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On his first day he glanced around the glade
Where supple grass grew by the crystal creek,
He lay down lazily in the fig tree shade
And fell asleep, his hand under his cheek.
Beneath the azure peace of Eden’s heavens
Sweetly he slept, nothing disturbing him.
And in his dream he saw the Auschwitz ovens
And trenches filled with bodies to the brim…
He saw his children… In the languid air
Of paradise he smiled in his primeval
Innocent dream, blissfully unaware
Of what it meant, not knowing good from evil.
The Original
АДАМ
Ленивым взглядом обозрев округу,
Он в самый первый день траву примял,
И лег в тени смоковницы, и руку
Заведши за голову, задремал.
Он сладко спал, он спал невозмутимо
Под тишиной Эдемской синевы.
Во сне он видел печи Освенцима
И трупами наполненные рвы…
Своих детей он видел… В неге Рая
Была улыбка на лице светла.
Дремал он, ничего не понимая,
Не знающий еще добра и зла.
Yevgeny Mikhailovich Vinokurov (October 22, 1925, Bryansk – January 23, 1993, Moscow) was a Russian Soviet poet, translator and teacher. His first poems were published in 1948 in the magazine “Smena” with a foreword by Ilya Ehrenburg. In 1951, he graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute, and his first book “Poems about Duty” came out the same year. His second book of poems, titled “Sineva.” came out in 1956 and earned the approval of Boris Pasternak. “Sergei from Malaya Bronnaya,” a poem about Moscow boys who did not return from the front and about their mothers, fading away in empty apartments, became one of the most popular Soviet post-war songs. (it was put to music in 1958 by Andrei Eshpai.)
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).
Launched in 2012, “Four Centuries” is an international electronic magazine of Russian poetry in translation.
Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) was one of the most prolific Russian writers of the twentieth century. Babi Yar and Other Poems, translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya, is a representative selection of Ehrenburg’s poetry, available in English for the first time.
Young readers will love this delightful work of children’s verse by poet William Conelly, accompanied by Nadia Kossman’s imaginative, evocative illustrations.
A book of poems by Maria Galina, put together and completed exactly one day before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is Galina’s seventh book of poems. With translations by Anna Halberstadt and Ainsley Morse.
The first bilingual (Russian-English) collection of poems by Aleksandr Kabanov, one of Ukraine’s major poets, “Elements for God” includes poems that predicted – and now chronicle – Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
A book of poems by Yulia Fridman.
“I have been reading Yulia Fridman’s poems for a long time and have admired them for a long time.” (Vladimir Bogomyakov, poet)
