***
Странно думать – быть может, это последние мирные дни.
Друзья покидают нас. Мы остаемся одни
перед лицом, перед рылом, перед пастью врага.
Неужели в этот капкан вступит его нога?
Неужели нашей землей он хочет набить свой рот?
Нежели товарищ ему не волк, а подземный крот?
Неужто по крови изголодалась земля?
Ненасытен вампир и ласков, что то теля,
только не молоко сосет, а кровь из жил,
чтобы потом спросили – в каком ты полку служил.
чтоб на всю грудь несметные посмертные ордена.
Тело истлело, душа осталась одна.
Что ей делать на поле боя? А в небеса ни-ни.
Страшно думать – быть может, это последние мирные дни.
February 12, 2022
* * *
It feels weird– but these could be our last days of peace.
Friends are abandoning us. We are staying alone
to face, or rather, to see the enemy’s mouth, his snout.
Will he really step into this trap?
Does he really want to stuff his mouth with our soil?
Is his best friend a subterranean mole, not a wolf?
Is the earth that hungry for blood?
The vampire is insatiable and gentle like a calf,
only it doesn’t suck milk, he prefers to suck blood from veins,
so that he gets asked later – in what regiment he had served
so that his chest is all covered with orders, post-mortem.
The body decayed; the soul remained all alone.
What is there for it to do on the battlefield? But, there is no way to heaven.
It so scary to be thinking – these could be the last days of peace.
Translated by Anna Halberstadt
Boris Khersonsky was born in Chernivtsi in 1950. Khersonsky has published over nineteen collections of poetry and essays in Russian, and most recently, in Ukrainian. A book of his poems in English translations, The Country Where Everyone’s Name Is Fear: Selected Poems, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2022. He is widely regarded as one of Ukraine’s most prominent Russian-language poets.
Anna Halberstadt is a poet and a translator from Russian, Lithuanian and English, who grew up in Lithuania and was trained as a psychologist at Moscow University and in the U.S. Her poetry in English was widely published in English-language journals, and Russian, in Arion, Interpoezia, Children of Ra and many others. Her poetry was translated into Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Tamil. She published four collections of poetry in English, and Transit and Gloomy Sun (in Russian).
This excellent anthology, compiled and edited by Julia Nemirovskaya, showcases poems by Russian (and Russian-speaking) poets who express their absolute rejection of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The documentary novel “The Tenth Circle” tells the story of the life, struggle, and destruction of the Minsk ghetto, one of the largest in the Soviet Union and Europe during World War II. (Russian edition)
“Monkey’s Defense” is a collection of short stories and parables by Nina Kossman, bilingual author of several books of poetry and prose and translator of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems into English.
