Federico Fellini, Giuliette Masina, Mario Mastroianni, Roberto Benigni, Claudia Cardinale in this wonderful Time Magazine photogallery, Ciao! Fellini
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Aruna Shanbhag
It has been 36 years since Aruna Shanbhag, a young KEM Hospital staff nurse, was raped and strangulated with a dog chain by a sweeper, Sohanlal Walmiki, and has been lying brain dead at the KEM Hospital.On a plea from journalist and author Pinki Virani, the Supreme Court today issued notices to the KEM Hospital, the BMC, the Maharashtra Government and the Centre asking them to provide information about her condition.
Arun was 25 years old when the incident changed her life. She was in love with a doctor and was slated to marry him soon. She is now 61. She can't speak, hear, see or move. She is not on life support nor is she intravenously fed. Mashed food is put into her mouth by KEM nurses, and it gets swallowed. That has been keeping her alive all these years. Her relatives have stopped visiting the hospital The KEM nurses take care of her to ensure that she doesn't get bed sores. The doctors have not conducted any medical tests on her either for last 15 years.
Sohanlal Walmiki was convicted for seven years, (and that too not for sexual assault or unnatural sex), and walked a free man.
With Supreme Court taking cognisance of her case, will Aruna's Story finally have an end?
Should it end?
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Ami Vitale
picture courtesy: amivitale.com
Have you checked Ami Vitale's website in the "Some Interesting Websites" section on this blog. I have put it on top of the list because I happen to visit it couple of days ago, and saw that it has been redesigned. It was just by chance that I discovered Ami's website.
I first heard about Ami about six-seven years ago. Ami had come to India and based herself in Kashmir to cover the conflict. Later, she won a World Press Photo award for one of her Kashmir pictures.
That's when I searched and found her website. It was the simplicity of the website that struck a chord. Clean, minimalistic design, and focus firmly on the pictures she has made in different countries. She has also added other features to the website.
What differentiates Ami from the other global photographers is that she is not into "spot news" photography. She is into much deeper things than capturing the on-the-spot action pictures or the blood, gore and shock of world conflicts though to be fast enough to freeze the action in a moment is a skill of a different kind. What was striking about her work was her complete involvement with her subjects in which ever country she has travelled. Usually, foreign photographers see a country and its culture from outside-in perspective, but I thought Ami saw India from the inside-out perspective. So, her pictures are not about cows-walking-the-city-roads and snake-charmers.
We were in the middle of organising a national photocontest in 2005, and I was trying to invite her as a jury. But, she was busy travelling and shooting, and couldn’t make it. So, I persuaded her to write a piece about Kashmir that she covered, and despite her schedule, she managed to write and send her pictures for the photo-book that we published. Then she vanished again and now she has emerged in Miami, Florida! Some day I hope to get her to Mumbai to speak and participate in our activities.
I am posting couple of her interviews to give you a glimpse of Ami Vitale. More power to her!
Interview by James Robinson
Do check her pictures from Guinea Bissau at the end of this interview. Interview by Susan Markisz
Monday, December 14, 2009
RIP TS Satyan
Pic Courtesy: www.Outlookindia.com
A news ticker running on NDTV yesterday said "Mysore: Photographer TS Satyan dies at the age of 86", and it took me back to my brief interaction with the man. I had never heard of TS Satyan, veteran photojournalist, till I went for a preview of his photographs at the Piramal Gallery in South Mumbai around 1999-2000. I will never forget the incident. Creative people should never be treated in this manner.
I happened to visit the Piramal Gallery about an hour before the scheduled preview that day. I thought I will get some time to chat up Satyan. When I reached there, I saw that the gallery was completely empty. An aging Satyan was very lovingly putting up his pictures on the wall along with photojournalist and my friend Chirodeep Chaudhari. I got a chance to leisurely see his pictures, and have a chat with the man.
Like Satyan, his pictures were simple. Mostly black and white pictures shot in the old school style -- the emphasis firmly on the human expressions, and compositions. Like in this picture of Maharani Gayatri Devi. The picture captures the awe common people felt towards royalty those days. A lot of these pictures were clearly part of a visual history that very few Indian photographers may have captured.
Minutes went by, and it was time for the preview to start. All this while, there were just three of us in the gallery - Satyan, Chiro and me. And, there was no sign of anyone arriving either. Satyan was clearly upset. He never expected that he would be received in this manner by Mumbai's art loving junta. I felt at least the photojournalistic community should have been there to support. I called up a few photojournalists friends. Those who were free at that moment did troop in later. But, Satyan was clearly hurt. He said he will never exhibit in Mumbai again. I don't know if he ever did.
I was also shocked for another reason. Exactly seven days before this, I had come to the same gallery for a much-hyped preview of Prabuddha Dasgupta's exhibition on Ladakh. Before the preview could start, I was standing near the entrance of the gallery with my friend Neeraj Priyadarshi, now Indian Express photo-editor. A well-known socialite (whose name is better avoided) walked in, and obviously mistaking Neeraj for Prabuddha, started complimenting him in a manner mastered only by empty-headed socialites.
Both of us were taken aback, and we politely directed her to go to the first floor gallery. Quite obviously, it turned out to be a socialite gathering complete with wine-and-cheese. The place was buzzing with models, and people from the ad industry since Dasgupta (yes the man who shot Milind Soman-Madhu Sapre Tuff Shoes ad) is a celebrated ad photographer. TV cameras and photojournalists also came in large numbers to cover the event.
The memory of the stark contrast between these two photo exhibitions came back when I read about Satyan's death in Mysore. Undaunted by the response to his Mumbai exhibition, Satyan continued to take his old-world-gentility all around the country, and came up with several collections of his photographs.
Born in 1923 in Mysore, Satyan was one of the early pioneers in Indian photojournalism and shot pictures for publications like The Illustrated Weekly of India, Life, Time, Newsweek. He also shot special projects for Unicef which allowed him to travel widely and shoot rural life, especially the children, from a closer perspective. In 1979, Unicef organised an exhibition of Satyan's pictures of children at the UN headquarters in New York to mark the International Year of the Child. His books include Exploring Karnataka, German Vignettes, Hampi - The Fabled Capital of the Vijayanagar Empire, In Love with Life - A Journey through Life in Photographs, and in 2005 Penguin published his memoirs titled Alive and Clicking. Satyan was awarded the Padma Shri in 1977.
