'Take My Neighbor, an Old Man'

Every year I look forward to the extended Christmas season which begins stirring on Thanksgiving and evaporates on New Year’s Day. Against my better judgment I feel an involuntary spring in my step, even with the cane in my hand. I’m oddly hopeful, energized, even optimistic. I avoid my customary companions, the cynics and naysayers, and shamelessly quote Dickens to friends. In private I sing carols. I find it easier in December to be a slightly better human being, more thoughtful and forgiving, as though the season were giving me a gift I’m too lazy to earn on my own.

Boris Dralyuk has given English-speaking monolinguists the New Year’s gift of translating another poem by Julia Nemirovskaya, the Moscow-born poet who teaches Russian literature and culture at the University of Oregon. In 2018 I cited an earlier Nemirovskaya/Dralyuk production and linked to Boris’ “The Little Books of Julia Nemirovskaya.” On Thursday, when I returned to work after almost three weeks on Yuletide break, I thought of “Neighbor”:

“Painful—to be boiling water:

Flooding over, never hotter,

Bubbles bursting with a pop.

Hurts—to be an apple trapped

In the dough, stuffy as clay;

Nothing takes the pain away . . .

How about a dried-up root?

How about a snapped-off shoot?

How about a short, inept

poem, jettisoned midline?

Take a person, for that matter,

Take my neighbor, an old man:

Sleep won’t come—his body doesn’t

Melt, as clouds do in the sky.

At long last, the moon emerges

On the outside of his dreams,

Laying out two strips of canvas

Gently on his upraised knees.

On it, in the dark, his eyes

Glimpse his brain, an MRI.”

Boris speaks of Nemirovskaya’s “radical extension of empathy,” and that’s an impulse close to the annual dispensation I described above. The poem begins almost whimsically with the pain of boiling water – the water’s pain at having reached 212° F – followed by the pain of a baked apple, a root and a shoot. After the poem’s middle point – “a short, inept / poem, jettisoned midline?” – the example cited is strictly human, “my neighbor, an old man.”

Nemirovskaya’s poems remind me of Kay Ryan’s, with their brevity, wit, tonal deftness and refusal to be cute. Her rhymes, like Ryan’s, are irregular and frequently unexpected: “eyes”/”MRI.” The voice is childlike but not cloying. Seamus Heaney described a Stevie Smith poetry reading as “a deliberate faux-naif rendition by a virtuoso,” and the same may be said of Nemirovskaya’s short poems. Boris writes of “Neighbor,” which I choose to call a clandestine Christmas poem:

  

“Laying her tricks aside, the poet addresses the heart of the matter: the human. Empathizing with the sleepless old man may indeed be harder than imagining the pain of boiling water. His all-too-human pain is all too close to home. This is the poem’s great insight: the distance between our neighbor and ourself isn’t great, yet it is the distance we are most reluctant to cover. Having worked her way up to it, Nemirovskaya does cover it.”