VIENNA

Everything seemed miraculous

on board Aeroflot

on our first trip abroad — canapés with caviar, champagne,

child-sized shiny metal utensils,

unusually polite flight attendants

who called us Herren und Damen.

But the airport in Vienna frightened

the beJesus out of my nine year old son

who asked me timidly: "Mama,

is Austria a capitalist country by any chance?”

and sat like a scared rabbit on our suitcase

glancing sideways at machine gun armed security guards

for the rest of the so-called welcome

led by an unshaven Israeli man

in a commissar leather coat.

The hotel in the outskirts was called Grüner something —

a forest or, possibly, a gate,

and the wet highway surrounded by heavy French walls

reminded me of Baltic towns of my youth — green, grey,

rainy…

Our taxi was a black Mercedes.

It impressed my son quite a bit —

he wrote a letter to his step-grandpa Mikhail Mikhailovich,

telling about the ride and the superiority of this shiny Mers

to MikhMikh’s old piece of shit.

I remember the dark oil painting on the wall

above the gargartuan bed

with a hunchbacked mattress

I shared with my child,

and another couple — Raya and her twenty year old daughter Yulka

staying in the room next door.

Immigrant children playing hide-and-seek in dusty hallways

while hookers were walking their clients

from the United Nations of the developing world

to the fifth floor.

Our first trip to the grocery store

with our precious foreign currency

that would not pay for a decent cup of coffee with strudel

had been memorable. We froze in awe

at the sight of these sacred objects: beautiful fruit in precious wrappers,

Warhol cans of tomato soup, phallic bananas without a scratch or blemish,

slices of Westphalian ham,

like peasant children eyeing a Christmas party

from behind a half-opened door

in the landowner’s home.

VILNIUS

The city of my youth,

dim aquarium of submerged baroque and gothic shapes,

slow movement of leaves

in crooked cobblestone streets.

Intricate jewelry of St. Ann's gothic needles,

so loved by Napoleon.

Old sand castle on top of the hill

overlooking the river,

din of Yiddish in streets,

mix of Lithuanian and Polish vowels.

Blue and green of oil cloths with mermaids and doves

carrying love letters to fallen soldiers

in the old market.

City of forty churches, one hundred synagogues

and Jesuit courtyards,

attic of my old house

with the wind blowing

through the drying sheets and soft dust with prints of cat paws.

green lakes, full of crayfish and drowned schoolchildren.

Disappeared people, disappeared voices,

smells of gefilte fish and aunt Ida’s napoleons,

sounds of "Lo Mir Yidden, In Einem, In Einem,”

my mother dancing to "Besame Mucho…”

Italian city of my youth,

built mistakenly in the North.

Atlantis of disappeared life,

container of my nostalgia,

swept by a wave.

I AM A WANDERING JEW

I am a wandering Jew,

or rather a Russian Lithuanian American Jewess.

Now I forget words not in one, but three languages.

My great-grandfather’s five storey house

still stands on Naugarduko in old Vilnius.

I grew up around the corner on Pylimo in a communal kitchen.

My grandfather’s grave is buried under the broken marble

and beer cans at the vandalized Jewish cemetery in Kaunas.

Apparently, dead Jews can still be subjected to pogroms

because the live ones from this part of the world are mostly gone.

My first love, the half Tartar wunderkind Kolia

must be building military planes some place around Moscow

or teaching others at the Baumann institute, in spite of

his youthful dreams to study history and art.

First husband Slava, the broken spirited jazz lover with graying temples

still puffs a cigarette despite a repaired heart

a few blocks from where we used to live,

in a seventies development Southwest of Moscow center.

He listens to the same Coltrane records,

only his wife leaves for the kitchen after the first two beats

and our cat is gone.

I am a wandering Jew, a psychologist, a somewhat multilingual therapist,

a poet—my home town Vilnius

must contain some traces of me

making my way to school through gothic courtyards,

home of my old music teacher on Basanavichius

and maybe to the biology department of the university

where my father used to teach.

Medieval corridors may have retained the smell of formalin

he used to put the frogs to sleep with in his lab;

the zoological museum with the gigantic whale jaw must be there,

luminescent Brazilian butterflies still glowing in the dark.

I am a wandering Sholom Aleikhem star —

these stars light up on their journey from continent to continent,

and then they get extinguished,

but a thin light trajectory may smolder in the night sky for a while.

Переклад з англійської Тані Родіонової. Куратор та редактор розділу — Олег Коцарев

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Таня Родіонова — перекладачка, редакторка, менеджерка культури, прес-секретарка Міжнародного фестивалю оповідання «Intermezzo». Перекладала для журналу соціальної критики «Спільне», Форуму Видавців у Львові та Київської бієнале 2015. Учасниця CulTour.UA — літературної подорожі для перекладачів і письменників (Україна – Польща, 2015 р.). З 2015 року живе та працює в Києві. Займається перекладом поезії американських бітників та Анни Гальберштадт.

У 2013 році започаткувала перекладацький проект VERBація, що займається колективним перекладом сучасної англомовної літератури українською. Разом із VERBацією перекладала слем-поезію Марка Сміта, п’єсу-вербатім «Синій бус» Дмитра Левицького (англійською), сучасну українську поезію для англомовної антології «Letters from Ukraine / Листи з України», виданої в рамках Місяця авторських читань у Вроцлаві. Зокрема, Танею перекладено вірші Григорія Семенчука, Юрія Іздрика та Василя Карпюка. У 2013 році проект VERBація потрапив до короткого списку премії для перекладачів поезії та есеїстики METAPHORA.