Do check more links on TS Satyan:
A Rediff report
Hindu article
Review of his show, A Long Exposure
Friday, December 11, 2009
RIP Dilip Chitre
Courtesy: Poetry International
PoetDilip Chitre passed away in Pune yesterday. Today's journalism resembles the era in communist countries where people opposed to the ruling coterie were airbrushed out of history, out of collective memory. What is worse is unlike communist countries where it was done for political reasons, Indian newspapers are doing it for financial reasons. Why waste column centimetres on people dead and gone is the attitude increasingly in the newsrooms? Why not give that space to advertisers? So, the demise of Bina Rai, who would rank among the most beautiful heroines to emerge from Bollywood ever, was reduced to four paras in Mumbai's leading newspaper. I am grateful to them for at least carrying the news. Therefore, I was actually happy to see that most papers took note of Chitre's death. On the web, I found an interview given by Chitre to Rediff.com's Lindsay Pereira in 2007. It's titled Portrait of An Artist where Chitre speaks in detail about his journey. One day I was trying to find Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri on the web, and I stumbled upon Chitre's blog on msn in which he has written a long piece on Kolatkar, his close friend. There are a number of pictures of his family friends, and much to read that would bring one up close to the man. Writing his profile, Chitre has written this beautiful expression:
the Self is the dancer: the inner Self the stage: the senses are the audience.
Check Dilip Chitre blog I also found some of his original poems in Marathi, and their translated versions at Poetry International. Do check some of Chitre’s poems
Rest in Peace Dilip Purushottam Chitre...
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Striking opening lines
Like John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, I found some striking opening lines of novels. The first one hit me like a slap when I first read it. Camus brings you face to face with his character immediately. I haven't obviously read all of these, but the first lines promise much.
********** *************** *****************
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
- Albert Camus, The Stranger.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
-Geroge Orwell, 1984
Lolita, the light of my life, the fire of my loins.
-Vladimir Nobokov, Lolita.
Erendira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of her misfortune began to blow. The enormous mansion of moonlike concrete lost in the solitude of the desert trembled down to its foundation with the first attack. But Erendira and her grandmother were used to the risks of the wild nature there, and in the bathroom decorated with a series of peacocks and childish mosaics of Roman baths they scarcely paid any attention to the caliber of the wind.
The grandmother, naked and huge in the marble tub, looked like a handsome whale. The grand-daughter had just turned 14 and was languid, soft-boned, and too meek for her age.
- Gabriel Gárcia Marquez, The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eight-four days now without taking a fish.
- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea.
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Courtesy: icarus.townhill.com
They're out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.
- Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst on to the rought terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path. Three of them were black slaves. The fourth, Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, the only child of Marquis de Casalduero, had come there with a mullata servant to buy a string of bells for the celebration of her twelfth birthday.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two cities
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, General Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
- Gabriel Gárcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude
"Who is John Galt?"
- Ayn, Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
- JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
It was inevitable: The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
- Gabriel Gárcia Marquez, Love in the time of Cholera
"Yes, Sir. Certainly, it was I who found the body. This morning, as usual, I went to cut my daily quota of cedars, when I found the body in a grove in a hollow in the mountains."
- Ryūnosuke Akutagawa,In A Grove (made into Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
They say when trouble comes, close ranks and so the white people did.
- Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Which of these do you find the most striking to open the book? If you know of more, do write in.
********** *************** *****************
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
- Albert Camus, The Stranger.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
-Geroge Orwell, 1984
Lolita, the light of my life, the fire of my loins.
-Vladimir Nobokov, Lolita.
Erendira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of her misfortune began to blow. The enormous mansion of moonlike concrete lost in the solitude of the desert trembled down to its foundation with the first attack. But Erendira and her grandmother were used to the risks of the wild nature there, and in the bathroom decorated with a series of peacocks and childish mosaics of Roman baths they scarcely paid any attention to the caliber of the wind.
The grandmother, naked and huge in the marble tub, looked like a handsome whale. The grand-daughter had just turned 14 and was languid, soft-boned, and too meek for her age.
- Gabriel Gárcia Marquez, The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eight-four days now without taking a fish.
- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea.
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Courtesy: icarus.townhill.com
They're out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.
- Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst on to the rought terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path. Three of them were black slaves. The fourth, Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, the only child of Marquis de Casalduero, had come there with a mullata servant to buy a string of bells for the celebration of her twelfth birthday.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two cities
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, General Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
- Gabriel Gárcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude
"Who is John Galt?"
- Ayn, Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
- JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
It was inevitable: The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
- Gabriel Gárcia Marquez, Love in the time of Cholera
"Yes, Sir. Certainly, it was I who found the body. This morning, as usual, I went to cut my daily quota of cedars, when I found the body in a grove in a hollow in the mountains."
- Ryūnosuke Akutagawa,In A Grove (made into Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
They say when trouble comes, close ranks and so the white people did.
- Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Which of these do you find the most striking to open the book? If you know of more, do write in.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
T S Eliot’s Eeldrop and Appleplex
It is always interesting to explore the lesser known aspects of an artist/writer/poet/philosopher/film-maker/actor-actress. By that, I mean you generally discover some real gems when you explore lesser known works or something the person is not known for.
Existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote several books, essays, treatises expounding his ideas. His novel Nausea (with a wonderful cover of a Salvador Dali painting) was brilliant, but was extremely depressing to read. I didn't imagine that Sartre would also short stories apart from his profound existential theses. Then I came across his collection of short stories called Intimacy and Other Stories. All the stories were brilliant and Sartre reflects so differently in that work.
Similarly, Eight and Half or La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life) are easily Federico Fellini's most famous films. But, I was completely mesmerised by La Strada (The Road). Unlike the other Fellini narratives which cut back and forth in time, La Strada has a simple linear narrative with three outstanding performances. Anthony Quinn and Fellini's real life wife Guilette Masina play roles of a life time. I found the film similar to Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (Song of the Road). Both films are extremely lyrical. Both have a brilliant theme music track that runs through the film. Both are extremely simply told, and both have superb performances.
My latest discovery is a short shory by poet laureate TS Eliot. I am yet to read it myself. Let's see how Eliot fares with prose. T S Eliot’s Eeldrop and Appleplex
Do tell me how you find it.
Existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote several books, essays, treatises expounding his ideas. His novel Nausea (with a wonderful cover of a Salvador Dali painting) was brilliant, but was extremely depressing to read. I didn't imagine that Sartre would also short stories apart from his profound existential theses. Then I came across his collection of short stories called Intimacy and Other Stories. All the stories were brilliant and Sartre reflects so differently in that work.
Similarly, Eight and Half or La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life) are easily Federico Fellini's most famous films. But, I was completely mesmerised by La Strada (The Road). Unlike the other Fellini narratives which cut back and forth in time, La Strada has a simple linear narrative with three outstanding performances. Anthony Quinn and Fellini's real life wife Guilette Masina play roles of a life time. I found the film similar to Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (Song of the Road). Both films are extremely lyrical. Both have a brilliant theme music track that runs through the film. Both are extremely simply told, and both have superb performances.
My latest discovery is a short shory by poet laureate TS Eliot. I am yet to read it myself. Let's see how Eliot fares with prose. T S Eliot’s Eeldrop and Appleplex
Do tell me how you find it.
