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Aging Nomad,
with one wooden leg,
makes his way up
to Winnipeg.
Here in Canada
winter returns,
the night is pitch black
but the moon still burns.
An aging crow
in perilous flight
lost a wing
to the wind’s might.
A doe with buckshot
sprayed in her side
hobbled three days
through the woods and died.
Would that whisky
alone could warm
Nomad against
the impending storm.
Decades pass
yet one never learns
why night is pitch black
though the moon burns.
Out of these years
what does one gain
but fevers and a lack
to augment the pain?
Pain upon pain
with nothing to assuage
the toil and rack
administered to age.
* * *
Одноногий бродяга
скитаться привык,
на Виннепег
держит путь старик.
Здесь, в Канаде,
уже лютует зима,
и ночью ни зги,
хотя луна зажжена.
Старой вороне
порвало крыло,
с ветром сражаться
ей тяжело.
С дробью в боку
в лесу олениха
три дня прохромала,
упокоилась тихо.
Если бы только
виски спасал
от ненастья бродягу,
но и с этим обвал.
Годы проходят,
неувязка одна –
ночью ни зги,
хотя луна зажжена.
Что толку от десятков
прошедших лет?
лихорадку и боль
они не утолят…
Попытка лишь пытка,
не уняться боли,
годы плоть разъедают,
не хуже соли.
Wayne Pernu is an American poet who grew up in Minnesota and now lives in Portland, Oregon.
Marina Eskin was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). She is a physicist by training. Marina is the author of four books of poetry in Russian, her texts and translations appear in various print and online publications. She is a member of the editorial board of “Interpoesia” journal.
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.
