THE FOREST TWILIGHT IS A MONK
translated from Russian by Rozalija Grace
Лесные сумерки – монах
За узорочным часословом,
Горят заставки на листах
Сурьмою в золоте багровом.
И богомольно старцы–пни
Внимают звукам часословным…
Заря, задув свои огни,
Тускнеет венчиком иконным.
Лесных погостов старожил,
Я молодею в вечер мая,
Как о судьбе того, кто мил,
Над палой пихтою вздыхая.
Забвенье светлое тебе
В многопридельном хвойном храме,
По мощной жизни, по борьбе,
Лесными ставшая мощами!
Смывает киноварь стволов
Волна финифтяного мрака,
Но строг и вечен часослов
Над котловиною, где рака.
The forest twilight is a monk
behind a richly inlaid book of hours.
Kamilavki gleam on leaves
of antimony in crimson gold.
Like old men, the pious stumps
hearken to the turning pages . . .
Dusk, dispelling its own fires,
dims into an icon’s halo.
An inveterate haunter of forest graveyards,
I grow younger on a May evening,
sighing upon some fallen fir
the way one might about a loved one.
To you it is a bright forgetting
in a coniferous temple of many chapels,
having become, by a mighty life—
by struggle—relics of the forest!
A wave of enamelled shadow
washes cinnabar from the trunks of trees,
but the book of hours, austere and lasting,
lies on the hollow where the shrine stands.
.
Writing during the profound social and ecological transformations of the Russian Revolution, national industrialization, and rural electrification, Nikolai Klyuev (1884–1937) examined the human relationship to nature through Russian folk tradition and Christian mysticism. Proscribed by the Stalinists for both his religiosity and homosexuality, he was executed in 1937 (“rehabilitated” 1957).
Rozalija Grace is a Russian and Armenian diasporic poet and fabulist from southern Alaska whose work exploring exile, intimacy, language, and faith has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Dappled Things, Rust & Moth, ROAR, and other journals. Her translations of gay, women’s, and minority voices in early Soviet poetry have been nominated for Best Literary Translations. She currently serves as a poetry editor for Psaltery & Lyre and lives in Minneapolis with her Hungarian American novelist fiancée and her dombyra. Read more at her website and on Bluesky @rozalijagrace.com.