Rabindranath Tagore's The Victory
Google, most of the time, works like magic. Many times I google something and keep reading as the net takes me on a wonderful journey.
One day I was wandering on James Nachtwey's site VIIphoto.com when I spotted that the photo agency plans to organise a photography workshop near Chernobyl site and the ghost town of Pripyat. Some areas around the nuclear reactor continue to be out of bound for radiation fears. I googled and found more about Pripyat and what happened that fateful night. It makes very disturbing reading. I also found a Chernobyl victim and her poems, which I have posted for you all to read.
I don't know why I suddenly thought of googling for a beautiful short story by Rabindranath Tagore that was part of my final year BA Literature syllabus. And, I actually found it on a wonderful online book resource. It is called The Victory, and the original English translation is by the poet laureate himself. Here it is for those who want to read The Victory. What I like about the story is the simplicity of Tagore's language and the unmistakable classical, oriental imagery.
Do tell me how you liked it.
One day I was wandering on James Nachtwey's site VIIphoto.com when I spotted that the photo agency plans to organise a photography workshop near Chernobyl site and the ghost town of Pripyat. Some areas around the nuclear reactor continue to be out of bound for radiation fears. I googled and found more about Pripyat and what happened that fateful night. It makes very disturbing reading. I also found a Chernobyl victim and her poems, which I have posted for you all to read.
I don't know why I suddenly thought of googling for a beautiful short story by Rabindranath Tagore that was part of my final year BA Literature syllabus. And, I actually found it on a wonderful online book resource. It is called The Victory, and the original English translation is by the poet laureate himself. Here it is for those who want to read The Victory. What I like about the story is the simplicity of Tagore's language and the unmistakable classical, oriental imagery.
Do tell me how you liked it.
Monday, December 07, 2009
The attack on Pearl Harbour
183 Japanese fighter planes invaded the skies at Pearl Harbour in the Pacific one early morning. The surprise attack destroyed 347 vessels at the US base and US plunged into World War II. And ever since US has been fighting other people's wars!!! Some archival pictures on this Time mag photogallery
The Attack on Pearl Harbour
The Attack on Pearl Harbour
Thursday, December 03, 2009
The Chernobyl poems
And this one will complete 25 years two years later - Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Lyubov Sirota and her son came to the balcony near the Chernobyl plant in the town of Pripyat for fresh air, and saw the flash of light emanating from the plant. The people of Pripyat were exposed to the radiation for 36 hours. Read on what exactly happened to chernobyl-and-pripyat Later, Sirota wrote The Chernobyl Poems. The poems are followed by Adolph Kharash who writes about the poetry and his meetings with Sirota...
Courtesy: www.wsu.edu/.../chernobyl_index.html
Lyubov Sirota with her son Sasha before the disaster
TO PRIPYAT
1.
We can neither expiate nor rectify
the mistakes and misery of that April.
The bowed shoulders of a conscience awakened
must bear the burden of torment for life.
It's impossible, believe me,
to overpower
or overhaul
our pain for the lost home.
Pain will endure in the beating hearts
stamped by the memory of fear.
There,
surrounded by prickly bitterness,
our puzzled town asks:
since it loves us
and forgives everything,
why was it abandoned forever?
2.
At night, of course, our town
though emptied forever, comes to life.
There, our dreams wander like clouds,
illuminate windows with moonlight.
There trees live by unwavering memories,
remember the touch of hands.
How bitter for them to know
there will be no one for their shade
to protect from the scorching heat!
At night their branches quietly rock
our inflamed dreams.
Stars thrust down
onto the pavement,
to stand guard until morning . . .
But the hour will pass . . .
Abandoned by dreams,
the orphaned houses
whose windows
have gone insane
will freeze and bid us farewell! . . .
3.
We've stood over our ashes;
now what do we take on our long journey?
The secret fear that wherever we go
we are superfluous?
The sense of loss
that revealed the essence
of a strange and sudden kinlessness,
showed that our calamity is not
shared by those who might, one day,
themselves face annihilation?
. . . We are doomed to be left behind by the flock
in the harshest of winters . . .
You, fly away!
But when you fly off
don't forget us, grounded in the field!
And no matter to what joyful faraway lands
your happy wings bear you,
may our charred wings
protect you from carelessness.
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
To Vasily Deomidovich Dubodel, who passed away in August 1988, and to all past and future victims of Chernobyl.
They did not register us
and our deaths
were not linked to the accident.
No processions laid wreaths,
no brass bands melted with grief.
They wrote us off as
lingering stress,
cunning genetic disorders . . .
But we--we are the payment for rapid progress,
mere victim (of someone else's sated afternoons.
It wouldn't have been so annoying for us to die
had we known
our death would help
to avoid more "fatal mistakes"
and halt replication of "reckless deeds"!
But thousands of "competent" functionaries
count our "souls" in percentages,
their own honesty, souls, long gone--
so we suffocate with despair.
They wrote us off.
They keep trying to write off
our ailing truths
with their sanctimonious lies.
But nothing will silence us!
Even after death,
from our graves
we will appeal to your Conscience
not to transform the Earth
into a sarcophagus!
* * *
Peace unto your remains,
unknown fellow-villager!
We'll all end up there sooner or later.
Like everyone, you wanted to live.
As it turned out,
you could not survive . . .
Your torment is done.
Our turn will come:
prepare us a roomier place over there.
Oh, if only our "mass departure"
could be a burning lump of truth
in duplicity's throat! . . .
May God not let anyone else
know our anguish!
May we be extinction's limit.
For this, you died.
Peace unto your remains,
my fellow-villager
from abandoned hamlets.
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
BURDEN
How amazing
in my thirtieth year
not to live
but instead
stumble along--
all bygone years
both happy and deadly,
heavy, wet, like logs,
crowd in the soul
as if in a tomb!
The soul does not sing
but rather becomes mute;
ails
rather than aches . . .
So it is harder to breathe.
I am not to fly!
Though the shallow edge
of heaven is over my porch.
Already the roads have tired me,
hobbled me so--
I can no longer soar!
Faces reflect in the heavens.
faces of those
to whom I have said farewell.
Not one can be forgotten!
No oblivion!
The soul, it seems--
is a difficult memory.
Nothing can be erased,
nothing subtracted,
nothing canceled,
nothing corrected! . . .
. . . Even so,--the burden is sacred,
the heavier
the dearer!
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
Revised by Lyubov Sirota
RADIOPHOBIA
Is this only--a fear of radiation?
Perhaps rather--a fear of wars?
Perhaps--the dread of betrayal,
cowardice, stupidity, lawlessness?
The time has come to sort out
what is--radiophobia.
It is--
when those who've gone through the Chernobyl drama
refuse to submit
to the truth meted out by government ministers
("Here, you swallow exactly this much today!")
We will not be resigned
to falsified ciphers,
base thoughts,
however you brand us!
