Ears – Z. Gippius

Russian Silver Age poetry translations, 13/?

Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) is now less well-known, but in her time she was acclaimed — and controversial for her poetically-expressed views on both religion and sexuality. She was married to Dmitri Merezhkovsky from 1889 until his 1941 death, and theirs was one of the most creatively fruitful marriages in literature. (At first they tried to have a deal that she would write exclusively prose and he would write exclusively poetry — ignoring the fact that she was helping him translate Byron’s poems — but that collapsed once he wished to write a novel, and so she became free to write and publish her verse.) However, even as they were both part of the Symbolist movement, she did not always support some of his more outlandish spiritual ideas.
 
Like Balmont, Merezhkovsky and Gippius both were shaken by the events of the Revolution, and emigrated to Poland, then lived out their last years in France, where they published an anthology for poets rejected by censors.

I only became acquainted with Gippius’s work very recently, when I went looking for other Silver Age women poets than the all-dominating Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, and this undated poem grabbed me with its very topical sarcasm. (She was known for her criticism and no tolerance for bullshit when she kept a salon for young poets in Russia.) 

Ears

“Who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

How mad, how childlike, how stubborn I had been!
I thought that we were all equal in rights and free,
All just because my hearing was clumsily over-keen
And heard steps from a land not ours and wouldn’t be.
But my rebellious spirit won’t revolt now and be shaken,
And now I am in mist and silence just like you.
Only a genius someday from sickbeds will awake us.
We’ll sleep until he comes. In sleep we’re right and true.
No struggle, and no pain… The way is clear and proud!
How near to me my friends since stone-deaf I walk!
We’ll trust only in one whose voice is strong and loud.
And if we hear a shout — even a crowing cock —
He’ll be who we await, we know,
And following the cock we’ll go.

Zinaida Gippius, Undated (circa early 1900s); translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, July 2016.

One thought on “Ears – Z. Gippius”

  1. Alas, it seems that no one has tried setting much of Gippius’s poetry to music. Admittedly, much of it was spare, logical and prickly, like herself.

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