Белла Ахмадулина
(1937-2010)
Новая домна на К М К
Где вздымается новая домна,
так работа идет наверху,
словно этому парню удобно
хохотать и висеть на ветру.
Он небрежно идет по карнизу,
но, быть может, заметно едва
мимолетною завистью к низу
замутится его голова.
Он вздыхает привольно и сладко,
и ступени гудят невпопад,
и огнем осыпается сварка —
августовский ее звездопад.
В нем, конечно, отвага без меры,
и задор, и мгновенный расчет,
что девчонка высокие метры
между ним и землею сочтет,
У девчонок иные привычки.
Поглядит, не поняв ничего.
Что-то нравится ей, что превыше
высоты, подымавшей его.
Но, бывавшая в цирке нечасто,
напряженно подавшись вперед,
побледнеет она за гимнаста,
если тот по канату пройдет.
И, глубокой обиды не выдав,
на девчонок, забывших о нем,
он опять с независимым видом
смотрит сверху и брызжет огнем.
[from the
collection Struna (Violin String), 1962]
d
Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie
The New Blast Furnace at the KMC
Where a blast
furnace new is ascending,
they labor up
high in the sky,
and it all
seems routine (condescending?),
for one
laughing and wind-surfing guy.
Nonchalantly he
strolls down a girder in tow,
but, could be,
though it’s barely apparent,
a transient yen
for safe earth down below
will sober what
looks like behavior aberrant.
His breath’s
free and easy and artless,
while his
footsteps sound ripe for a fall,
and the welding
torch spatters out sparklets,
like a cascade
of August star-fall.
He has, of
course, daring unbounded,
and fervor, and
inner conviction that some
of the girls
looking up will be awed and astounded
by the heights
that he navigates, feigning humdrum.
But the girls
view quite differently this death defyer.
She’ll gaze up
befuddled, face blank but inspired.
Something
pleases her that’s so much higher
than the
heights to which he has aspired.
Having been to
the circus but rarely,
all tensed up
as she gazes on high,
she goes pale
in her fright for the rambler
as his
tightrope he ambles, tough guy.
Careful to hide
all his feelings offended
at the girls
who’ve lost interest in him,
he looks down
from above with insouciance splendid,
while the sparks
spatter on with sheer vim.
d
Translator’s Note
If you google
the KMK of the Russian title today you come up with Кузбасский медицинский
колледж, which translates as the Kuzbass Medical College, an important medical
institution in Kemerovo, which is a major industrial city of Siberia. But the
initials as used in our poem of 1962 apparently refer to the Kemerovo
Metallurgical Combine. Did Akhmadulina visit the city of Kemerovo in the late
fifties or early sixties? I’m not sure, but in Soviet times it was a common
practice to send groups of poets and writers on visits to industrial sites, where
they could commune with Soviet workers. In what seems now like a far-distant
age, the time of the USSR, they were expected to write works of art glorifying
the workers or peasants.
The title of
the present poem suggests that this is to be just such a work, the kind
demanded of poets by the socialist state, but, as we soon learn in reading the
poem, the action has little to do with the actual blast furnace of the title.
The poet is, ostensibly, furnishing the government authorities with what they want,
while, simultaneously, writing a more subtle and lyrical piece of her own.
The subject
matter of the poem is somewhat muddled. The central character featured is,
obviously, the young construction worker who walks steel beams high in the sky,
while showing off for the girls watching from below. As for those girls, we get
a variety of takes on them. While Stanza 4 suggests that the worker expects the
girls below to be impressed by his performance, Stanza 5 begins with a line
that reads, literally, “But the girls have different habits” (or different ways
of behaving and thinking than the daredevil worker).
Switching in
this Stanza 5 from “girls” in the first line to one particular girl in the rest
of the stanza, the poet informs us that this one will “look up [at him]
understanding nothing”—as if musing over what’s going on? The last two lines of
the stanza are, literally: “Something pleases her that is far higher (loftier)/Than
the height that has raised him up.” We wonder what this thing is that is so
important to at least one of the girls below.
Stanza 6 digresses
from the present action to present a girl at the circus, looking on anxiously
at the antics of a tightrope walker. There is an analogy made here between
girls in two places looking up anxiously; a parallel is drawn between a circus
performer and a worker “performing” on a high beam. Stanza 7 concludes the poem
by describing the construction worker again. Now he is somewhat peeved (but
hiding his displeasure behind “an independent air”) because the girls down
below have “forgotten about him.” This strikes the reader as somehow odd. After
all of the anxious looking up, no more anxiousness, no more awe at or
appreciation of the performance. So what are the girls doing now? Could it be
that the image of their awestricken observation of the construction worker is
something that he himself has conjured up in his own imagination?
Perhaps the key
to the whole thing lies in Stanza 5, where at least one girl with a different
take on things is introduced. I would suggest that this girl may be emblematic
of the poet herself, she who finds much more elevated things to entrance her
than someone showing off on a steel beam or walking a tightrope at the circus.
The central lyric image of the poem appears both in Stanza 3 and in the final
stanza. It is that of the welder’s torch as it “spatters out sparklets” that
resemble a shower of falling stars in August. This may be the lofty, elevated
something that the girl appreciates, an image of God’s perpetual beauty in the
universe.
I first came
across this poem in The Penguin Book of Russian Verse, a lovely
paperback edited by Dimitri Obolensky and published in 1962. Almost as a kind
of afterthought, Obolensky includes this piece of verse, and only this one, as
representative of Akhmadulina’s work; the poem appears on the last page of his book.
When choosing a poem from this young poet, from her earliest collection—also published
in 1962—Obolensky could not have imagined what a great poet was in the offing, what
Bella Akhmadulina was to become in the years that followed.
