Translation Tuesday: Poems written during the Siege of Leningrad

Three Russian poets shine words into the blackness of 1942 when a million people died under siege by the Nazis, in this extract from a new anthology Written in the Dark

By Gennady Gor, Vladimir Sterligov and Pavel Zaltsman for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

Fresh from launching our Fall 2016 issue yesterday, featuring exclusive writing from 31 countries, by such authors as Stefan Zweig, László Krasznahorkai and Anita Raja, we present a selection from “Written in the Dark,” a new, groundbreaking anthology out from Ugly Duckling Presse. The poems gathered therein were written in 1942, during the most severe winter of the Nazi Siege of Leningrad, in which one million perished. Charles Bernstein compares these poems to “the sparks from two sticks of wood, creating a fire that warms even in an apocalypse.”

With plaintive, ardent reverie, / We drink these soundless words

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