The Translator by John Crowley Read Free Book Online Page B

person to another, as we have recited. For a poem to live within a reader, reader must be able to say it in his own mind and heart. And for this reason I tell you now of class requirements and final test.”
    He drew out and piled before him the packets of purple mimeo-graphed poetry, and patted them. “I cannot give you grade on what poetry you write. This would be foolish, as though to grade you for your beauty or your strength. I can grade on how hard you try, and how hard you try to understand poetry of others. And so midterm, and final, test will be only that you write down in blue books the poems we read together. So you must memorize, commit to memory, learn them by heart is how you say it, yes?” He looked around at their faces, which were stunned or amazed or amused. “Which poems will be asked for on these tests? Any or all. Best to memorize all. Observe this motto of Soviet Young Pioneers: Be Prepared.”
    “I think they were all astonished,” Christa said to Gavriil Viktorovich in his St. Petersburg apartment. “We were all astonished. To be told that the only poems you could understand were the ones you had memorized.”
    “Yes.”
    “Like the one of my own, that he wanted me to recite. I could have remembered it if I’d thought a minute. I just never had to, I mean . . .”
    “Of course not. You need not memorize poetry. You need only to open book.”
    “Yes,” she said. “All we need to do. If we do.”
    He bent his head as though he would not pursue this topic, maybe shaming to his guest. His little apartment, cement-walled like a jail cell, was deep in books and papers. A small ikon amid them on a book-

t h e t r a n s l a t o r
43
    shelf, and by it a small framed picture, a woman with a gray bun and a flowered dress who hadn’t wanted to be photographed.
    “You know,” he said, “we have a view of poets unlike anyone’s.”
    “Yes. I think you do.”
    “We did once. Now, I do not know.”
    “Yes.”
    “Because, perhaps, they arrived so suddenly among us, with Pushkin—almost none before, Russian poets writing Russian. Then perhaps because after the Revolution they spoke truth long after others ceased or were silenced. And even when they themselves were silenced we could say truths they had said, in their voices, because we remembered their poems. Could be banned and burned but not plucked from memories.”
    “Yes.”
    “At one time we greeted one another with these poems. A line, a stanza of Akhmatova, of Mandelstam: if the other could complete the poem or the stanza, perhaps you could trust—perhaps be friends. Perhaps not.” He smiled. “Once poetry seemed capable to bring the dead to life. Maybe only our dead, in that age. Because of that power poets were killed, in several ways, not always reversible.”
    “What do you mean, not always reversible?”
    He regarded her as he had before, in that way that seemed to chal-lenge her, gently, to seek in herself for what she surely already knew.
    And yet it was she who was to have brought knowledge, or at least news. She said—surprised to find that she was going to ask it, right now, though it was what she wanted to know— “Do you think it was wrong of me, to publish those translations? In a book of my own?”
    He didn’t answer immediately. “It began your own career, I think?”
    “Yes.”
    “So long ago. And now you are most famous of American poets.”
    “Well no. No. And even if that were true, no poet in America is famous really.” She looked down at the wedding band on her left hand, turned it in her fingers, a habit. “I’ve never known if it was right of me. If I did it for the right reasons.”
    44

j o h n c r o w l e y
    He took one skinny knee in both his hands, and smiled. “Tell me,”
    he said. “Was it perhaps because of this doubt that you never studied Russian more?”
    She didn’t answer.
    “And that for so many years you have not talked of him? Because you thought perhaps you wronged him?”
    “I