PRISON POEMS
Daniel, Yuli
Yuli Daniel was born in Moscow in 1925. His novel This is Moscow Speaking and short stories were published in the West under the pen name of Nikolai Arzhak. He was arrested with Andrei Sinyaysky...
...All that's gone...
...You have helped me win my battles...
...Not a day would pass when the heavenly manna of human sympathy did not fall upon me...
...You know I didn't throw my love on the scales and measure out my passion piece by piece— I loved you so much, my Russia, more even perhaps than the women I've loved...
...Can it really be true that slander is going to divide us for good...
...Things go very bad for me...
...So, my country, say at least one word to me, for you know I have not lied to you...
...Before you my conscience is clear...
...We walk, simpletons and poets, having swapped freedom and family, having swapped the caresses of women for words, for fantasies, for dreams...
...But just what else are we to do when we are all creating poems out of blood...
...Zeks—Russian prison slang for "prisoner...
...He was arrested with Andrei Sinyaysky in September 1965 and in February 1966, in an infamous trial, was sentenced to five years in a corrective labor colony for "slandering the Soviet Union...
...I would hold up my delicate palms, and smile ironically: "God be praised...
...No, men do not live by bread alone...
...A chapter of Anatoly Marchenko's My Testimony is devoted to Daniel's stay in a strict regime labor camp in Mordovia...
...550 YULI DANIEL A Song About My Native Land M y country, say at least one word to me...
...But only here, far from your distant hands, your distant eyes, was I able to understand, that in these three vile and terrible years only you have saved me from ruin...
...And we, who have grown used here to speak of love with savage bluntness, walk past them quietly, humbly, without any wisecracks or curses, because we are not phonies here, because these tired wives aren't sluts, easy lays, dumb peasants, but are called—the sister of the Zeks...
...I harbor no evil designs, nor any regrets for my fate...
...whenever caravans of visitors came bearing their priceless gifts of warmth and light...
...To My Friends God's grace was excessively generous...
...How hard it must have been for them to save up for the tickets kopeck by kopeck, to make up those parcels bit by bit for their rowdy soldier men, and, shedding coins like tears, to buy cigarettes, then buy some more, to transport them, carry them here, hoping for luck, only to hear: "Take them back...
...Freedom won't be coming soon and hope is at best a spark...
...But in the silence of my humdrum desolation you are transformed into sounds and words...
...Once again a restlessness circles above me...
...My dreams knocking stone till they bled, I came to you through heat and cold, through you I came to you and as I came cities dissolved like tears in my eyes...
...So that I won't lament my fate, so that I won't fall beneath my cross's weight, give me a sign of your trust, my country— before you my conscience is clear...
...Translated by RICHARD LOURIE...
...You have poured life and blood into my veins, O my doctors, my donors of blood...
...All that's gone...
...Who will sigh to me: "You crazy guy . . ." and touch my forehead with a warm hand...
...His novel This is Moscow Speaking and short stories were published in the West under the pen name of Nikolai Arzhak...
...I was rich...
...By the Check Point We walk past weeping women, we walk, stepping in silence, we don't dare say a word to them, we can not wave our hands to them, we walk, and on their shoulders— knapsacks of tobacco and grub, knapsacks of unspent passion, knapsacks of old anguish...
...He was released in September 1970...
...That's the kind of husbands you've got— You probably ought to forgive us...
Vol. 19 • September 1972 • No. 4
