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 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.