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.
No comments:
Post a Comment