The Ice Fisherman
Solitude and rest
are the gains I know
from stooping all day
in the wind and snow.
The harsh northern gusts
by God’s own device
harry the man who chops
a hole in the ice.
A plank board roof
on a corrugated shack
tells what I own more
than what I lack.
What I lack is the wisdom
to know how God
will raise the dead at judgment
from a frozen sod.
And all the prophets
of the Bible couldn’t know
the virtues of waiting
for a bite in the snow.
Подледный лов
Одинокий покой —
все, что я найду,
горбясь под снегом
у лунки на льду.
Ветром промозглым
Господня рука
хлещет нещадно
с пешней рыбака.
Дощатая крыша,
на стенах жесть —
на виду все, что есть у меня,
да не то, чего несть.
Несть мне мудрости
понять, как Господь
в страшный суд из земли
поднимет мертвую плоть.
Так библейским пророкам
не понять никогда
ожиданья поклевки
средь белого льда.
Translated into Russian by Dmitri Manin
Wayne Pernu is an American poet who grew up in Minnesota and now lives in Portland, Oregon.
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.