We don't wish--and don't you suggest it!--
to view the world through bureaucratic glasses!
We're too suspicious!
And, understand, we remember
each victim just like a brother! . . .
Now we look out at a fragile Earth
through the panes of abandoned buildings.
These glasses no longer deceive us!--
These glasses show us more clearly--
believe me--
the shrinking rivers,
poisoned forests,
children born not to survive . . .
Mighty uncles, what have you dished out
beyond bravado on television?
How marvelously the children have absorbed
radiation, once believed so hazardous! . . .
(It's adults who suffer radiophobia--
for kids is it still adaptation?)
What has become of the world
if the most humane of professions
has also turned bureaucratic?
Radiophobia
may you be omnipresent!
Not waiting until additional jolts,
new tragedies,
have transformed more thousands
who survived the inferno
into seers--
Radiophobia might cure
the world
of carelessness, satiety, greed,
bureaucratism and lack of spirituality,
so that we don't, through someone's good will
mutate into non-humankind.
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
AT THE CROSSING
A century of universal decay.
In cyclotrons nuclei are split;
souls are split,
sounds are split
insanely.
While behind a quiet fence
on a bench in someone's garden
Doom weighs
a century of separation
on the scales.
And her eyes are ancient,
and her palms are taut with nerves,
and her words clutch
in her throat . . .
Nearby and cynical, death
brandishes a hasty spade.
Here, whispers are worse than curses,
offer no consolation.
Yet out on the festive streets
the mixed chorus
of pedestrians and cars
never stops.
The stoplight
winks with greed,
gobbles the fates of those it meets
in the underground passageways
of eternity.
How long
the bureaucrats
babbled on
like crows
about universal good . . .
Yet somehow
that universal good
irreversibly
seeps away.
Have we slipped up?
In the suburbs, choke-cherries
came out with white flowers
like gamma fluorescence.
What is this--a plot by mysterious powers?
Are these intrigues?
We have slipped up!
Choke-cherries are minor.
They are not vegetables . . .
Here, tomatoes ripened too early:
someone just ate one--the ambulance
had to be called in a rush.
We have slipped up.
We came to the sea--
the eternal source of healing . . .
And--we were stunned.
The sea is an enormous waste dump.
What happened?
Have we slipped up?
How masterfully
the blind promoters
of gigantic plans
manipulated us so far!
Now the bitter payment
for what we so easily
overlooked yesterday..
Has day died?
Or is this the end of the world?
Morbid dew on pallid leaves.
By now it's unimportant
whose the fault,
what the reason,
the sky is boiling only with crows . . .
And now--no sounds, no smells.
And no more peace in this world.
Here, we loved . . .
Now, eternal separation
reigns on the burnt out Earth . . .
These dreams are dreamed
ever more often.
Ever more often I am sad for no reason,
when flocks of crows
circle over the city
in skies, smoky, alarmed . . .
Translated from the Russian
by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
Original Russian version of this poem.
FATE
(Triptych)
1.
I am working--
as if with my final strength,
as if from my final days
I look at eternity.
The moment of farewell
has made my head spin . . .
I adore you--
random passersby!
To me--you are no one,
but you give me the plot,
the smile,
the glance laced with bitterness . . .
Your astonished looks follow me, surprised
I-love you for no reason.
Yet maybe
I can see more clearly
from the silence,
bareness of abandoned hamlets--
nothing more absurd than feuds,
nothing more splendid than confession,
how petty are success and luck,
how lowly the yearning for riches.
Like last year's snow, you can't buy
at any price the sense
of brotherhood.
What happiness--
to come home,
to repay debts to friends and kin,
without thinking
your last duty is
to bow over your smoldering home!
2.
I accept
this world!
I embrace
this air!
I am happy
it is not simple
for me
to become
your happiness . . .
3.
I am working--
as if with my final strength,
as if from my final days
I look at eternity.
But only with you
is the hour of daybreak kind.
And only with you
is every evening splendid.
Indeed can it be
I have only a handful of days
left to live--
to be burnt up in one short month?
Now,
when I can love so much,
when my world is so majestic and bright!
Life went up in smoke from somebody's campfire
(this world has inquisitors to spare!).
Everything burned,
burned up.
Even the ashes
were not always left behind . . .
But the stubborn soul still lives
yet again resurrected from ashes!
I live with abandon!
I live, breathing you!
And for you, I am ready to go
into the inferno again!
But with merciful hands you extinguish
the fatal fire under me.
My beloved,
may God protect you!
May the flame of the redeemed soul shield you!
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
Your glance will trip on my shadow
and the shadow
will thrust itself
into the leafy shade.
The pale sun will shine over us,
a lantern
scorched by the burning question . . .
Caught by the gravity of the light,
breathing is choked, lips are pressed,
and there is no answer,
no answer
to this light in the violent night.
But freed from gravity our shadows
shook the jasmine bush,
they will drift apart,
breathe night haze at our backs.
And the yellow leaf will fall exhausted,
it will take unbearably long to inhale.
As if the wisdom of autumn
were to catch us by surprise . . .
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
April 26, 1986
A Voice from Dead Pripyat
by Adolph Kharash
Science Director, Moscow State University
I first met Lyubov Sirota late in January 1988 in Kiev, in an area of the city called Troeshchino where, in November of 1986, there settled a group of people evacuated from Pripyat, the satellite city of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. They warmly greeted our group of students and professors from Moscow University in the Zemliaki club , where the children from the deserted city were taking classes in dance and drawing, and adults were meeting to recall what had been and plan what would come.
People from Pripyat very much appreciated any kind of attention. It was no joke that for almost two months after the catastrophe not a single word about Pripyat was in the central press or tv or radio--nothing about the fate of the city which was in an hour forever deserted by more than 50,000 inhabitants. Even some knew of its existence (the town was designated "special purpose" or "Secret"), nobody knew that this was the nearest city to the Chernobyl nuclear plant, only three kilometers away. I learned about the existence of this city only in June, 1986, when I went to the site. The inhabitants of Pripyat knew nothing of the explosion. They suspected nothing, took no precautions, and were exposed to the fallout from the Chernobyl catastrophe for thirty-six hours.
The City of Ghosts is how the city was called in the poems of another acquaintance from Troeshchino, Vladimir Shovkoshitny, a friend of Liubov Sirota; he had formerly worked in the Chernobyl nuclear plant and was one of the first volunteers for the cleanup of the aftermath.
Lyubov Sirota and her little son lived in the neighborhood of Pripyat closest to the nuclear plant. The night of the April 25th was very warm and clear. Lyubov couldn't sleep. She went outside to breathe the fresh, fragrant spring air. She was one of the first--one of the few--people in Pripyat to see above the Chernobyl plant the evil flash of light, the star Wormwood (in Russian, Chernobyl ), which two thousand years ago was prophesied in the Book of Revelation, and which that night abruptly incinerated people's hopes and plans. If she had only known then that she should have closed her eyes and run, not looking back, away from this dawn glow, from this air rich with spring blossoms.
