Falling raindrops leave no visible traces,
not on the glass of my window, not on the temple wall,
but once in a while water goes mad and races
to wash away bridges, flood the market and city hall.
For thousands of years down to the sea the river
of time rolls on, never to be the same,
but the temple of Artemis has been attached forever
as if with a knot in our memory to Herostratos’ name.
A muddy stream rushed from the northern ranges
Down to the south, inundating the sleeping Ukraine.
Mother, wake up! even the dead are in danger:
bombs rain down and tear to pieces your graveyard plain.
Again Herostratos, malice convulsing his face,
curses the temple and spitefully strikes the flint.
A drop of rain decided to leave a trace
and slid down the glass as a drip with a bloody tint.
The Original:
Капля дождя не оставляет следа
ни на моём окне, ни на стене собора,
но иногда сходит с ума вода –
сносит с пути мосты и заливает город
Тысячи лет катится к морю река
времени – для неё в прошлое нет возврата,
но храм Артемиды в памяти на века
связан морским узлом с именем Герострата.
Мутный поток с северной кручи на юг
ринулся, затопив спящую Украину.
Мама, проснись – умершим тоже каюк,
бомбы крушат твою кладбищенскую долину.
Вновь Герострат, злобою перегрет,
храм обругал и мстительно чиркнул спичкой.
Капля дождя решила оставить след
и по стеклу кровавой стекла водичкой.
Poet, prose writer, essayist, and president of “The Emigré Lyre” [Rus.”Эмигрантская лира”/”Emigrantskaya lira”] association. Founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine with the same name. He has lived in Belgium since 2000.
Dmitri Manin is a physicist, programmer, and translator of poetry. His translations from English and French into Russian have appeared in several book collections. His latest work is a complete translation of Ted Hughes’ “Crow” (Jaromír Hladík Press, 2020) and Allen Ginsberg’s “The Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems” (Podpisnie Izdaniya, 2021). Dmitri’s Russian-to-English translations have been published in journals (Cardinal Points, Delos, The Café Review, Metamorphoses etc) and in Maria Stepanova’s “The Voice Over” (CUP, 2021). In 2017, his translation of a poem by Stepanova won the Compass Award competition.
This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.
Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.
This collection of personal essays by a bi-national Russian/U.S. author offers glimpses into many things Soviet and post-Soviet: the sacred, the profane, the mundane, the little-discussed and the often-overlooked. What was a Soviet school dance like? Did communists go to church? Did communists listen to Donna Summer? If you want to find out, read on!