Summer, Landscape
Sunstuck, a boy on a red-hot square, light
and shadow. Beads
in the hand of an old woman.
Sunstuck, a boy on a red-hot square, light
and shadow. Beads
in the hand of an old woman. A bird
with lilac feathers screams, flies up, and from afar
whispers its quiet curse. It’s sunny and stuffy, as if at this moment
a young half-naked butcher, holding
his breath, were waiting for blood
to stream by itself—in the paroxysm of impatient
sacrifice—from the throat of a black sheep
like a song of praise for the Southern sun; and
later, a dark trickle (sweat) would cut
a well-defined male nipple. But
who would move us?
Who would break the spell?
The earth, your lips, a red bird.
Shamshad Abdullaev is the leading poet of the Fergana School. Abdullaev has been awarded the Andrei Bely Prize for his poetry (1994), the annual prize of the journal Znamia for his prose writings (1998), and the Russian Prize of the Boris Yeltsin Center (2006; also shortlisted in 2014). He was the last poetry editor of the old thick journal Zvezda Vostoka, based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (closed in 1994). Other translations of Abdullaev’s work by Alex Cigale have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Literary Imagination, The Manhattan Review, and St. Petersburg Review. Also, a poem in the translation of Valzhyna Mort in Two Lines, and a story, in the translation of Vitaly Chernetsky, in the St. Petersburg Review.
Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus and moved to the USA in 2005. She’s the author of two collections of poetry, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). Mort was the recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry Magazine.
