OLGA SEDAKOVA
Nació en Moscú en 1949 y actualmente enseña en el Departamento de Filosofía de la Universidad Estatal de Moscú. Premiada y reconocida, sus poemas han sido traducidos a varios idiomas.
Profesora en el Departamento de Historia y Teoría de la Cultura Mundial en la Universidad de Moscú, Sedakova ha querido dedicar a este “problema” su último trabajo, Apología de la razón, publicado en Italia por “La Casa di Matriona”.
Olga Sedakova es una de las poetisas más populares de Rusia. Sus versos –que han sido publicados en todo el mundo, desde EEUU a China–, han recibido múltiples reconocimientos, entre los que se cuenta el Premio Vladimir Soloviev 1998 y el de la Fundación Solschenitzin en el año 2003.
Su pluma ha hecho hablar en ruso a los poetas y escritores más importantes: de Dante a Rilke, de Claudel a Eliot. De confesión ortodoxa, ha vivido un privilegio único: Juan Pablo II le invitó en varias ocasiones a sus dependencias personales para participar en lo que él denominaba “encuentros solovievianos”, que consistían en conversaciones con un grupo de intelectuales moscovitas. Un día el Papa le saludó con las siguientes palabras: «Con Dostoievski, seguimos en la esperanza de que la belleza salvará al mundo». «Nos hicimos amigos. Cuando me preguntó por mi obra poética pensé que se trataba sólo de una formalidad. Sin embargo, la siguiente vez que nos vimos me dijo: “Le leo a diario”. A pesar de las diferencias, había entre nosotros una gran cercanía, tal vez porque él también era un poeta».
FIGURA FEMENINA
En un largo ancho velo
está parada, volviendo su rostro
a otra parte: eso parece un álamo
junto a ella;
las apariencias engañan: no hay ningún álamo ahí.
Pero ella misma vería con agrado transformarse en uno,
como aparece en las viejas leyendas,
si sólo pudiese dejar de oír:
"¿Qué ves acá?"
"¿Qué veo dónde, psicóticos?
El océano, no pueden adivinarlo?
El océano y nada más. O no es suficiente
que yo deba afligirme para siempre, y tenerlos
a ustedes atormentándome con sus preguntas?"
FUENTE
Wayne Miller y Kevin Prufer. Modern European Poets.
Graywolf Press, 2008.
ПОСВЯЩЕНИЕ
Помни, говорю я, помни,
помни, говорю и плачу:
все покинет, все переменится
и сама надежда убивает.
Океан не впадает в реку;
река не возвращается к истокам;
время никого не пощадило –
но я люблю тебя, как будто
все это было и бывает.
(Ольга Седакова)
From the book Kliazma and Yauza
Surely, Maria, it’s not just the frames creaking,
Not just the panes aching and trembling?
If this is not the garden,
allow me to go back,
into the silence where things are invented.
If this is not the garden, if the frames are creaking
because it never gets darker than this,
if this is not that foreordained garden,
where hungry children sit by the apple trees
and forget the fruit that’s been bitten into,
where no lights can be seen,
but breathing is darker,
and the medicine of the night more safe…
I do not know, Maria, my sickness.
This is my garden that stands over me.
Traducciones: Gerald S. Smith
Is that only the windows creaking, Maria,
the wounded panes in them trembling?
If this is no garden
then let me return
to the silence where things are invented.
If this is no garden, where the windows are trembling
because this darkness is denser than any,
if this isn’t the garden of which it is written
that children sit hungry next to the apples
forgetting the fruit they have bitten,
where these’s not one light, even,
but breathing is darker,
and the medicine of night brings more hope;
I don’t know the name of my illness, Maria.
My garden stands taller than I do.
Traducciones: Catriona Kelly
From the book The Wild Rose
Legends and Fantasies
(1976 - 1978)
The Wild Rose
You unfold in the swollen heart of suffering,
wild rose,
oh,
the wounding garden of the universe.
Oh you, wild rose, white rose, the whitest of them all.
The one who names you will out-argue Job.
I am silent, though, disappearing in the mind out of the beloved sight,
concentrating my look
and not taking my hands off the fence.
The wild rose
walks, like a stern gardener,
who knows no fear,
with a crimson rose,
with compassion᾽s hidden wound under his wild shirt.
Traducciones: Richard McKane
From the book Tristan and Isolde
(1978-1982)
The Mill Hums
O happiness, you are the plainest of things
a simple crandle
you are a women crib
a fir-tree rocking
and if we fall
you will be our end.
Shining for me to this day,
as it does for anyone on this earth,
a radiant seam under a closed door.
O, life amounts to nothing
O, the mind hurts as much
as the heart.
A child weeps in the distance
and the mill hums.
Now a rough garment
of sound
and a fine bread dust.
The grain cries like a bird
beneath the hefty millstones.
And a solitary voice
alone, simple
talks with Vesper
the first star.
– O Lord my God
forgive me, forgive
and if you can
release my heart
so it might be
forgotten and good-for-nothing
required by nobody
descending a great staircase
into the expansive dark
so it discard life, like a golden sphere
invisible in the mind's eye.
A radiant seam beneath a closed door
which shines to this day, where one can disappear.
Tell me, my happiness
why live in the world?
To hear a child crying
and serve the stars.
And the stars themselves gaze down
from their caves or abysses:
it must be the Tsar's son
who also waits, and is alone.
He, like them, is alone.
And some strange power
like water under ice
stares through the spectral figures
which look down upon us
and the gaze, solitary
and plain
of this first and purest star.
Traducciones: Gregory O'Brien and Jacob Edmond
From the book Elegies
(1987-2004)
Autumn Water’s Elegy
To the Memory of Sergei Morozov and Leonid Gubanov
1.
