On Translating Dmitry Blizniuk

It may seem surprising, but falling bombs aren’t scary. They are sort of hypnotizing. You don’t feel fear when you find yourself lying on the underground beach, listening to the waves of war that thump above your head. You feel stupefied. However, “stupefied” is not the right word. The most evident characteristic of this altered state of mind is an almost complete absence of fear, while the second component of it is surprise: “How is it possible?” “Why?” It’s a cold, icy consternation, or translucent stupor—and here again, words fail. That is why it was so difficult for me to translate poems by Dmitry Blizniuk, who has been writing only about war since February 24, 2022, the date that refracted the life path of each of us. Words, even the best and most accurate of them, only scratch the surface—they cannot convey the essence of the experience.

And yet, translating Dmitry Blizniuk's poems was also easy for me. I, too, have been on the underground beach. I, too, have seen high-rises that look like vertical cockroaches with their heads torn off, blackened by fires and having no upper floors. Something that looked like cockroach legs stuck out of them. Water or gas pipes, perhaps. I’ve been inside them. From inside, they resemble nine- or sixteen-story crematoria full of burned lives—the charred bones of pets, a half-melted kitchen table flowing like a motionless waterfall, and concrete walls bent by a heat so merciless that you can see through several apartments at once. Some of the high-rises are shot through so that from outside the buildings you can look through the holes and see the sky and, circling in it, black birds, silhouetted like enemy bombers, like bombers coming to raze to the ground a city with a million and a half people in it: scientists, builders, doctors, students, and poets. 

Those who survived are trying to speak out now.