By Kaciaryna Andrejeva
Translation: Will Firth
2023
Life in twenty-three was like a volcano, every bit:
We saw valkyries shoot out of the orchestra pit.[1]
There was a gushing and sparking, a boom like a thunderbolt,
And the hour hand turned now wildly, now ground to a halt.
How often the lucky ones sailed past and out of sight.
We stayed on to resist the darkness out of spite.
Yet it crept into the city, spreading fear, killing trust,
With shreds of letters, rumours, rubble and dust.
“So what?” we shouted. “The view is far!
“Where you stand is what you are.”
Be glad, all you who escaped, sailed away, saved tears,
Reckoning the wind and paths of celestial spheres.
Younger, angrier and merrier we deemed ourselves, never kneeled,
We smiled at history amidst its minefields.
Honour? Conscience? No, the tuning fork of the age –
We don’t look so bad on history’s page.
What’s left of us? Take this poem,
Or a star that beacons bright and meek
In a constellation far from home.
And my great-granddaughter’s dimpled cheek.
[1] A reference to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion and the relocation of Wagner Group troops to Belarus.
To Dzmitry Zavadsky[2]
You once smiled at me from a portrait
In a golden frame on the wall
Back in the year two thousand,
Now covered by a silent pall.
The shine of the peaks, the sheen of parquet,
The executioner’s grin and aha:
All is gone save the echo “Where are you, where are you?”
At the open door of the empty car.
Who put the question mark? “Me”, I out and say.
I’m in no hurry to forget
Because I’m stubborn, even twenty years to the day
Belarus smashed my camera set.
We’ve been hosed and embalmed; a requiem they sang.
Do you know why I’m not sad at all?
There’s no death. Instead, two portraits now hang
Golden-mounted on the wall.
And from that fine frame,
When the hustle dies away,
We smile at the girl – not knowing her name –
Who’ll visit here one day.
[2] The critical journalist Dzmitry Zavadsky (*1972), a colleague of Katsiaryna’s, was abducted in 2000 and likely murdered by the Belarusian authorities. He was declared dead in 2003.
Translator’s note: This translation preserves the partly oblique rhyming of the two poems. The “forced” feeling can be seen as reflecting the anguish of Katsiaryna’s arbitrary incarceration in Belarus and the bitter absurdities of life under Lukashenka’s regime.