Horatian Paraphrases
Translated from the Russian by J. Kates

Poems scorched by the cold (‘Frozen’ verses)
Horatii Paraphrases (Carmina praeusta frigore)
Парафразы Горация
Стихи опаленные холодом (‘Отмороженные’ стихи)


Sergey Zavyalov (b. 1958) graduated in classical philology from the Leningrad State University. Between 1988 and 2004 he taught Greek, Latin and classical literature at high school and university level. In 2004 he emigrated to Finland, and has been living in Winterthur (Switzerland) since 2011. His first published poems appeared in Leningrad Samizdat. He has published seven books in Russian, and has been awarded the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and the Premio Ceppo Internazionale Piero Bigongiari in 2016.

Zavyalov is at the younger end of the generation that tried hard to forge new literary languages to reclaim Russian from Soviet Newspeak. His colleague Aleksandr Skidan characterized these poems of the 1990s as ‘ruins’, in the sense that immediately reminds a Western reader of Eliot’s ‘fragments I have shored against my ruins’, and Pound’s contemporary pillaging of ancient sources – the same need to build stones fallen from ancient constructions into the walls of a new edifice. The architecture of this (re)construction is also characteristically Leningrad/St. Petersburg.

A participant in the countercultural Club-81, Zavyalov began publishing his poems in samizdat in the 1980s. Steeped in Latin and Greek, he looked to Pindaric odes and classical prosody as models for his writing. The ‘Horatian Variations’ here have a quality of palimpsest about them, writings over and under other writings, again in the words of Skidan, ‘a contrasting clash between the avant-garde impulse and the “archaic”’.

I had not previously translated Zavyalov, but, as I wrote to him in 2020, ‘forced isolation has made me susceptible to reading Horace, and therefore turned me to your “Paraphrases”. They are a fine excuse for rereading the originals – leading me even beyond these to Euripides’s Orestes.’ He noted in his reply that ‘I read this cycle at the “Genius Loci” festival in 1998, where we first became acquainted’.


1. (I. 24)
                       for Viktor Krivulin

As if everything had frozen in these fields

birds that had never flown
the crusted snow turned black, unthawed
the empty open heights

What else to notice?

Here the poet spoke about a measure of shame
in days of sorrow, in days of loss
touching a familiar brow in farewell?

Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
...