"Nobody knew anything."
This is how I see Lyubov; even today, though I have often met with her after that remarkable evening in Troeshchino She was the embodiment of defenselessness, and of limitless baffled anger.
"Nobody knew anything."
She was the first to try to explain to us, the uninitiated, who came from well-protected, undisturbed Moscow, what had actually happened in Pripyat that night and in the following thirty-six hours of anxious waiting. Now, three years after we met in Troeshchino I can see the Pripyat of that time in the light of my endless pondering and in the pain in the voice of Lyubov Sirota in the poem "At the Crossing.²;
Has day died?
Or is this the end of the world?
Morbid dew on pallid leaves.
By now it's unimportant
whose the fault,
what the reason,
the sky is boiling only with crows . . .
And now--no sounds, no smells.
And no more peace in this world.
Here, we loved . . .
Now, eternal separation
reigns on the burnt out Earth . . .
The destruction of Pripyat is the destruction of the promised land; it is a metaphor of universal destruction, a prophecy and sign of the Apocalypse. For the latter inevitable and universal catastrophe there will be in reality no one who can be called guilty. Any merely human cause is utterly petty, trifling, not worth mentioning. But for earthly tragedies earthly beings must pay the price. The perishable flesh prevents the spirit from freeing itself from earthly cares and soaring into cosmic space. Flesh drags the spirit down to the deserted hearth, forces it to grieve unconsolably for the fate of relatives and neighbors, to look into the eyes of children in which an unchildish despair is fixed.
Again and again, we torture ourselves with the living pictures of that summery April day, when the people--unsuspecting--opened the windows of their apartments, strolled about in the streets, sunbathed on the river beaches, celebrated weddings, picnicked in the nearby forests, eating ice cream which was sold in the street, the children frolicking, thrusting their bare arms up to the elbows into the foaming streams of radioactive water streaming profusely through the city streets. Again and again one seeks in torment the guilty and laments for the victims. This is why Lyubov Sirota's apocalyptic insights are not for an instant abstract or passionless, even prophesying as they do the end of the world. These insights are deeply personal and quite mortal. They are penetrated by physical pain and inscribed with the grief for the casualities and concern for the lives and fates of mortal, living people and also by angry accusations against other people--also very much alive and mortal--who did not rush to help, did not warn of the danger, did not prevent the fatal outcome.
In one of the films of Rolan Sergienko, who created a cycle of films on the Chernobyl catastrophe, fact is uniquely combined with artistic expressiveness. Lyubov Sirota participated in making one of the films, Threshold. One scene, shot in Pripyat April 26, 1986 by a young local cameraman named Nazarenko, shows a sunlit street filled with people in the midst of their festive Saturday holiday, women strolling carelessly, wearing light, loose dresses, infants in their strollers, bareheaded men relieved of their workday burdens. Suddenly two strange and gloomy figures appear, looking like characters from a science fiction film about an invasion from another planet: two militiamen in shiny protective clothing fully covering their bodies, wearing gloves, hoods, and tightly-sealed military respirators. A passerby who meets them stands still as if petrified, looking at this fantastic vision, not trusting his own eyes, as if he had seen them in a dream. Or perhaps this is what our terrifying reality is: a dream.
"Nobody knew anything,' repeats Lyubov Sirota, but this does not apply to everybody--not to those who in one way or another knew about the April tragedy. The citizens of Pripyat, who should have been informed in the first place so that they could immediately take care of their own safety, knew nothing about it,. But those who made decisions knew everything about the catastrophe--or almost everything. As can be seen from the posthumously published notes of academician Legasov prove that by four o'clock A.M. of April 26, 1986, in the Kremlin, a thousand kilometers from carefree and defenseless Pripyat, they already had sufficient information about all elements of that night's catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Those authorities took care to have the militiamen dressed in special protective clothing; the unsuspecting citizens were given only counseling. The official declaration by the important bureaucrats from the Ministry of Health was that the evacuation was carried out in time, and that none of the city's inhabitants had suffered any harm. Their fears and concerns were declared unnecessary, groundless, labelled with the sinister psychiatric term "radiophobia.'
The event in Chernobyl inspired special documentary films such as Rolan Sergienko's movies and also the writings of the poets from Pripyat. Works in this genre are difficult to understand if you do not consider their factual basis. The poem "Radiophobia," which stands out in the poetic work of Lyubov Sirota, belongs to this genre.
"Don't promote this terrible word radiophobia!"
This was the first request made to us that evening in Troeshchino by the citizens of Pripyat. For those who were at the epicenter of the Chernobyl cataclysm this word is a grievous insult. It treats the normal impulse to self-protection, natural to everything living, your moral suffering, your anguish and your concern about the fate of your children, relatives and friends, and your own physical suffering and sickness as a result of delirium, of pathological perversion. This term deprives those who became Chernobyl's victims of hope for a better future because it dismisses as unfounded all their claims concerning physical health, adequate medical care, food, decent living conditions, and just material compensation. It causes an irreparable moral harm, inflicting a sense of abandonment and social deprivation that is inevitable in people who have gone through such a catastrophe.
Does the term "radiophobia" console anyone? Yes, of course. First, it calms public opinion , suggesting that only a handful of victims of Chernobyl ecxists. And what are tens or hundreds of thousands of people, or even several million, in such a large country, or measured against all of humanity? A handful of super-sensitive individuals who gave in to panic. Most important, the term excuses the authorities from worrying, relieves them of responsibility for the destructive effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe on human organisms, and helps them to "conserve&" huge material resources.
That meeting in Troeshchino went on late into the long winter night. "Look, he's fallen asleep," said Liubov" Sirota, looking at her son as he napped in a corner. "He's tired. Before the war he sat in front of the TV until long after midnight." [These words have a special meaning: "before the catastrophe" as they are used by those who happened to be in the area contaminated by radioactive rain of cesium, plutonium, and strontium. People call that period in history, which began for them on the night of April 25th, 1986 and which stretches into the present-- "the war."]
"My apartment is not in order,' she apologized when I unexpectedly visited Lybov Sirota one week later in her small two-room apartment in Kiev's Kharkov district. She added bitterly, "I'm still young, a little over thirty, but have no energy to clean the floors properly, no energy.' This is also the voice motherly anxieties, the voice of physical exhaustion which came Unbidden. The fate of children and adults burned by the invisible fire of Chernobyl became a very heavy burden.
This is how we live.
The body is heavier and heavier,
the spirit is subtler and narrower.
It can enter the deserted house;
it circles like a bird above Pripyat in the night . . .
and you often wish that it would leave the inept body
and not days but years flow away
and numberless are the losses.
But one has to live,
and for the sake of the children,
accumulate anger,
to efface the old age in children's eyes
with the hope for a cure.
