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Poems for N[atalia] Е. Shtempel
I
Unwillingly clinging to a bare land,
With an uneven sweet gait
She goes—a little bit ahead
Of a swift girlfriend and her young groom.
She is drawn by the constrained freedom
Of an uplifting imperfection.
Perhaps a clear prediction
Clings to her gait, longing to stay:
That this spring weather
Is for us a grave’s foremother,
And this will begin forever.
II
Some women are kin to damp earth,
Their each step is a resonant dirge,
They are summoned to accompany
The risen and be the first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand their caresses,
And it is impossible to leave them.
Today — an angel, tomorrow — a grave’s worm,
And the next day—just a shadow . . .
What was a posture will be gone . . .
Flowers are immortal, the sky is wholesome,
And everything to come — is just a promise.
May 4, 1937
The Original
Стихи к H[аталии] Е. Штемпель
I
К пустой земле невольно припадая,
Неравномерной сладкою походкой
Она идёт—чуть-чуть опережая
Подругу быструю и юношу-погодка.
Её влечёт стеснённая свобода
Одушевляющего недостатка,
И, может статься, ясная догадка
В её походке хочет задержаться —
О том, что эта вешняя погода
Для нас — праматерь гробового свода,
И это будет вечно начинаться.
II
Есть женщины, сырой земле родные,
И каждый шаг их — гулкое рыданье,
Сопровождать воскресших и впервые
Приветствовать умерших—их призванье.
И ласки требовать от них преступно,
И расставаться с ними непосильно.
Сегодня — ангел, завтра — червь могильный,
А послезавтра—только очертанье…
Что было—поступь — станет недоступно…
Цветы бессмертны. Небо целокупно.
И всё, что будет, — только обещанье.
4 мая 1937
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From Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. A Bilingual English–Russian Edition; translations by Ian Probstein. Academic Studies Press (2022)
Osip Mandelstam [Rus. Осип Мандельштам] (14 January 1891 – 27 December 1938) was one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century. He was arrested in the 1930s and sent into internal exile with Nadezhda Mandelshtam, his wife. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to five years in a GULAG camp in the Soviet Far East. He died that year at a transit camp near Vladivostok.
Ian Probstein is a poet, scholar, and translator of poetry. His most recent book in English is The River of Time: Time-Space, Language and History in Avant-Garde, Modernist, and Contemporary Poetry. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017, Complete annotated edition of T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2019), Charles Bernstein. Sign Under Test: Selected Poems and Essays. (Moscow: Russian Gulliver-Center 2020).
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
In this collection, Andrey Kneller has woven together his own poems with his translations of one of the most recognized and celebrated contemporary Russian poets, Vera Pavlova.
This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.
Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
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.
