Reading Poetry: Sergei Yesenin

Another day, another poetry immersion. This time, I decided to busy myself with some translations of Sergei Yesenin poetry. 

Yesenin had a short yet adventurous life and a prolific poetry writing activity: he died at 30, but at the time, he had 4 wives already - among which the American dancer Isadora Duncan, 20 years his senior whose life was also marked by tragic - and took part actively to the events during the Soviet Revolution. He died by suicide in his hotel room in the then Leningrad, creating a wave of suicide among his admirers.

I may confess that the poems dedicated to the Big Campaign sounded the least appealing to me, as I´ve found highly stereotypical, sounding like they were written just to maintain the writing flow alive, but most probably the poet was busy at the time with the direct interventions and military actions.

The other ones, talking about village life, the animals - dogs and cows among others - and the people living there, are his anchor. Every time he is writing about the present or the future, there is the past reference who matters. As Romantics do, childhood is represented as a time of innocence, followed by the troubled youth, that Yesenin would never go beyond it. A rebel, a bit dead inside.

The erotic imaginary belongs to his poetic realm, as it belongs the drinking. Alcohol is both a source of inspiration and helps to forget the existential pain.

Yesenin poetry is timeless - except the ´revolutionary´ part that needs context to be understood - and is both individual and universal: it is the manifesto of a troubled soul in troubled times.

Reading Yesenin is a window towards those times, but also of a way of being of a soul who cannot find its peace.