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HELEN’S FACES
Bitterly have I been contested for,
Though never have I counted numbers–
They were too many, less than all.
And kindly have I warded off
Contest and bitterness,
Given each a replica of love,
Beguiled them with fine images.
To their hearts they held them.
Her dear face, its explicitness!
Clearly, of all women, the immediate one
To these immediate men.
But the original woman is mythical,
Lies lonely against no heart.
Her eyes are cold, see love far off,
Read no desertion, when love removes
The images out of fashion.
Undreamed of in her many faces
That each kept off the plunderer:
Contest and bitterness never raged round her.
ЛИКИ ЕЛЕНЫ
Бились за меня жестоко,
Сколько точно, не знаю, не считала:
Много было их, хоть и не все.
Мягко я отводила
Соперничество и ревность,
Каждому слепок любви давала,
Чаровала прекрасной личиной.
К сердцу они прижимали
Милый лик в его очевидности!
Вот ведь самая близкая из женщин
Для этих мужей недалеких.
Но настоящая женщина — миф,
Одинока, к сердцу не прижата.
Очи холодны, видят любовь вдалеке,
Предательства не видят, когда личины
У любви выходят из моды.
Невообразима за своими ликами,
Каждый — как щит от мародеров;
Соперничество и ревность до нее не касались.
Laura Riding Jackson (born Laura Reichenthal; January 16, 1901 – September 2, 1991), best known as Laura Riding, was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Although not as well-known as some of her famous contemporaries, such as Ezra Pound or H.D., she was one of the greatest American poets.
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 a poem by Stepanova won the Compass Award competition.
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.
