burning
I
where are Isaak Moshe Wefa?
they are all asleep here beneath this soil
Where are Rachela Stefan Aleksander?
They are all asleep beneath this soil
in Stawiski in Tykocin in Radziłów
in Czyżew in Drohiczyn in Jedwabne
II
“he had butchered eighteen Jews
he told me this in my apartment
as he built in my stove”
and the sun still shines upon his house
and the generations of his family
“you raped a Jewess behind the mill
and then you slashed her throat”
in the village he is greatly respected
despite being a bachelor despite being decrepit
and to this day a sign hangs on his door:
Jews Gypsies and Devils Not Welcome
“he hit a child with an iron rod
brains splattering upon his clothes
and made its mother clean the mess”
he worked in the fields
toiled late into the night
he was kind to his dying mother
let us judge him not in his hour of need
“they began beating her turning her white body black”
there was so much chaos in those days—
such everyday misdemeanours and transgressions
might now seem something special
III
oh Lord
oh Lord
Thou pluckest us from their hands
burning
burning in the barn
burning
Peter Constantine is a literary translator and editor, and the director of the Literary Translation Program at the University of Connecticut. His recent translations, published by Random House (Modern Library), include The Essential Writings of Rousseau, The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, and works by Tolstoy, Gogol, and Voltaire. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. A Guggenheim Fellow, he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. Peter Constantine has been a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library and a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Grzegorz Kwiatowski is a Polish poet and member of psychedelic rock band Trupa Trupa. He is the author of several books of poetry revolving around the subjects of history, remembrance and ethics, and has been a beneficiary of numerous international literary programs and artist’s residencies. He co-hosts the University of Oxford workshop Virus of Hate, and has been a guest lecturer at the University of Cambridge, the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, Jewish Theological Seminary, and Miroslaw Balka’s Studio of Spatial Activities at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. His music and literary works have been published and reviewed in The Guardian, Modern Poetry in Translation and Rolling Stone, among others.
