Marina Tsvetaeva, Мари́на Ива́новна Цвета́ева, Poems, Those from the Factories, Zavodskie, English Translation

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (Мари́на Ива́новна Цвета́ева;  1892 - 1941) was a Russian and Soviet poet.

Those from the factories, from 'Poems', by Marina Tzvetaeva

    They stand like working class gloominess
the bodies of factories, blackened with smoke.
Above the soot  shook their curls
the skies, moved to compassion.

Towards the smoky orphan-like loneliness of the inn,
smeared with grease, a hat  shuffles along.
The last hooter from the outskirts
howls demanding justice.

Hooter! Hooter! Of distraught foreheads
the ultimate scream: "we are still here, us!"
What a sense of death sentence
in this lament of the last hooters!

How bites their pitiful howling -
your satiation of velvet!
What a sense of being buried alive
and dragged to the slaughterhouse.

And God? Smoked till the forehead,
he doesn't intervene! We wait in vain!
Above the cots of the hospitals and the jails
he stands, pinned with tiny nails.
Tormented!  Living flesh!
And so it was and will be - till
the demise.
     Embankment for all songs
and of all despairs a nest:

factory! factory!  Because it's called
factory this black raise to fly.
To the the despair of the factory's hooter
pay heed - for it calls

the factory. And no intermediary
you will need any longer, when,
when above the last city
will bellow the last hooter.

Translated in English by Literary Joint

Jersey Blues, Selected Poems, published today!

The much-awaited Jersey Blues, Selected Poems now published: available as classic paperback book as well as e-book, and on the iBookstore.

Cover of Jersey Blues, Selected Poems, 2012

 

A foreword from the author:

    In my many years in America, like a pilgrim, or a spiritual vagrant, crisscrossing the country—always rolling on the very fabric of the continent: westwards and eastwards, to the eternal oceans, and from the northern vast plains down through the Appalachian, to the deep recesses of the lowlands, to the swamps—infallibly enough, I would always return to my dwelling in Princeton. 

    Many a time the lonely night was devoted to the contemplation of the moon of New Jersey, as I licked the wounds of a sore soul. Always wondered I, how different that pale, ghostly circle of a moon was, from the one I encountered elsewhere above the magnificent land that I had been scampering about, and from the lost moon of my childhood.

    Yet, with adulthood—or maturity—seeing at last the rise and fall of earthling matters, I would flinch, my heart recoiling, as from something unpleasant. Thus, through the jaundiced, estranged buoy in the sky, I would recall past memories, and hold out my quivering hand to reach over to the always-receding mysteries of existence. These are, in essence, my "Jersey Blues."