Edge of Town, A Dream

Poetry
Written By Shamshad Abdullaev

Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale

And so, he declared, the Arno, plague of mirrors, another –
river of suicides. You almost hallucinate. The air
and we in it, wedged in the beeswax of the clay-built corners. The streets’
recesses hemorrhage with summer light. So many
hidden compartments in the midday spasm – as though
Numidian arrows whirl into the window’s swelling. Now
suffocation is partitioned into stony scraps
beyond the door, the cat’s gaze,
the calloused walls and a Florentine film
covered with heliophobic stains. Across
the room a ray measures a bilious
weave under the feet and exasperates
with a capricious character the clenched lips
or sows in them a light delirium:
Italiam, Italiam! and the hypnosis melts. The southern
gloaming droops into our eyes’ orbits, into the crust
of the baked lava; we are here. Men and the landscape disperse
in the distance, like ashes.

 
Shamshad Abdullaev

Shamshad Abdullaev (b. 1957) is the leading poet of the so-called “Fergana School” (for its “manifesto,” see MPT). 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 short-listed 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.

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