The Blog

What’s the use of breaking if you knew what’s inside? Translations were there, that’s what. Translations from English, 35 stories, 472 pages typewritten in Ukrainian.

These, like, randomly collected figures do not repeat each other in their summing up of 6 years’ work—gee! and this one also does not coincide with a single one of them!

Six years deftly wrapped in the mustard-hued paper, bound-sealed up by skillful hands of a post office service-lady: shrrsh-frisst-trunt-slamp – next, please!

The undeniably non-uniform figures do contain certain meaning, albeit not graspable with a fleeting glimpse, because socialism is, first and foremost, inventory, to cite the aphoristic definition by Lenin at the sitting of All-Russia Central Executive Committee on p.57, vol. 35, Complete Collection Of Works in 55 Volumes…

In the Publishing House they also did not bother to open the translations, toe-kicked them on the fly instead. A one-touch shot.

Yet why multiplying them? The half-back was seated all alone at his desk in the second office to the left down the corridor. Sedentary way of life made of that Sitting Bull a blob of blubber. Unhealthy obesity, not fitting a soccer player.

Let him thank me for the humanitarian aid offered—no excruciating push ups, just taking to the post office 472 pages plus their cover—to throw away a sliver of his fat in the exercise, and the Publishing House would reimburse the expenditure confirmed by the post office bill slip.

Not a chance. A courier was sent by the fucking slackmaster…

The long and short of it, the translations returned to where they had initially started from and stilled there, like a mustard-hued tombstone, to crown 6 years of mental toil marked by the contemplation wrinkles in the thoughtful forehead.

And why not to lie still enjoying such a sound prop? The DIY book-shelves coated with translucent shellac—tranquil and soft environs for a peaceful slumber.

Yet the pages in the package upon the homemade shelf not only weighed down the interior’s item but also were drip-dripping onto my brains even through the coarse paper, the pages. Their comatose presence made still acuter the inertia amassed in 6 years of communing with them those antlike-black-critters-in-the-white-field, so obstinate at first but getting tamer, bit by bit, until they finally hooked me up too. The situation-conditioned addiction. But after the Game over, in the stiff stillness, there remained nothing to waste myself away. Plodding donkey and circus horses are incurable…

Fucking Sir Isaac Newton and that First Law of his, although the inertia thing was cabbaged from Galileo.

The evenings noticeably lengthened. To find a shim for filling them up with turned out not a trivial task.

Like, not any quick fix but go and learn playing melodeon squeezebox so that, in the dark, to stroll about the hood lanes outpouring some hot air or another, in a flash pair of black high boots, and a fluffy flower (Portulaca oleracea) stuck in the visor-cap so that the girls would tag along and fall over themselves to treat the musician to the black seeds they’re snacking non-stop…

Sad pity but the idea about a squeezebox failed to hook me up effectively, you know, and I bypassed buying high boots.

As for the girls, cute and saucy, they’ll always find who to give their seeds to in this or that, or any other feasible way in the current environment.

Squeezing all the above-said together, instead of a two-row A-major/D-minor melodeon there, by the intact heap of paper within the stiff cask-like shell of wrapping (somewhat grown already with the softer layer of the virginal pollen of dust), yes, right next to it, possibly too nigh to, stretched out a notebook, rather thick and of a certain hint at brazen boldness in its pale-gray leatherette cover.

The purpose of the stationery bad ass, at first, had rather fuzzy outlines, however, definitely slanted to the ant-like-signs-and-so-on-and-forth private games (because no computer games existed yet and computers themselves were named Machine-Computer Engineering Tools that necessitated construction of reinforced concrete foundation to mount them (the Tools) upon and on that solid basis they thundered like locomotives spi

Yeah, buddy, be kind to patiently endure the games of my mind spilt in your grid-ruled pages where the well-schooled ant cohorts would crawl on bringing up the grim story of how I could possibly get to so morbid life style. Yet, those crossed-out lines do not count…

At that exactly moment came to me the radiant clearance as to how slippery was this question: where to start from?

However, the notebook did not give an eff about the complicated nature of the issue and with the arrogant gusto, and the nonchalance of bro-to-bro-talk revved forth about i

Everything as it was and always is to be in a one-horse burg of N…

That way, at nights, the notebook became the time-machine to which they flocked hurriedly, those a hundred times already mentioned ant-critters to turn into a fixed scrawl in another white field (small-scale-grid-ruled) until they stole the machine, not ants of course.

