* * *
I don’t like and I don’t feel like getting dressed.
I cannot tell a nightshirt from all of the rest.
Yes, I can go shopping and lose my keys on the way,
But what is the purpose of that exercise anyway?
Dear listeners, tomorrow, no later, all of you
Will wake up in a Universe perfectly new,
Where Pinocchio dreams of becoming a real log, against all odds;
Where an astronaut is served as the breakfast of gods.
That’s because, dear listeners, for a long time and a day
We threw up in our mouths when we looked at your ugly faces.
That’s because you’ve been asking for it, time and again,
With your love of the same old words, actions and places.
When inter-star draft, to soundless prayerful sobbing,
Rips and tears the curtains of atmospheric lace,
Like a love leaf, the door to each house will begin throbbing
And the lock will explode, a particulate fountain in space.
June 9, 2020
~ ~ ~
Я не хочу одеваться, я не могу отличить
Ночную рубашку от всего остального,
Можно пойти в магазин, по пути потерять ключи,
Но к чему это делать снова и снова?
Дорогие радиослушатели, не позднее, чем завтра
Вы проснетесь в совершенно новой Вселенной,
Где Буратино мечтает стать настоящим поленом
И на завтрак богам подают астронавта,
Потому что долго, дорогие радиослушатели,
Нам сводило скулы при взгляде на ваши рожи,
Потому что вы давно этого заслуживаете
За привычку говорить и делать одно и то же,
И межзвездный сквозняк под неслышные всхлипы молитв
Оборвет занавески атмосферного шелка,
Двери каждой квартиры дрогнут, как лист любви,
И фонтаном частиц разлетится в пространство защелка.
7 июня 2020
Yulia Fridman, b. 1970, is a researcher at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. Her poetry and prose appear in various online journals. Her published translations into Russian, done jointly with Dmitri Manin, include several works of Dr. Seuss and a memoir of a prominent French mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck.
Anna Krushelnitskaya (b.1975) lives in Ann Arbor, MI. Anna’s original texts and translations appear in Russian and in English in various print and online publications. She has authored two collections of poems in English. Anna’s most voluminous work is the 700-page bilingual interview collection Cold War Casual/ Простая холодная война (2019).
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.
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
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!