I was asking God to ease my living,
“Everywhere I look, grim darkness swells.”
God replied, “Just wait and curb your grieving,
Time will come, you’ll ask for something else.”
Years have passed, I’m full of dark misgivings,
Round the corner is my final breath.
I was asking God to ease my living,
Yet, I should have asked for an easy death.
The Original
Легкой жизни я просил у Бога:
Посмотри, как мрачно все кругом.
Бог ответил: подожди немного,
Ты еще попросишь о другом.
Вот уже кончается дорога,
С каждым годом тоньше жизни нить…
Легкой жизни я просил у Бога,
Легкой смерти надо бы просить.
Ivan Ivanovich Tkhorzhevsky (September 19, 1878, Rostov-on-Don – March 11, 1951, Paris) was a high-ranking official of the Russian Empire, a banker, a prominent political activist of the White Movement, manager of the Council of Ministers of the government of Southern Russia P. N. Wrangel, poet and translator.
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 Stepanova’s poem won the Compass Award competition. “Columns,” his new book of translations of Nikolai Zabolotsky’s poems, was published by Arc Publications in 2023 (https://eastwestliteraryforum.com/books/nikolai-zabolotsky-columns-poems).
When Clea returns to London with her new Russian husband, she is surprised to see him become even more eccentric.
A haunting dystopia some readers have called “the new 1984.” In a society where memory is rewritten and resistance is pre-approved, freedom isn’t restricted; it’s redefined. As systems evolve beyond human control and choice becomes a simulation, true defiance means refusing the script, even when the system already knows you will.
“13 short pieces…pungently convey the effects of growing up under a totalitarian regime.” .—Publishers Weekly
Original poetry by Nina Kossman, accompanied by a selection of poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated from Russian by Kossman. “The sea is a postcard,” writes Nina Kossman. There is both something elemental in this vision and—iron-tough.”
—Ilya Kaminsky
