which has divided us into social strata and

  classes,

  we sing of the dead, and the silence they left behind.

  We build this road between far-­flung cities,

  we lay it down in the heat of summer and in winter flurries,

  confidently calling out to each other in the fog,

  never scrimping on our hate or our cigarettes.

  Because every road is our joy and weariness,

  because every stop is our silence and solitude,

  because we always know who waits for us at home,

  we understand dedication and we know there’s no going

  back.

  Each of us will have lots to tell after death,

  although we don’t believe it will ever come.

  Heaven warms us up in worn-­out jackets.

  I have a heart, and I understand what it’s worth.
r />   I have a voice, and that’s why I can communicate,

  this road can truly be easy,

  because a warm moon hangs overhead

  and you can always reach up to touch it.

  That’s why we build this road from silence and clay,

  We stretch it out like a thread behind us,

  between sound and silence, between heaven and earth,

  between light and darkness, between love and oblivion.

  Five years standing watch, five years as a worker,

  dark sunburnt skin, hot veins.

  When I return I will talk till

  the last gaping fool walks away.

  I will tell him about the cities, countries,

  about the seasonal hired hands who

  raised walls and towers all these years,

  raised them like warriors after convalescence.

  I will tell him how sirens called us to work,

  how we slept in churches under the trumpets of the

  archangels,

  and on the rooftop, crosses were as sensitive as antennas,

  so you could listen in on the conversations of the saints.

  It made no difference where each of us came from.

  The differences were in the heavens above.

  In the East we built churches and prisons,

  in the West we built hospitals and train stations.

  I know the real value of work.

  I know hearts have the color and taste of oranges.

  As long as there’s work, each of us strains,

  stretching toward the warm summer air like a blade of

  grass.

  I will say that the Lord stood between us,

  creating arguments in our guilds and brigades,

  dividing us by language, skin color, and names,

  forcing us to put up barricades in the streets today.

  So now the water in his baptismal fonts is always salty,

  and his golden churches are full of Irishmen and Lemkos.2

  My love, forgotten in the squats of Babylon at night,

  weeps for me in all languages and dialects.

  But someday, I will say to him, we will work again,

  we will drag building stones again,

  day workers of the world, mercenaries, rebels.

  We are divided by our bosses and our fear.

  But we are united by our perseverance and our hate.

  Always returning here to these hills and rivers,

  where guards and tax collectors stand at the gates.

  Here the evangelists in churches have such dark faces,

  like they’ve been in the sun all day picking grapes.

  Here the men wear so much gold

  that it’s a strain for death to carry them off.

  Here the women are touched by such deep fears at night

  that they paint their eyes blue.

  Here children learn such dangerous trades when they’re

  young

  that they can’t find jobs when they grow up.

  So every war for them is like manna from heaven,

  since soldiers are laid to rest with flowers.

  Trucks from the South bring a plague into the city.

  At midnight the beggars count the losses.

  As always, it’s my fate to remember everyone

  and return here.

  I tell myself,

  Autumn isn’t here yet.

  But here are its evening trees, like regimental banners.

  And here is her dark building, here are her windows.

  Maybe she waits here too.

  Maybe she even waits for me.

  SERHIY ZHADAN was born in the Luhansk Region of Ukraine and educated in Kharkiv. He is the author of twelve books of poetry. His prose works include Big Mac (2003), Depeche Mode (2004), Anarchy in the UKR (2005), Hymn of the Democratic Youth (2006), Voroshilovgrad (2010), and Mesopotamia (2014). Zhadan’s books have been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Russian. He is the front man for the band Zhadan and the Dogs.

  REILLY COSTIGAN-­HUMES and ISAAC STACKHOUSE WHEELER are a team of literary translators who work with both Ukrainian and Russian. They studied together at Haverford College. Their debut translation, Serhiy Zhadan’s novel Voroshilovgrad, was published in May 2016.

  VIRLANA TKACZ and WANDA PHIPPS have received the National Theatre Translation Fund Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Translation Award and twelve translation grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. Their translations have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, and are integral to the theater pieces created by Yara Arts Group. www.brama.com/yara.

  Translations by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps were supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Special thanks to Svitlana Matviyenko, Sofia Riabchuk, Julian Kytasty, Olena Jennings, and Kateryna Babkina for their assistance with the poetry translations and to Tanya Rodionova and Tania Maiboroda for their assistance with the prose translation.

  1. A seaside town in Crimea.

  2. People from western Ukraine.