Air Raid

Polina Barskova

Translated by Valzhyna Mort

POETRY, TRANSLATION  |  $20 $18

October 2021
Read an excerpt

Preface

 

I want blah blah blah

and the power of yadda-yadda

the power of Flaubert and Zola

the power of good and evil                              

the power of libraries

So I could turn you into a chronic bruise

So I could clone you into a wound

 

This old witch

Where did she die

What month date

What stranger

passed by a mass of snow she was frozen into.

 

Her galoshes stuck out like two prunes on a wedding cake. 

Whatever’s touched-up, wiped-out

I wish to expose, to trace

like a child – her tongue stuck out diligently –

traces letters. 

 

What letter is this? 

What do you think? 

Aaaaaaaaaaa Could be aaaaaaaaaa                               

Zinaida Bykova lowers herself into the snow,

like Verlaine – into the grass

in the suburb of London. 

I leave her now,            

I live a bit now.

This elegiac and terrifying book, so filled with voices' various rhythms, will stay in my memory as a moment of stillness...

Ilya Kaminsky

The Siege of Leningrad began in 1941 and lasted 872 days, resulting in the most destructive blockade in history. Already shaken by Stalin’s purges of the ’30s, Leningrad withstood the siege at a great human cost. Air Raid takes us through the archives of memory and literature in this city of death. Polina Barskova’s polyphonic poems stretch the boundaries of poetic form—this is what we’re left with after poetry’s failure to save nations and people: post-death, post-Holocaust, post-Siege, post-revolution; post-marriage and post-literature. How does language react to such a catastrophe? How does a poet find language for what cannot be told? This new translation of a leading contemporary Russian poet confronts English excavating its muteness, stutter, and curse.

About the Author

Polina Barskova is a poet and a scholar, author of twelve collections of poems and two books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, “Living Pictures,” received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and is forthcoming in German with Suhrkamp Verlag and in English with NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (UDP) and has three collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House) and Relocations (Zephyr Press). She has taught at Hampshire College, Amherst College, and Smith College. In 2021, she will be teaching Russian Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

Praise

Through a dazzling variety of poetic forms and with genuine poetic courage, Polina Barskova—one of the best poets writing in Russian today—reenacts the Siege of Leningrad, tragic pages of Russian history, and the lives of her favorite poets, as well as her own life with its joys, pains, and dramas. Translated into English by Valzhyna Mort, a superb poet herself, Air Raid reaffirms the significance of poetry as the historical medium uniquely equipped to articulate painful historical experiences and intimately connect them with today's sensibilities.

Mark Lipovetsky, Columbia University

Is this a poetics of history or memory or of the inability of our notions of history and memory to make any sense of the horror our species has created? Is this a poetics of scream or whisper, or a scream in whisper? Is it a poetics whose music is crisis or one that takes a crisis as its muse? All of this, I think. And much more. "This pebble here is a monument to someone," Barskova writes. Her poetics is multi-vocal, yes, she echoes the voices of victims, yes, she makes sure many other poets' lines resonate as her own pages turn, yes—and yet it is silence, at the core of her metaphysics, that moves me the most. It is her silence that knows the limits of any human response to horror, it is her silence that orchestrates melodies unheard. Not an easy thing to create, this silence. And Valzhyna Mort does that hardest of things—she translates it into American-English, thereby challenging our own American-English assumptions of what poetry is. This elegiac and terrifying book, so filled with voices' various rhythms, will stay in my memory as a moment of stillness, as when one comes from the crowded funeral and closes the door to sit alone in the room. This book casts a spell; it leaves me with an ornament of silences that emote—for, as Dickinson told us: after great pain, a formal feeling comes.

Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

Air Raid is a study of human response to history; a light-catching collection that casts the minute and individual alongside the collective experience of survival and loss. It is a gift to have this polyphonic work of cultural legacy presented to English-speakers in such excellent translation.

Marina Brown, Los Angeles Review

About the Translator

Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of Factory of Tears, Collected Body (both from Copper Canyon Press), and Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG). She is the recipient of an NEA translation grant, fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Amy Clampitt Fund from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, the 2010 Bess Hokin Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the 2018 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation. She is the translator of Air Raid by Polina Barskova (UDP). She teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian.

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Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-70-1
Trade Paperback
Smyth-sewn. 160 pp, 5.25 x 8.25 in
Publication Date: October 01 2021
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: Eastern European Poets Series #47