SONG (to be played to guitar music)
The Original:
Maybe it’s a train in the distance,
someone coming but I don’t have a clue,
homebound on an overcast night.
a spot of yellow on a field of blue
Maybe I could have lived better.
Who knows why we do what we do
like a painting I saw in a gallery
a spot of yellow on a field of blue.
It’s been raining buckets of pain.
There’re too many doctors in my brain.
Forgive me please, you’re not to blame.
Tell me again, I’ve forgotten your name.
I got a heart and I keep it safe.
Live long, you see what’s true.
I love when life seems clear like
a spot of yellow on a field of blue.
* * *
Поезд ли возник в отдаленье,
может быть, кто-то спешит домой,
путник неведомый темной ночью:
на синем поле всплеск золотой.
Я мог бы, верно, прожить и лучше,
бог весть, зачем двинул этой тропой,
как картина, увиденная в музее:
на синем поле всплеск золотой.
Беды – ливнем, как из ведра.
В башке моей – одни доктора.
Прости, это ведь не твоя вина.
Кто ты ты? Я все позабыл имена.
Сердце взаймы не беру, не даю.
Век живи, и со всей простотой
увидишь правду, прекрасную, как
на синем поле всплеск золотой.
D.B. Schell is a New York-based artist and owner/manager of Green Kill Gallery in Kingston, NY. He divides his time between administrative duties, guitar, digital painting, and lyrical poetry. He is also the creator of Mr. Drinkwater Cartoons, a web-based political cartoon series that ran from the late 1990s until 2012.
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.