Spring of a Down - Prolog

Dedicated to MiJeong Kim

This work began as a translation of a letter wherein a writer who is associated with a Urkriane writers’ group warned of the awful aspect that Putin takes when he sees a country not under his command. It then followed out a novella consisting of vignettes of how a war effects and affects the people who live through it.

All mistakes in translation are my fault entirely.

Prologue

“I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.”

W.H. Auden “September 1, 1939” Lines 1-11^[1]

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[1] Auden, “September 1, 1939”. This is W.H. Auden’s most famous poem. It is also not in his collected works. There is an unmatched line that is out of place which is certainly true, as far as it goes. But it is also true, in an Aristotelian με/δε clause that anger is finally confessed to, while the human heart is hidden.