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A millisecond too close in,
a century too far out,
water the plague of uncertainty
and no dry land to assuage the doubt.
A dizzying look at the world
through the eyes of a disowned daughter;
ocean declared the province of death
and everywhere water, water.
Any direction the wind goes
provides for them who have no route
circling wave-ripples, wave-ripples,
wave-ripples, in aimless pursuit.
The sun stuns, the heat strokes,
and no one else can see
but they who die in mid-ocean
how imperishable water can be.
Вода
Недолет на миллисекунду,
перелет на тысячу лет,
вода — чума переменчивости,
и без суши опоры нет.
Мир глазами брошенной дочери:
головокружение, тошнота,
океан объявлен волостью смерти,
и повсюду — вода, вода.
Куда бы ветер ни дунул,
если сбился с пути человек, —
лишь круги на воде, круги на воде,
бесконечный, бесцельный бег.
Солнце давит, жара дурманит,
и не знает никто, никогда,
кроме гибнущих в океане,
как нетленна бывает вода.
Russian translation by Dmitry Manin
Wayne Pernu is an American poet who grew up in Minnesota and now lives in Portland, Oregon.
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.
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!
“Cold War Casual” is a collection of transcribed oral testimony and interviews translated from Russian into English and from English into Russian that delve into the effect of the events and the government propaganda of the Cold War era on regular citizens of countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Julia Wiener was born in the USSR a few years before the Second World War; her youth was spent during the “Thaw” period, and her maturity coincided with the years of “Soviet stagnation”, which, in her case, ended with her emigration to Israel in the early 1970s. Her wartime childhood, her Komsomol-student youth, her subsequent disillusionment, her meetings with well-known writers (Andrei Platonov, Victor Nekrasov, etc.) are described in a humorous style and colorful detail. Julia brings to life colorful characters – from her Moscow communal apartment neighbors to a hippie London lord, or an Arab family, headed by a devotee of classical Russian literature. No less diverse are the landscapes against which the events unfold: the steppes of Kazakhstan, the Garden of Gethsemane, New York, Amsterdam, London.
Julia Wiener’s novels focus on those moments when illusory human existence collapses in the face of true life, be it spiritual purity, love, old age, or death.
