My encounter with St. Petersburg poet Elena Shvarts (described in the Witz article) led to things like this: I started learning Russian (slowly, haltingly), and translated some Mandelstam, along with some poems by Shvarts (published in Nedge #4). She, in turn, responded to my efforts: this poem (written in Russian, translated imperfectly by me) appeared in one of her recent collections published in St. Petersburg:


To the Poet Henry Gould in the City of Providence



At your time's perihelion
the bird-clock sings.
Strange hours on the wall - as
if Keats devised their workings.
When, over there, an owl
hoots, representing midnight,
here a raven drops a crust
beside my windowpane.
I myself am on the wane -
needle-thin, grown accurate,
wheezing over cheap tea in winter
sunlight, a pudgy nightingale.
He, in deep dark, without hope
- poet left alone with his icon,
still-ineffable loving brother -
offers his Promised Land…

Over the ocean, two birds feed
halfway - and where they salute,
fallen rooted to the sea-floor,
a pearl aches - ripening
under the hard bark of the waves.


It seemed like a beautiful gesture from this grand poet (she is a recipient of the Pushkin Prize, the major St. Petersburg literary award). There have been more literary exchanges (as well as other things. I sent Elena an Audubon bird-clock similar to the one she saw on my kitchen wall; also a little wooden bathtub boat my mother made for me as a child, christened "Sophie" on its bow - boats being important icons in the city of Peter the Great). A chapter of my book The Grassblade Light (a sequel to Stubborn Grew) is titled "Letters to Elena" - another attempt to actualize the "Russian influence".