I didn’t report the vehicle theft and never showed any surprise, outwardly, so as to skirt dour declarations that I’d been warned it was to happen.

Yes truly, a couple of times there were voiced reproofs in the interrogative form: what fucking rascal hooey was I scribbling in that notebook?

But then the City Psychiatrist diagnosed the notebook’s case as not outrageously violent so it could be taken back to lie beside the hefty stiff parcel.

The whistle blowers played along with the doc’s recommendation, however, they were not ready to what happened after.

‘And what? What was that? Tell us, tell! Cut out your damn tries at frigging suspension! Damn coot, you!’

Well, not a thing. None! Nothing whatsoever.

The retrieval was met with the deadpan of my poker face (if observed from outside), no comment, total indifference, and since then the number of untouchable idlers on the shelves doubled drastically – the mustard-hued mother walrus, and her gray cub immovably advancing towards the equivalence in their pigmentation due to the natural growth of the dust layer of identical thickness.

Both time and place let me in on their mutual incongruity with wanton games at ant domestication and getting schooled in response. That’s the ballgame, folks!

In all fairness to the twix (time-and-place), the so rigid hault was partly motivated by a vengeful wish to pinch the nose of mess-arounders, whose sporadic and somewhat pensive looks in the direction of dormant walrus colony of two upon their shellacked shelf, as well as the fingerprints detectable in the dust layer over the gray leatherette were telling signs of their, deductively, thirst to know what was to happen next in them those fucking scribbles?

Not a thing. You should of taken it to the psychiatrist and let the wise guy guess the story line without helpful clues from letter-ants.

That’s how that particular point turned a false start.

The following try was flagged off a couple of years later by the pocket-book volume borrowed for a 10-year stretch, which accompanied me over the watershed of the Caucasian mountains…

The first winter was lived through inside the tiny Pioneers' Room on the second floor in the two-story school building.

Way back, it was an ordinary house expropriated later from the owner living at large or else he, the owner, gave it up in token of his good will, after which move the village obtained the ready-made school for the compulsory secondary education.

However, all the above-supposed had taken place before my arrival from over the Caucasus and I had no desire to inadvertently chafe the sore spot by ferreting the details out.

The Pioneer Room was equipped with the ubiquitous mark of such cubbies – the compound attribute of the Pioneer Horn-and-Drum, and furnished with a nondescript desk inserted by the wall opposite the entrance, bearing the cross of the school library—a couple scores of books worn to tatters. The heaps of happy kids in pioneer red ties hung from two walls in the cardboard visuals for teaching Armenian to the elementary kids and English grammar to the students at secondary schools because the third wall (opposite to the library) was barely wide enough for the wooden door from the corridor, which ran along the Teachers’ Room (the former living room) towards two itsy-bitsy classrooms sliced out by the plywood partitioning from the erstwhile bedroom (five more partitioned classrooms were on the first floor). The fourth wall in the room was a complex of small glass panes in the wooden window binding.

The square sheet of tin, substituting glass in one of the panes in the middle of the laced structure, had a round hole in its center, cut to let out the 5.8-inch-wide tin smoke pipe rising from the rectangular-cuboid tin stove [60 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm] on 4 tin legs to keep the contraption 25 cm clear off the boards in the floor. All the tin grown with brownish crust of rust and the round hole (cut thru with the convenience of thrusting the smoke pipe out in mind) had generous gaps for the ventilation and immediate contact with the outside weather.

The Horn-and-Drum couple kept mum on the stand shelf by the door, in company with a weighty jingle-bell cast of bronze with the relief molding, which ran around its wall, in Russian: “Gift from Valdai”, distinguished by the knack for mighty clangor to a

The firewood for the tin stove I cleft in the tin-roofed shelter nearby the two-door outhouse in the yard.

The ax kept flying off the handle. Old Goorguen, the school watchman from the house next door, ironically chortled beneath his white-yellow mustaches to every flight he witnessed, while the Principal, named Surfic, instantly a

Late in the evening, the tin stove turned the Pioneers’ Room into a scorching sauna but after midnight the freezing cold harassed me even through the mattress upon the folding bed, and in the morning I got up into the mountain raw winter cold…

I did not set off translation of Ulysses right away. First off, employing The Chamber’s 20th Century Dictionary, I translated Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man pretending it was the must to have a closer look at Stephen Dedalus, the youngest in the trinity of Ulysses’s main characters.