Song Under the Bullet

We are so bound up in discord
The centuries cannot disentangle us—
I’m a warlock, you’re a wolf. We’re close
In the continuous dictionary of earth.

Shoulder to shoulder, like the blind,
And led along by destiny,
In the undying dictionary of this country
We’re both condemned to die.

When we sing this Russian song
We trade our kindred blood in drops
And I become your night prey.
This is why we exist, wolf and warlock.

The snow smells sweet as a slaughterhouse
And not a single star shines above the steppe.
Old one, there’s still time to get your face
Broken in two by a lead-tipped whip.

1960

Untitled

A German machinegunner will shoot me in the road, or
An incendiary bomb will break my legs, or

An SS-kid will give me a bullet in the gut.
In any case, on this front, they’ve got me covered.

Without my name, or glory, or even boots,
With frozen eyes I’ll gaze at the snow, blood-colored.

1942

Arseny Tarkovsky
Arseny Tarkovsky (1907-1989) is one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century. He survived the entire Soviet era—suffering a leg amputation during the Second World War—by his work as a translator of poetry. His renown grew with the publication of his first book in the 1950s and when his son (the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky) used readings of his father's poems in his films The Mirror and Stalker.

Philip Metres
Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), and Pictures at an Exhibition (2016). He has translated five books of poetry from Russian into English. His work has garnered the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and three Arab American Book Awards, among others. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and is core faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
http://www.philipmetres.com

Dimitri Psurtsev
Born in Moscow, Dimitri Psurtsev is a poet and translator who has written five books of poetry — Ex Roma Tertia, Tengiz Notebook, Between, Tired Happiness, and Murka and Other Poems — and translated numerous books from English. He teaches at Moscow State Linguistic University and lives with his wife, Natalia, outside Moscow. Translations of his work have appeared, or will soon appear, in The Dodge, Ergon, The Journal, Presence, and World Literature Today.