Девятый круг. Одиссея диссидента в психиатрическом ГУЛАГе

…While you typed, you smoked

furiously, trying to stay awake, trying not

to make too many errors. When you finished,

you delivered your copies to someone who took

the different chapters, that had been prepared

by your fellow conspirators, and assembled them

into five complete copies of the contraband book,

and passed these on to still others.

In this way

translations of Karl Popper and Mikhail Bulgakov

and Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak and Akhmatova.

were given to persons who wished to read them,

persons you might never meet and never know.

Sometimes your own group got together secretly,

to smoke and drink red wine, and listen

while someone read aloud from the book all of you,

working together, had just produced…