A
Note on Sarah Valentine’s Genady Ayigi
by Ilya Kaminsky
Beautiful poems of insight and wisdom
of otherworldly seeing, where each girl in childhood “goes out / like a bright
breath into the field / like board-white buckwheat” and we see ourselves “as if
the soul were in a burnt-out barn / at night” while “like snow the Lord is all
there is / when all there is is snow”
These poems of Genadyi
Ayigi, Russia’s most innovative poet of the second
half of the 20th century, gorgeously translated into
English by Sarah Valentine, are filed with elegiac whisperings and bright
sensual turns, and “the sleeplessness of the night watchman / at the city
graveyard,” whose spiritual longing shows us how this poet is climbing the air,
“as if / through bloody branches / you clamber towards the light.”
Combining
what he learned from Celan, Char and other Wester Europeans and what he loved in the old Chuvash
tradition, Ayigi gave us poems like:
Garden—Grief
it is
(perhaps)
the wind
that rocks this too light
(for dying)
heart
Clearly, Ayigi's
are verses whose co-author is the silence itself. Thinking of him, several
years after he passed away, one is tempted to repeat his own words: “The earth
and soil he knew were more raw than that in which we bury him today,” but the
poems remain, and in Sarah Valentine’s versions they are more alive than ever:
“god-fire! – this clear field»