Банальное рассуждение на тему разумности идеалов

by Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov

Погода в Москве к идеалу приблизилась

А раньше была ведь весьма далека

Была непонятлива и жестока

Поэтому часто мы с ней препиралися

А тут идеалы мои поменялися

И сразу погода приблизилась к ним

Вот так вот природу безжалостно мучим мы

И мучимся сами ужасно притом

A Banal Discourse On the Topic of Reasonable Ideals

by Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov

The Moscow weather has become very near ideal

While earlier it was quite far from it

A bit slow on the uptake, and rather cruel

Which is why we wrangled, finding no agreement

And then, all of a sudden, my ideals were different

And straight away the weather rose to meet them

And thus we mercilessly torment nature

While we torment ourselves terribly by the same

translated from Russian by Matvei Yankelevich

A key member of the late-Soviet artistic underground, Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov (1940-2007) participated in the formation of Moscow Conceptualism along with Ilya Kabakov, Lev Rubinstein, Andrey Monastyrsky, and others. During the Soviet period, his work circulated in samizdat and emigre publications. He was arrested in 1986 and forcibly hospitalized for a short period in a psychiatric hospital, probably as a result of a series of absurd texts addressed to his fellow citizens which Prigov pasted up in his neighborhood subway station. His literary oeuvre includes more than 36,000 poems, three novels, numerous essays and plays, but Prigov—trained as a sculptor—was also a prolific artist, exhibiting widely in Europe and Russia in the last 20 years of his life. He was honored with a posthumous solo exhibit at the 2011 Venice Biennial. A conference devoted to his work convenes annually, and in 2012 was hosted by the Hermitage in St Petersburg, which has dedicated space in its contemporary wing to show a collection of his works.

Matvei Yankelevich is the author of the poetry collection Alpha Donut (United Artists Books) and the novella-in-fragments Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books), and several chapbooks. He is the translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook/Ardis) and the co-translator of Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets). He is one of the founding editors of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he curates the Eastern European Poets Series.