Intimacies turn to formal YOUs and YOUs to THEY.
For how long must we stand and watch them end
in self-annihilation while autumn’s eerie hiss
shears off the days?
2.
Old age and winter stare me in the face and it’s with
inhuman boldness in their eyes they stare at me, old age
and winter,
measuring what treasures may remain, pyxing
and assaying with the lupine teeth of decimating grief.
3.
Arise, my soul, arise (to paraphrase the saint).
But whether itʼs too late or not,
we cannot say, though others might.
Warm is the air which age and winter print
white words on,
sightless wicks that burn
4.
in darkness visible. Coming tracks impressed
in snow thatʼs not yet fallen. Sergei, Leonid,
the slant earth gasped
(remember?) to see those waters lit below
on winter’s edge, a flambeau.
5.
With staff in hand I walk familiar waves
of ever unreaped corn and through typhoons of
earthen seas, those watery strings,
which cause the hills of mud to ripple,
6.
echoing on high the sourcesʼs sound like... yes,
like tiny hammers on a gamelan,
like comb and paper in the flowing water’s mouth
winding their courses towards us out of silence.
7.
Water gazes down
from the soundless core of the pallid watchfireʼs
rustling humstrum. Bending she comes down
and turns to me
and asks:
“What is humbler than water?”
8.
What is humbler than water?
Than patience more patient; like the name Anna,
grace abounding, giving from poverty, turning out
pockets
at the merest prompting of the inconstant ground.
9.
All things open like a door,
each has a secret doorway
to a deep transcendent passage. Try the latch;
in bolts the grateful heart, to home and silence.
Right now
10.
I think that nothing leads straighter there
through wildered gardens, flowers of the field and flowers
of the forest – all long desicated – via somnolence,
than water on her sleepless rounds,
11.
before ice closes in and sleep begins,
and she becomes as eyelids or the faithful skin
of one tight-clasped whose dreaming self’s
a distant two-in-one.
Things in paradise, are you
like love or it like you?
12.
A person with the skill to die
when living means approaching death:
such is the poet. Let the rest fool whom they can
and etch their letterʼs back
with senderʼs address.
13.
It costs us no great toil, my Muse,
to master sensual inquisitiveness,
outstaring, empty-eyed, the monstrous horse
that hews the flaming waters from
14.
the treeless, beastless, birdless rock.
Where dwell only you, thin shadows.
And you who like a fair child pluck the bents
of grasses,
blessed,
parched
and bleakish.
15.
Such is the sound when winter looks
and old age watches and the skies survey.
Such is the scream of pinions over nightmare governments
cowardly as death,
bearing you aloft with fiery trail,
our only goddess, Muse of Victory.
Traducciones: Robert Reid
The Elegy of Autumn Water
1.
The singular you becomes plural you,
all of you,
them.
For how much longer are we to stand over their demise,
their suicides listening, as autumn’s days grow shorter
with a prophetic rustle?
2.
Winter and old age look right into my face. The winter and old age look
with bold unhuman eyes:
they have to probe what’s left there
by biting it with the teeth of a wolf, with the teeth of ruinous longing.
3.
Rise, my soul, stand up, as St. Andrew of Crete says1. Whether it’s too late
or not, it’s not up to us to say, let it be heard in the speech of others.
The winter and old age write a white word
in the still warm air: the flame of invisible candles
4.
is in the still visible darkness, the future footprints
in the snow, which is still too far away. Dear Seryozha, dear Lyonya,
do you remember how the earth used to gasp on a slope
noticing
the glow of the approaching winter water below?
5.
I walk with my old staff all over the same
fields, unharvested as usual, the typhoons
of the earth’s sea, weak strings of water
from which hills rolled out, repeating
6.
the sound of a spring in the height, they look like… well,
like tiny oriental drums
or maybe jaws harps by the mouth of the flowing
water, emerging from silence to right here?
7.
From the fire of silence in the pale fire
of the rustling, the strumming, the partly singing water looks downward,
stoops as it goes down.
Turning to me,
someone says:
Is there anything more peaceful than water?
8.
What is more peaceful than water? It
is more patient than patience itself, it’s like the name Anna,
it’s like a pauper offering grace, turning
all his pockets inside out before any desire of the bottom.
9.
You can open any single thing like a door.
There is
a secret door into the transcelestial, underground passageway in each of
them.
Having found it alter groping around, the grateful heart
will run in – and will become silent in its homeland.
It seems
10.
to me now
that nothing leads there quicker
than this never-sleeping, this sleep-avoiding water that runs past these
empty
gardens, these meadow and forest plants that
no longer drink it
11.
before becoming ice, becoming just a dream.
becoming like eyelids, becoming like the trusty old skin
of one who falls asleep when she’s caressed, who sees herself with another
further in sleep…
Things, in your own garden,
you look like love–or perhaps, it’s love that looks like you?
12.
A poet is one who can die
where to live means reaching death.
The rest may try to fool whomever they may find.
They can write
their return address on an empty envelope.
To overcome
13.
eternal curiosity and lust – are we up to this task?
The Muse looking with the extinct eyes
of a monstrous steed that stroked the water fire
out of a cliff on which neither
14.
trees or beasts or birds live. Just you,
sheer shadows. And you are like a child with fair hair
gathering blades of blanched
sacred
dry
grass.
15.
With the same sound. Old Age, Winter, and the Firmament gaze.
With the same swish, wings carry, following
fresh footprints above countries that stretch long like a dream and are
cowardly like death,
our goddess –
the Victorious Muse.
Traducciones: Slava I. Yastremski and Michel Naydan
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