These lines are not printed in the copy of the collection Lyubov gave me. She wrote these lines by hand on the last page as a personal gift from the poet. But one has to live.
In her poems Lyuba entrusts her soul to other people. She believes that people will carry on this burden and help her, as she herself is ready to help everyone who lives on earth. The source of her faith is a crystal-clear spring of love, friendship, comradeship, mutual understanding, which penetrates her lyrics from the beginning to the end.
We are with you, dear reader; while people live on earth, hope is alive, hope for a better future, and this is what the poet wrote on my copy of Burden.From dead Pripyat comes the voice of living suffering, of a living soul, living hope. This hope is the underlying current of the creative impulse that inspires the poetry of Lyubov Sirota, the sacred meaning of her lyrics. I am enormously happy that this voice will sound for thousands of readers whose friendly help will no doubt ease the uneasy burden one poet. Perhaps this is also a small foreshadowing of the message about the better future for which Lyubov Sirota hopes.
Translated by Arkady Rovner, with Paul Brians, Birgitta Ingemanson, and Elizavietta Ritchie.
Courtesy: www.wsu.edu/.../chernobyl_index.html
Lyubov Sirota with her son Sasha before the disaster
TO PRIPYAT
1.
We can neither expiate nor rectify
the mistakes and misery of that April.
The bowed shoulders of a conscience awakened
must bear the burden of torment for life.
It's impossible, believe me,
to overpower
or overhaul
our pain for the lost home.
Pain will endure in the beating hearts
stamped by the memory of fear.
There,
surrounded by prickly bitterness,
our puzzled town asks:
since it loves us
and forgives everything,
why was it abandoned forever?
2.
At night, of course, our town
though emptied forever, comes to life.
There, our dreams wander like clouds,
illuminate windows with moonlight.
There trees live by unwavering memories,
remember the touch of hands.
How bitter for them to know
there will be no one for their shade
to protect from the scorching heat!
At night their branches quietly rock
our inflamed dreams.
Stars thrust down
onto the pavement,
to stand guard until morning . . .
But the hour will pass . . .
Abandoned by dreams,
the orphaned houses
whose windows
have gone insane
will freeze and bid us farewell! . . .
3.
We've stood over our ashes;
now what do we take on our long journey?
The secret fear that wherever we go
we are superfluous?
The sense of loss
that revealed the essence
of a strange and sudden kinlessness,
showed that our calamity is not
shared by those who might, one day,
themselves face annihilation?
. . . We are doomed to be left behind by the flock
in the harshest of winters . . .
You, fly away!
But when you fly off
don't forget us, grounded in the field!
And no matter to what joyful faraway lands
your happy wings bear you,
may our charred wings
protect you from carelessness.
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
To Vasily Deomidovich Dubodel, who passed away in August 1988, and to all past and future victims of Chernobyl.
They did not register us
and our deaths
were not linked to the accident.
No processions laid wreaths,
no brass bands melted with grief.
They wrote us off as
lingering stress,
cunning genetic disorders . . .
But we--we are the payment for rapid progress,
mere victim (of someone else's sated afternoons.
It wouldn't have been so annoying for us to die
had we known
our death would help
to avoid more "fatal mistakes"
and halt replication of "reckless deeds"!
But thousands of "competent" functionaries
count our "souls" in percentages,
their own honesty, souls, long gone--
so we suffocate with despair.
They wrote us off.
They keep trying to write off
our ailing truths
with their sanctimonious lies.
But nothing will silence us!
Even after death,
from our graves
we will appeal to your Conscience
not to transform the Earth
into a sarcophagus!
* * *
Peace unto your remains,
unknown fellow-villager!
We'll all end up there sooner or later.
Like everyone, you wanted to live.
As it turned out,
you could not survive . . .
Your torment is done.
Our turn will come:
prepare us a roomier place over there.
Oh, if only our "mass departure"
could be a burning lump of truth
in duplicity's throat! . . .
May God not let anyone else
know our anguish!
May we be extinction's limit.
For this, you died.
Peace unto your remains,
my fellow-villager
from abandoned hamlets.
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
BURDEN
How amazing
in my thirtieth year
not to live
but instead
stumble along--
all bygone years
both happy and deadly,
heavy, wet, like logs,
crowd in the soul
as if in a tomb!
The soul does not sing
but rather becomes mute;
ails
rather than aches . . .
So it is harder to breathe.
I am not to fly!
Though the shallow edge
of heaven is over my porch.
Already the roads have tired me,
hobbled me so--
I can no longer soar!
Faces reflect in the heavens.
faces of those
to whom I have said farewell.
Not one can be forgotten!
No oblivion!
The soul, it seems--
is a difficult memory.
Nothing can be erased,
nothing subtracted,
nothing canceled,
nothing corrected! . . .
. . . Even so,--the burden is sacred,
the heavier
the dearer!
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
Revised by Lyubov Sirota
RADIOPHOBIA
Is this only--a fear of radiation?
Perhaps rather--a fear of wars?
Perhaps--the dread of betrayal,
cowardice, stupidity, lawlessness?
The time has come to sort out
what is--radiophobia.
It is--
when those who've gone through the Chernobyl drama
refuse to submit
to the truth meted out by government ministers
("Here, you swallow exactly this much today!")
We will not be resigned
to falsified ciphers,
base thoughts,
however you brand us!
We don't wish--and don't you suggest it!--
to view the world through bureaucratic glasses!
We're too suspicious!
And, understand, we remember
each victim just like a brother! . . .
Now we look out at a fragile Earth
through the panes of abandoned buildings.
These glasses no longer deceive us!--
These glasses show us more clearly--
believe me--
the shrinking rivers,
poisoned forests,
children born not to survive . . .
Mighty uncles, what have you dished out
beyond bravado on television?
How marvelously the children have absorbed
radiation, once believed so hazardous! . . .
(It's adults who suffer radiophobia--
for kids is it still adaptation?)
What has become of the world
if the most humane of professions
has also turned bureaucratic?
Radiophobia
may you be omnipresent!
Not waiting until additional jolts,
new tragedies,
have transformed more thousands
who survived the inferno
into seers--
Radiophobia might cure
the world
of carelessness, satiety, greed,
bureaucratism and lack of spirituality,
so that we don't, through someone's good will
mutate into non-humankind.
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
AT THE CROSSING
A century of universal decay.
In cyclotrons nuclei are split;
souls are split,
sounds are split
insanely.
While behind a quiet fence
on a bench in someone's garden
Doom weighs
a century of separation
on the scales.
And her eyes are ancient,
and her palms are taut with nerves,
and her words clutch
in her throat . . .
Nearby and cynical, death
brandishes a hasty spade.
Here, whispers are worse than curses,
offer no consolation.
Yet out on the festive streets
the mixed chorus
of pedestrians and cars
never stops.
