In spite of the years which hold us apart
(a fathomless labyrinth hope can’t renew)
a line you wrote still cuts to the heart.
This world covets what it most despises,
finding veracity in what is least true.
The vast constellations are fixed in the heavens
for pseudo-astrologers to misconstrue;
time lags while the same moon rises
Homer and Dante knew.
~ ~ ~
Смятенье чувств с годами нарастает,
Мы не дойдём до середины мненья,
И только строки сердца достигают,
Скорейшее найдя нам примененье.
Созвездий расточительны разломы,
Догадки наши безнадежно плохи,
Но Данте и Гомер вершат подъемы,
Сплетая нами прожитые сроки.
Russian translation by Alexander Markov
Wayne Pernu is an American poet who grew up in Minnesota and now lives in Portland, Oregon.
Alexander Markov is a philologist, culturologist, professor of cinema and contemporary art at the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow).
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.
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.
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.