“I, too, dislike it.” Marianne Moore’s iconic line characterizes so many things I love. I still work on poetry, and teach it, and it seems increasingly frivolous to do so—and increasingly necessary. Necessary because poetry inhabits and creates networks, synchronous and asynchronous. Despite how tiresome the work could be, editing Mantis made it feel possible to be and stay a grad student when my studies felt isolating and arcane. Mantis made community, including through publishing poetry in translation. Recently Two Lines published collaborative translations from one of my college classes, of a Belarusian poet, Dmitry Strotsev. I knew of Two Lines from a collaboration event during the early years of Mantis. Translating poetry remains for me a foolproof way of sustaining conversation across time and space, even in the most restrictive of circumstances.

The poem I’m including is one by Uzbek writer Shamshad Abdullaev (b. 1957), of the famous Fergana School. Abdullaev is a leading voice in decolonial Russian-language poetry. In Issue 4 (Poetry & Politics), Mantis published him in translation by Vitaly Chernetsky, a native of Odesa, Ukraine, and a leading scholar and translator of Ukrainian literature. In the work of these two writers we witness how poetry resists empire, undoing it at its heart.

Martha’s Selection:

Shamshad Abdullaev (translated by Vitaly Chernetsky) - Summer Heaviness