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And at dawn
I shall put on a necklace
of avian footprints,
And depart, stepping weightlessly on
Virgin snow.
And I’ll exit this ruthlessly mean ecumene of humans,
Beyond evil and good, having spent all my strength,
I shall fall.
And you shall come, you will find me, my love! You shall know me,
That same instant I’ll know you too. We shall be free and serene…
From the snowfields tinted with blood, you shall raise me,
And we’ll go and fade, –
Like an echo,
A memory,
A scream.
* * *
И с утра
Ожерелье из птичьих следов
Я надену,
И по первому снегу легка-невесома
Уйду,
И покину границы жестокой людской ойкумены,
За пределами зла и добра я без сил
Упаду.
И придёшь ты ко мне мой возлюбленный нежный,
И узнаешь меня, и узнаю тебя в тот же миг,
И поднимешь меня ты с полей окровавлено-снежных,
И уйдём и растаем,
Как эхо,
Как память,
Как крик.
Born and raised in Leningrad, Margarita graduated from the Leningrad State University’s Department of Philology, majoring in English Lit. Afterward, she lived in Poland, where she graduated from the University of Warsaw, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Department of Hebrew Language & Lit. After that, she lived in Israel, where she defended her dissertation in discourse analysis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 2004, she’s been living in Toronto, where she works as a medical translator. Her poems and short stories have been published in various Russian-language anthologies and magazines, both online and in print. She published a collection of poems, Night Bear Confessions”.
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)
