With you, I forgot By Inna Kabysh, Translated by Katherine E. Young


 
 

With you, I forgot home and time.
And poems. Poems! – what trifles.
I looked at you, up there on high,
and couldn’t lift my hand to write.
 
So the centuries go: every
woman on earth tracks down God
so as to believe, to drink her fill
of paradise and falling. I don’t
 
judge unjustly: I spare my neighbor.
...Beneath our feet: gold incalculable.
I walk. I’m leaving simply because
when I’m with you, I’m merely mortal.
 
 
 
Russian poet Inna Kabysh (b. 1963) is the author of six books, most recently Nevesta bez mesta (2008) and Mama myla ramu (2013). In 1996 her book Lichnye trudnosti was awarded the Pushkin Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Fund (Germany); in 2005 she won the Anton Delwig Prize.
 
Katherine E. Young is the author of Day of the Border Guards, 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist, and translator of Two Poems by Inna Kabysh. Her translations of Xenia Emelyanova and Inna Kabysh won third prize in the Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender competitions in 2014 and 2011, respectively. She was named a 2015 Hawthornden Fellow. katherine-young-poet.com