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Mama, your boy is freezing;
it is so cold and dark!
Mama, you are the stars now, –
how can I give you a hug?
A beam from the sky is stretching
to the earth like a silver thread;
Mama, you are the sky now, –
how can we have a chat?
The light will touch so gently
and lighten the dead of night;
Mama, where are your hands now
that used to caress my head?
Is it a voice I hear, –
or is it the wind that calls?
It is so dank and chilly;
Mama, your boy is cold!
~
Холодно и промозгло
мальчику твоему;
мама, теперь ты – звёзды:
как же я обниму?
Луч до земли серебрян –
тянется, словно нить;
мама, теперь ты – небо
как же поговорить?
Свет осторожно тронет,
высветит ночь ясней.
Где же твои ладони
для головы моей?
Ветер ли? оклик? возглас? –
вслушаюсь – не пойму.
Холодно и промозгло
мальчику твоему.
Igor Kuras is a poet, prose writer, and editor of “Etaji”, a Russian-language literary journal. He is the author of several poetry collections. His poems have been published in Russia, as well as in Russian-language periodicals and almanacs in Ukraine, Canada, Germany, Israel, and the US. His poems have been translated into Hebrew, English, Ukrainian, and German.
Simon Patlis grew up in the former Soviet Union (first in Tashkent, later in Kishinev.) Since moving to the US in 1991, he’s lived in San Diego, CA. Mathematician by education, he works as an IT consultant. He has been writing poetry since childhood and translates English and Russian poetry (English to Russian, Russian to English). He is the author of “Duda”, published in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, in 2006. His work was published in “The Notebook. A Collection of Contemporary Russian Poetry in North America” (“Общая Тетрадь”, Moscow, 2007), as well as in other collections and almanacs of poetry published over the years in Russia and the US.
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)
