A Russian Poet, This One Still Living(!)

I heard a podcast that featured Vera Pavlova, a Russian poet who has had fourteen books published in Russia and just had her first published in English. They seemed to make a big deal out of the fact that her husband is her translator, I guess everybody needs some kind of hook to get ink.


I enjoy the brevity of her poems - her voice can sometimes be too elliptical and compressed because of it, but when it works I enjoy the specificity and the enigmatic elements. Here's one that I think does this really well.

I think it will be winter when he comes

Vera Pavlova

I think it will be winter when he comes.
From the unbearable whiteness of the road
a dot will emerge, so black that eyes will blur,
and it will be approaching for a long, long time,
making his absence commensurate with his coming,
and for a long, long time it will remain a dot.
A speck of dust? A burning in the eye? And snow,
there will be nothing else but snow,
and for a long, long while there will be nothing,
and he will pull away the snowy curtain,
he will acquire size and three dimensions,
he will keep coming closer, closer . . .
This is the limit, he cannot get closer. But he keeps approaching,
now too vast to measure . . .




After having seen my share of harsh winters I appreciate the details, the painful starkness of a snowy landscape where making things out at a distance is like a torturous eye exam or an exercise in Rorschach discernment.


But the fact that you don't really know who "he" is, whether it's the poet's lover, father, nemesis, just a shadowy figure who takes up more and more room. You can invent the details for yourself, if you'd like, but I enjoy keeping it all a mystery. You can try on and take off any number of scenarios and conjectures, but not commit to deeply to any. 


I like it quite a bit, it's a distinctive voice that lacks pretense and artifice. I think I may have to buy her book, at the very least to see if her interpreter hubby is worth his salt.