The Translator

An elderly woman with a cane slowly stoops to place her bag on the wall by a metro station exit.

Bending over, she takes out a pair of paperback books and, holding them up, stands to the side of the exit. She does not have a sign or a table, and she does not call out to passersby, so it is a bit difficult to immediately gather what it is the woman is selling.

“Within 15 minutes of standing here, almost all of them are sold,” she says, looking out from beneath the hood of her shabby black coat. “Today I unexpectedly found a copy of another book – poems of the English romantics: Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Blake. It got snapped up too.”

Galina Sergeyevna Usova is a poet and translator of English prose and poetry. For a few years now, she has been standing outside St. Petersburg’s Polytechnic Institute metro station selling her books. She says that the station is both literally and figuratively close to home: she lives nearby and her father and brother both worked in the institute.

At 86, Usova self-publishes all her books, which include a collection of her own poems as well as translations of English poets.

“Do you know what Kellomyaki is?” she suddenly asks, showing me a thin book with an orange cover.

“Not entirely.” “That means no. But Komarovo you definitely know. You see, they are one and the same. From 1945 to 1948 we lived there in a dacha. The forest was littered with shells. Let me show you...”

On the cover of the book is an ancient family photo taken in Kellomyaki (what Komarovo was called until 1948), the site of a dacha that Usova’s father was given after the war. Later, she went there to vacation at the Writers Retreat. “Many of my poems are about that place,” she says in a hoarse voice, from time to time glancing at the people exiting the metro.