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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.
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.
