Tatters of rock-crystal foliage
torn from the jittery night
by a garden light, shudder slowly
hiding their wind-driven fright.
The witchy Greek neighbor’s shadow
swings upward, viciously tall,
bird-headed, evil, stupendous,
breaking in half on the wall.
In the dry throat of a lampshade
a drumroll, a night moth’s unrest.
In a pickling jar vodka splashes
steeping with orange zest.
Darkness colluding with emptiness,
Sweet bitterness making mischief.
Into the present continuous
Eternity sneaks like a thief.
~~~
Лампа в саду вырывает
ночи испуганной клок
со слюдяною листвою,
прячущей ветреный вздрог.
Злобной старухи-гречанки
птицеголовая тень
вымахнет ростом отчаянным,
переломившись у стен.
В горле сухом абажура
гулкая дробь мотылька.
На апельсинных кожурках
водка внутри бутылька.
Сладкая горечь проказит,
тьма с пустотой заодно.
Вечность в мгновенье пролазит,
словно воришка в окно.
Valery Chereshnya was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1948, and now lives in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has authored five collections of poetry (among them “Recognition”, 2018), a book of essays “A View from Himself”, as well as many other publications in major Russian literary magazines.
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 wartime poems by Alexandr Kabanov, one of Ukraine’s major poets, fighting for the independence of his country by means at his disposal – words and rhymes.
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.