"Squares"

plus a story of a translation of a translation of a poem

And yet the order of things is odd
People who’s minding stores
People who’s making the road
Someone shamelessly stole what’s yours

Not only your labour, leisure, and love
They stole curiosity of your eyes
Giving approved conclusions a shove
They watch how your thinking ability dies

For every question there is a come back
You see it but you just don’t realize
How placing your brains on a storage rack
Keeps multiplying the number of lies

Maintaining your daily submissive demeanor
You’re deader today than you’ve ever been
At dusks and dawns like a vacuum cleaner
The subways are sucking you in

Pretending to be completely awake
Helpless… although quite skilled
People who know how to make
People who know how to build

You see them marching without remorse
An exercise or some sort of a drill
For now, to just demonstrate their force
People who know how to kill

One day, on patience you’re running low
And tired you are of the dictated norms
You have decided that you’re gonna grow
Outside of allowed, square forms

You’re feeling rebellious, live free or die!
You throw yourself into the fray
So consequently you’ll be visited by
People who know how to sway

Their words will be noble and kind and just
For a better future they’re making a claim
Their explanations seem very robust
Why nobody can exit this game

And you will atone, my brother in arms
My brother in arms, you will be forgiven
They gladly will give you another chance
Back into your square you will be driven

Alas, should you keep rejecting their myth
And keep spitting out their shiny blue pill
Again you’ll be promptly acquainted with
People who know how to kill  

Fitting your life into the grid
Quickly and surely, like with a spell
Into the squares the sky will be split
By bars of your cozy prison cell.



(V. Lifshitz, translation by Denis Varak-originally written by James Clifford, and translated by V. Lifshitz))

****************************

* My talented friend Denis translated this poem -and while doing research I discovered:

-it appears that the original actually IS in English, and was written by a James Clifford, and then translated by Lifshitz to Russian.

Obviously-I started looking for the original-and to my sheer awe and amazement, found this great post, which I highly recommend. It contains the original by Clifford, and tells one fascinating story-and is also written by two great Substackers I subsribe to, talk about coincidences,

Vanya Bagaev

and Oleg of

Babel Babble

! here’s the link to the post:

Life And Poetry Of James Clifford

I immediately shared this awesome story with Denis, who, after first shock, quipped it’d be cool if somebody now takes upon himself translate his translation back to Russian…we’d have a sort of a matryoshka thing going on, and I wonder-after which little matryoshka it’d become impossible to recognize the original-or would it always read as the original still, regardless how many people become transfixed with the poem and put-inevitably so-their own little stamp on it when they translate it, back and forth.

It’s easy to fall in love with the poem, it’s quite catchy, I love the rhythm of it, and it rings true.

And yet…I can’t say “here, there’s a poem I’d written myself, if I could”-it speaks about society very clearly divided, and I know it is, and still-I myself am a person with poor boundaries between myself and the world, I’m all punctured, I’m this string bag-and everything penetrates me, somehow, and I myself, in some strange way, penetrate everything, thus.

Maybe because of this constant “a river runs through it” I’m not sure all these barriers stand still-people who make do become people who kill, and then back again, and it’s some constant diffusional state, everything’s changing and floating, and is painful-fascinating, yes, if one’s a god that’s just observing, or a historian who observes hundreds years after-but I’m not a god, neither I’m a historian, and I think I’m too full of holes and tears, to stay fascinated only, even then.

** About diffusion-I’m very bad in sciences, and especially physics, so feel free to tell me “it’s not called “diffusion”, it’s some other process”.

I could ask my family of course, they know.

***Speaking of which-I re-read my last post, written very fast and in a frenzy, and it landed on me how easy it might be understood, for example, as something written about a war (I say “a war” because I, as you know, live, albeit in different ways, two wars):

“machine gun”, “star on Earth”, fire, all the imagery.

While actually it’s not, it’s how clinical depression, that currently lives in me, feels.

Everything is burning.

The wars contributed to “normal”, reactive feeling of being fucking depressed.

Then you, in a way, get used to, otherwise you go mad.

Yet it’s side effects to medications that kicked it to some awful level where one starts losing control and themselves too, in a way-because everything becomes fragments, fragments, leaving you.

Do you remember those old-fashioned thermometers? If it falls and breaks-there are tiny silvery balls of mercury rolling around and away? Very hard to gather-and Mom becomes upset.

That’s what you feel like-many tiny parts escaping you until you’re not you anymore.

You’re fire,-you’d do everything to escape it, you know that, you’re scared as hell of doing things, and you try to sit very still.

Usually I know it’ll pass; one just needs to wait.

Only this time, I’ve been waiting for three months, I think. Maybe more. Why it doesn’t leave me, I don’t know.

(Unless I didn’t get used to, and went mad-but no, it feels too chemically induced for that)

But it’s not easy of course to deal with me, right now. I’m a mess.

I’d apologize for being a mess, even though it’s not that I chose it-but some people hate when I apologize (hey, folks, I love you, even though you don’t let me apologize to my heart’s content, I said, и помахал рукой))

I’m saying it all out loud it here , much to my own dismay, in a hope that saying it helps to gather those fragments. Kill the thing, quench the fire.

Writing does help to revive things (and people)-or kill them, symbolically.

If you write about something long enough.

***It’s one long post, so I’ll try to wrap up.

If you’re still reading and interested (I’d be very surprised if you are)-” star on Earth” refers to what my son is trying to do in his field of work which is Plasma Physics.

I understand precisely nothing in this, yet, being his mother, never give up asking, so at some point he sighed and told me: “We’re trying to build another source of energy. Think about it like building a star on Earth”.

I became giddy as a toddler, at that moment. At last, something that sounds like a fairy-tale.

The painting with breasts pointing towards Heaven with a machine gun between them very briefly appears in a novel by Soviet writer Vladimir Tendryakov, “Rendezvous with Nefertiti ".

(I used to love Tendryakov’s work-not sure whether this one was ever translated to English, yet some other of his works are, including famous “Assassinating mirages”.

I still love him enough to recommend him to you, dear readers.

I re-read “Rendezvous with Nefertiti” recently-only I don’t remember when, time’s a blur, everything that happened this decade is “yesterday” to me.)

*****I suddenly decided you had enough of my musings, so

until next time,

very truly yours, albeit a mess,

Chen/April

PS (she didn’t leave though but continued to ramble))

I’ve just read this book, “The Guest”, by Emma Cline. It’s very engaging, I read it in 3 hours, maybe 4-but it added to me being a mess.

Too much in common-even though no, that’s not me, I’m different, I’d never this or that, -but you read with this awful recognition, and it throws you back so hard, and your remaining mercury balls are flying allover, how many one still has, anyway?

Nevertheless, I started re-reading it as soon as i turned the last page-so I guess it’s a safe bet to recommend it too.