Гусеница обустраивает кокон, вырубается без наркоза,
Перевоплощается в бабочку, что мало кого удивляет.
Может летать, оказывается, рожденный ползать.
Рожденный летать, пожалуй, вовсе не умирает.
Гусеница – прожорлива, бабочка – та постится,
Цветочную пыльцу переносит без видимого усилья.
Бабочками не рождаются, но можно в неё превратиться:
Отползать своё – и однажды расправить легкие крылья.
~~~
A caterpillar builds a cocoon, falls asleep without pills,
Goes through a transformation to become a butterfly.
One that’s born to crawl will fly over hills,
One that’s born to fly may never die.
A caterpillar searches restlessly for food.
A butterfly, carrying pollen, never eats.
One who was crawling has changed the route:
Jumped into the air and spread her wings!
Translated by the poet
Boris Kokotov was born in Moscow. He has authored several poetry collections in Russian. His translations of works by German Romantic poets were published in “A Century of Translation” (“Век перевода”), an anthology of translated verse, in Moscow. His translation of Louise Glück’s “The Wild Iris” was published by Vodoley (Moscow, 2012). Since 2015, his original work in English, as well as his translations into English, appeared in many literary magazines. He lives in Baltimore.
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.