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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.
Launched in 2012, “Four Centuries” is an international electronic magazine of Russian poetry in translation.
Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) was one of the most prolific Russian writers of the twentieth century. Babi Yar and Other Poems, translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya, is a representative selection of Ehrenburg’s poetry, available in English for the first time.
Young readers will love this delightful work of children’s verse by poet William Conelly, accompanied by Nadia Kossman’s imaginative, evocative illustrations.
A book of poems by Maria Galina, put together and completed exactly one day before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is Galina’s seventh book of poems. With translations by Anna Halberstadt and Ainsley Morse.
The first bilingual (Russian-English) collection of poems by Aleksandr Kabanov, one of Ukraine’s major poets, “Elements for God” includes poems that predicted – and now chronicle – Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
A book of poems by Yulia Fridman.
“I have been reading Yulia Fridman’s poems for a long time and have admired them for a long time.” (Vladimir Bogomyakov, poet)