The stoplight
winks with greed,
gobbles the fates of those it meets
in the underground passageways
of eternity.
How long
the bureaucrats
babbled on
like crows
about universal good . . .
Yet somehow
that universal good
irreversibly
seeps away.
Have we slipped up?
In the suburbs, choke-cherries
came out with white flowers
like gamma fluorescence.
What is this--a plot by mysterious powers?
Are these intrigues?
We have slipped up!
Choke-cherries are minor.
They are not vegetables . . .
Here, tomatoes ripened too early:
someone just ate one--the ambulance
had to be called in a rush.
We have slipped up.
We came to the sea--
the eternal source of healing . . .
And--we were stunned.
The sea is an enormous waste dump.
What happened?
Have we slipped up?
How masterfully
the blind promoters
of gigantic plans
manipulated us so far!
Now the bitter payment
for what we so easily
overlooked yesterday..
Has day died?
Or is this the end of the world?
Morbid dew on pallid leaves.
By now it's unimportant
whose the fault,
what the reason,
the sky is boiling only with crows . . .
And now--no sounds, no smells.
And no more peace in this world.
Here, we loved . . .
Now, eternal separation
reigns on the burnt out Earth . . .
These dreams are dreamed
ever more often.
Ever more often I am sad for no reason,
when flocks of crows
circle over the city
in skies, smoky, alarmed . . .
Translated from the Russian
by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
Original Russian version of this poem.
FATE
(Triptych)
1.
I am working--
as if with my final strength,
as if from my final days
I look at eternity.
The moment of farewell
has made my head spin . . .
I adore you--
random passersby!
To me--you are no one,
but you give me the plot,
the smile,
the glance laced with bitterness . . .
Your astonished looks follow me, surprised
I-love you for no reason.
Yet maybe
I can see more clearly
from the silence,
bareness of abandoned hamlets--
nothing more absurd than feuds,
nothing more splendid than confession,
how petty are success and luck,
how lowly the yearning for riches.
Like last year's snow, you can't buy
at any price the sense
of brotherhood.
What happiness--
to come home,
to repay debts to friends and kin,
without thinking
your last duty is
to bow over your smoldering home!
2.
I accept
this world!
I embrace
this air!
I am happy
it is not simple
for me
to become
your happiness . . .
3.
I am working--
as if with my final strength,
as if from my final days
I look at eternity.
But only with you
is the hour of daybreak kind.
And only with you
is every evening splendid.
Indeed can it be
I have only a handful of days
left to live--
to be burnt up in one short month?
Now,
when I can love so much,
when my world is so majestic and bright!
Life went up in smoke from somebody's campfire
(this world has inquisitors to spare!).
Everything burned,
burned up.
Even the ashes
were not always left behind . . .
But the stubborn soul still lives
yet again resurrected from ashes!
I live with abandon!
I live, breathing you!
And for you, I am ready to go
into the inferno again!
But with merciful hands you extinguish
the fatal fire under me.
My beloved,
may God protect you!
May the flame of the redeemed soul shield you!
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
Your glance will trip on my shadow
and the shadow
will thrust itself
into the leafy shade.
The pale sun will shine over us,
a lantern
scorched by the burning question . . .
Caught by the gravity of the light,
breathing is choked, lips are pressed,
and there is no answer,
no answer
to this light in the violent night.
But freed from gravity our shadows
shook the jasmine bush,
they will drift apart,
breathe night haze at our backs.
And the yellow leaf will fall exhausted,
it will take unbearably long to inhale.
As if the wisdom of autumn
were to catch us by surprise . . .
Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie
April 26, 1986
A Voice from Dead Pripyat
by Adolph Kharash
Science Director, Moscow State University
I first met Lyubov Sirota late in January 1988 in Kiev, in an area of the city called Troeshchino where, in November of 1986, there settled a group of people evacuated from Pripyat, the satellite city of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. They warmly greeted our group of students and professors from Moscow University in the Zemliaki club , where the children from the deserted city were taking classes in dance and drawing, and adults were meeting to recall what had been and plan what would come.
People from Pripyat very much appreciated any kind of attention. It was no joke that for almost two months after the catastrophe not a single word about Pripyat was in the central press or tv or radio--nothing about the fate of the city which was in an hour forever deserted by more than 50,000 inhabitants. Even some knew of its existence (the town was designated "special purpose" or "Secret"), nobody knew that this was the nearest city to the Chernobyl nuclear plant, only three kilometers away. I learned about the existence of this city only in June, 1986, when I went to the site. The inhabitants of Pripyat knew nothing of the explosion. They suspected nothing, took no precautions, and were exposed to the fallout from the Chernobyl catastrophe for thirty-six hours.
The City of Ghosts is how the city was called in the poems of another acquaintance from Troeshchino, Vladimir Shovkoshitny, a friend of Liubov Sirota; he had formerly worked in the Chernobyl nuclear plant and was one of the first volunteers for the cleanup of the aftermath.
Lyubov Sirota and her little son lived in the neighborhood of Pripyat closest to the nuclear plant. The night of the April 25th was very warm and clear. Lyubov couldn't sleep. She went outside to breathe the fresh, fragrant spring air. She was one of the first--one of the few--people in Pripyat to see above the Chernobyl plant the evil flash of light, the star Wormwood (in Russian, Chernobyl ), which two thousand years ago was prophesied in the Book of Revelation, and which that night abruptly incinerated people's hopes and plans. If she had only known then that she should have closed her eyes and run, not looking back, away from this dawn glow, from this air rich with spring blossoms.
"Nobody knew anything."
This is how I see Lyubov; even today, though I have often met with her after that remarkable evening in Troeshchino She was the embodiment of defenselessness, and of limitless baffled anger.
"Nobody knew anything."
She was the first to try to explain to us, the uninitiated, who came from well-protected, undisturbed Moscow, what had actually happened in Pripyat that night and in the following thirty-six hours of anxious waiting. Now, three years after we met in Troeshchino I can see the Pripyat of that time in the light of my endless pondering and in the pain in the voice of Lyubov Sirota in the poem "At the Crossing.²;
Has day died?
Or is this the end of the world?
Morbid dew on pallid leaves.
By now it's unimportant
whose the fault,
what the reason,
the sky is boiling only with crows . . .
And now--no sounds, no smells.
And no more peace in this world.
Here, we loved . . .
Now, eternal separation
reigns on the burnt out Earth . . .
The destruction of Pripyat is the destruction of the promised land; it is a metaphor of universal destruction, a prophecy and sign of the Apocalypse. For the latter inevitable and universal catastrophe there will be in reality no one who can be called guilty. Any merely human cause is utterly petty, trifling, not worth mentioning. But for earthly tragedies earthly beings must pay the price. The perishable flesh prevents the spirit from freeing itself from earthly cares and soaring into cosmic space. Flesh drags the spirit down to the deserted hearth, forces it to grieve unconsolably for the fate of relatives and neighbors, to look into the eyes of children in which an unchildish despair is fixed.
