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КОФЕ НОЧЬЮ
Ночью дрогнет летевшая к морю рука,
Тронет тапочек, к полу прижавший затылок,
И вскочу, как наткнувшись на слово тоска
В книге – вправду тоскуя сто тысячью жилок.
Что бы сделать? Не чёрту ли душу продать,
Чтобы разные жизни за жизнь повидать?
Чем бы быстро заесть неожиданный вкус
Ночи-глины, в которую я превращусь?
Выпью кофе – и новая мысль обожжёт:
Пока ночь нерушима и время идёт,
Как бессильна печаль перед силою сил,
Перед радостью сонных развернутых крыл!
~ ~ ~
My hand, flying seaward, will tremble at night,
touch a slipper that’s resting its head on the floor,
and I’m startled – as when, in a book, I catch sight
of “despair” … and it seeps into my very core.
What to do? Call the devil and trade in my soul
for a tour of new lives while I live? How I yearn
to wash down this flavor – so sudden, so dull –
of the clay of the night, into which I will turn…
I drink coffee – and then a new thought scalds my mind:
while night doesn’t break and time runs on its course,
sorrow loses its power when faced with that force,
with the joy of two somnolent wings spreading wide!
Translated from Russian by Boris Dralyuk
Julia Nemirovskaya was part of Kovaldzhi’s Seminar and Poetry Club New Wave Poets. She published several collections of verse and short stories, a novel, and a book on Russian Cultural History (with McGrow-Hill, 1997, 2001). Her work appeared in Znamya, LRS, GLAS, Asymptote, Vozdukh, Novyi Bereg, Okno, Stanford Literary Magazine, etc. in Russian, French, English, and Bulgarian. She is currently teaching and directing student’s theater at the University of Oregon.
Boris Dralyuk is the Editor in Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution and Ten Poems from Russia, and translator of Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Review of Books, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, First Things, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere, and his collection My Hollywood and Other Poems will be published by Paul Dry Books in April 2022.
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)
