stigmas on the body of air

^{translated from the Russian by Ryan Hardy, Asher Maria, and Kevin M. F. Platt}

stigmas on the body of air

the wind finds its voices

after retouching the speaker

look at them moving

in the twilight of indifference

стигмы на теле воздуха

стигмы на теле воздуха

ветер обретает голоса

отретушировав говорящего

гляди как они двигаются

в сумерках безразличия

Copyright © 2024 by Ekaterina Derysheva, Ryan Hardy, Asher Maria, and Kevin M. F. Platt. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 16, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“Ekaterina Derysheva’s poetic work is a form of research practice, oriented at once toward the poet’s own position in language and toward the languages that surround her: everyday, technical, professional, etc. The poem ‘stigmas on the body of air’ uses terms drawn from religious discourse (‘stigmas’) and photography (‘retouching’) to think through the position of a human voice in a natural soundscape. Wind gains [the] human qualities of intelligibility, voice, and suffering, while still retaining qualities that we might associate with the natural world—its ‘indifference.’ The voice of the speaker is ‘retouched,’ transformed by wind, in a manner that recalls human technical processes and metaphorically intertwines sound and sight. The poem as a whole might be seen as a phenomenological investigation of our position in a natural and material world that is only knowable in mediated fashion, through the senses, language, and technical prostheses, yet that somehow echoes back something of the human to [us] who are cast into it. This poem was translated in the spring of 2024 at the University of Pennsylvania [during] a collective translation workshop involving faculty, students, staff, members of the Philadelphia community, and the poet herself.”
—Kevin M. F. Platt