Again and again, we torture ourselves with the living pictures of that summery April day, when the people--unsuspecting--opened the windows of their apartments, strolled about in the streets, sunbathed on the river beaches, celebrated weddings, picnicked in the nearby forests, eating ice cream which was sold in the street, the children frolicking, thrusting their bare arms up to the elbows into the foaming streams of radioactive water streaming profusely through the city streets. Again and again one seeks in torment the guilty and laments for the victims. This is why Lyubov Sirota's apocalyptic insights are not for an instant abstract or passionless, even prophesying as they do the end of the world. These insights are deeply personal and quite mortal. They are penetrated by physical pain and inscribed with the grief for the casualities and concern for the lives and fates of mortal, living people and also by angry accusations against other people--also very much alive and mortal--who did not rush to help, did not warn of the danger, did not prevent the fatal outcome.
In one of the films of Rolan Sergienko, who created a cycle of films on the Chernobyl catastrophe, fact is uniquely combined with artistic expressiveness. Lyubov Sirota participated in making one of the films, Threshold. One scene, shot in Pripyat April 26, 1986 by a young local cameraman named Nazarenko, shows a sunlit street filled with people in the midst of their festive Saturday holiday, women strolling carelessly, wearing light, loose dresses, infants in their strollers, bareheaded men relieved of their workday burdens. Suddenly two strange and gloomy figures appear, looking like characters from a science fiction film about an invasion from another planet: two militiamen in shiny protective clothing fully covering their bodies, wearing gloves, hoods, and tightly-sealed military respirators. A passerby who meets them stands still as if petrified, looking at this fantastic vision, not trusting his own eyes, as if he had seen them in a dream. Or perhaps this is what our terrifying reality is: a dream.
"Nobody knew anything,' repeats Lyubov Sirota, but this does not apply to everybody--not to those who in one way or another knew about the April tragedy. The citizens of Pripyat, who should have been informed in the first place so that they could immediately take care of their own safety, knew nothing about it,. But those who made decisions knew everything about the catastrophe--or almost everything. As can be seen from the posthumously published notes of academician Legasov prove that by four o'clock A.M. of April 26, 1986, in the Kremlin, a thousand kilometers from carefree and defenseless Pripyat, they already had sufficient information about all elements of that night's catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Those authorities took care to have the militiamen dressed in special protective clothing; the unsuspecting citizens were given only counseling. The official declaration by the important bureaucrats from the Ministry of Health was that the evacuation was carried out in time, and that none of the city's inhabitants had suffered any harm. Their fears and concerns were declared unnecessary, groundless, labelled with the sinister psychiatric term "radiophobia.'
The event in Chernobyl inspired special documentary films such as Rolan Sergienko's movies and also the writings of the poets from Pripyat. Works in this genre are difficult to understand if you do not consider their factual basis. The poem "Radiophobia," which stands out in the poetic work of Lyubov Sirota, belongs to this genre.
"Don't promote this terrible word radiophobia!"
This was the first request made to us that evening in Troeshchino by the citizens of Pripyat. For those who were at the epicenter of the Chernobyl cataclysm this word is a grievous insult. It treats the normal impulse to self-protection, natural to everything living, your moral suffering, your anguish and your concern about the fate of your children, relatives and friends, and your own physical suffering and sickness as a result of delirium, of pathological perversion. This term deprives those who became Chernobyl's victims of hope for a better future because it dismisses as unfounded all their claims concerning physical health, adequate medical care, food, decent living conditions, and just material compensation. It causes an irreparable moral harm, inflicting a sense of abandonment and social deprivation that is inevitable in people who have gone through such a catastrophe.
Does the term "radiophobia" console anyone? Yes, of course. First, it calms public opinion , suggesting that only a handful of victims of Chernobyl ecxists. And what are tens or hundreds of thousands of people, or even several million, in such a large country, or measured against all of humanity? A handful of super-sensitive individuals who gave in to panic. Most important, the term excuses the authorities from worrying, relieves them of responsibility for the destructive effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe on human organisms, and helps them to "conserve&" huge material resources.
That meeting in Troeshchino went on late into the long winter night. "Look, he's fallen asleep," said Liubov" Sirota, looking at her son as he napped in a corner. "He's tired. Before the war he sat in front of the TV until long after midnight." [These words have a special meaning: "before the catastrophe" as they are used by those who happened to be in the area contaminated by radioactive rain of cesium, plutonium, and strontium. People call that period in history, which began for them on the night of April 25th, 1986 and which stretches into the present-- "the war."]
"My apartment is not in order,' she apologized when I unexpectedly visited Lybov Sirota one week later in her small two-room apartment in Kiev's Kharkov district. She added bitterly, "I'm still young, a little over thirty, but have no energy to clean the floors properly, no energy.' This is also the voice motherly anxieties, the voice of physical exhaustion which came Unbidden. The fate of children and adults burned by the invisible fire of Chernobyl became a very heavy burden.
This is how we live.
The body is heavier and heavier,
the spirit is subtler and narrower.
It can enter the deserted house;
it circles like a bird above Pripyat in the night . . .
and you often wish that it would leave the inept body
and not days but years flow away
and numberless are the losses.
But one has to live,
and for the sake of the children,
accumulate anger,
to efface the old age in children's eyes
with the hope for a cure.
These lines are not printed in the copy of the collection Lyubov gave me. She wrote these lines by hand on the last page as a personal gift from the poet. But one has to live.
In her poems Lyuba entrusts her soul to other people. She believes that people will carry on this burden and help her, as she herself is ready to help everyone who lives on earth. The source of her faith is a crystal-clear spring of love, friendship, comradeship, mutual understanding, which penetrates her lyrics from the beginning to the end.
We are with you, dear reader; while people live on earth, hope is alive, hope for a better future, and this is what the poet wrote on my copy of Burden.From dead Pripyat comes the voice of living suffering, of a living soul, living hope. This hope is the underlying current of the creative impulse that inspires the poetry of Lyubov Sirota, the sacred meaning of her lyrics. I am enormously happy that this voice will sound for thousands of readers whose friendly help will no doubt ease the uneasy burden one poet. Perhaps this is also a small foreshadowing of the message about the better future for which Lyubov Sirota hopes.
Translated by Arkady Rovner, with Paul Brians, Birgitta Ingemanson, and Elizavietta Ritchie.
Bhopal 25 Years Later
Its another anniversary of a tragedy today. The Bhopal Gas tragedy completes 25 years today. Union carbide has got away. Bhopal's warriors are still fighting the battle. And there is absolutely no guarantee that another Bhopal Gas won't happen in this country. hmmmm...
Do check this Time magazine photogallery Bhopal 25 Years Later
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