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I’ve checked out of my old life
and into a new
with a first-of the-month stipend
and a room with a view.
A one-room in Finntown
on the second floor
with a cubical fridge
and a sign on the door.
A self-contained kingdom,
a rarified hovel,
no shower to fix
or sidewalk to shovel.
Just a bed and a table
and a weekly let,
an ashtray and a remote
for the television set.
A blind for the window
when the cold morning’s break
but a clear view of the sunset
over Bailey’s lake.
Whole days for drinking
while the counsels convene
and never once thinking
what I might have been.
~ ~ ~
ВОЗРАЩЕНИЕ В ФИННТАУН
Выписался из жизни старой,
И в новую прописался,
комната с видом, пособие даром,
остальное меня не касается.
В Финнтауне комната целая
на втором этаже,
куб холодильника белый,
на двери табличка уже.
Чем не царство и благодать,
редкостная дыра,
Нет ванной – нечего починять,
Снег не сгребаю с утра.
Кровать, стол, стул,
просто, зато не тесно,
телевизионный пульт
достаю, не вставая с места.
Скрывая рассвет холодный,
на окнax шторы висят,
а вечером, вход свободный –
над озером Бейли закат.
Пока соц. работникам судьбы решать,
могу пить, хоть целый день,
а кем я мог бы в той жизни стать
мне даже и думать лень.
Translated into Russian by Marina Eskin
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.
