The Holocaust never occurred,
it’s a matter of perception
and logical reasoning
said a young tall guy,
PhD from MIT in artificial intelligence,
sitting on the floor with Merlot
at a literary party in Cambridge, Mass.
A condescending hint was flickering
in his mocking brown eyes.
And if it did—said, softening the point
his girlfriend, a knockout Harvard Law
in tight Donna Karan corduroys,
—it’s not virtually relevant anymore,
the train is gone, so to speak.
I got up and left the building
so as not to smash his precious head
with a Wal-Mart folding chair.
That night I woke up in my childhood:
Moscow, January frozen precipice,
through frosted window
a huge poster: People and Party Are United!
held still by a projector,
my grandma behind the wall,
tossing and turning in her bed, sobbing.
The usual: remembering
her mother and three sisters,
their fading smiles on the old photo from a letter.
In her nightmare: their last supper
of bread and carrot tea,
night before their disappearance
into historical irrelevance.
Lodz, 1943, melting gray snow,
charred carcasses, monstrous Panzer,
roaring pointlessly at one spot.
Polish policemen warming up in the yard,
passing vodka around,
cold lard and cigarette stubs:
Jeszcze Polska
Nie zginela
Poki my zyjemy.*
*From an old Polish national anthem.
Andrey Gritsman was born and raised in Moscow. He has been living in the US since 1981. He works as a physician. A prolific Russian and American poet and writer, he got an MFA degree in 1998. Author of many publications in the US, Russia and in Europe, and of fifteen collections of poetry and prose in both languages.
A collection of essays and reviews by Art Beck. “These pieces are selected from a steady series of essays and reviews I found myself publishing in the late aughts of the still early century.”
A collection of early poems by Zabolotsky, translated into English by Dmitri Manin. “Dmitri Manin’s translations retain the freshness of Zabolotsky’s vision.” – Boris Dralyuk
A book of wartime poems by Alexandr Kabanov, one of Ukraine’s major poets, fighting for the independence of his country by means at his disposal – words and rhymes.
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
In this collection, Andrey Kneller has woven together his own poems with his translations of one of the most recognized and celebrated contemporary Russian poets, Vera Pavlova.
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.