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Akhmatova, Anna Andréevna,
As a kid had a cat whose behavior
Was not to be pitied:
Its fur had been knitted
Into a shawl someone gave her.
*
У Анны Андревны Ахматовой
был в детстве котенок лохматовый.
Котенка не жаль,
пошел он на шаль
на плечи великой Ахматовой.
* * *
Pasternak, like us all, was born nude.
He pewked and he puled and he mewed
Till he swapped in his nappy
For something more snappy
And a sex life especially crude.
*
Родившись, Борис Пастернак
был косноязычен и наг.
Подрос, огляделся,
слегка приоделся
и стал сексуальны маньяк.
* * *
He followed her just like a lamb,
But she told him, “I don’t give a damn,”
She said when he bleated,
And again she repeated,
“Give it up, you’re a pest, Mandelstam.”
*
За ней он ходил по пятам.
Она говорила: не дам.
Она говорила,
она повторила:
«Настырный же Вы, Мандельштам».
* * *
A face that could turn dogs away
‘s what I see, thought the idle Sergéy.
He was looking at Lenin,
This Sérgey Yesenin,
And not in a mirror that day.
*
Какая противная рожа, –
со скукой подумал Сережа.
Той рожей был Ленин.
Сережей – Есенин,
и были они непохожи.
* * *
One day at Shakhmatovo Blok
And his mother sat down for a talk:
“A lawyer I’ll be
Or a trouper, you’ll see!”
“Give it up, you’re no genius, my chuck.”
*
Однажды в Шахматово Блок
Вел с мамой такой диалог:
Хочу быть юристом,
Хочу быть артистом!
– Да ты ж не отличник, милок.
Translated from Russian by J.Kates, a minor poet and a literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. His translations of Ttiana Shcherbina (The Score of the Game: Zephyr Press and An Offshoot of Sense: Cold Hub Press) remain in print.
Tatiana Shcherbina is a poet and essayist. A graduate of the philology faculty of Moscow State University, she has authored many collections of poetry (one of them, in French) and several books of essays. Her books have been translated and published in France, Canada, Great Britain, USA, New Zealand, Slovenia, and Greece. Her books include “Zero Zero” (1991), “Life Without” (1997), “Dialogues with an Angel” (1999), “The Book of Plus and Minus …” (2001), “Azure Tablet” (2003), “Stock Strength “(2006),” Confessions of a Spy “(2007),” France, Magic Hexagon”(2007), Escape of Meaning “(2008),”They Drowned”(2009), “Reproduction of the Personality “(2010), “Crocozyabry “(2011), “Chronicles. Poems “(2017), and “Anthropological travel” (2019).
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.
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
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!
