Are we going to win or not Emperor Qin demands
His astrologer says it depends on the phase of the moon
But the moon Qin says has already left our lands
and the moon of clay can be only seen by blind men
The astrologer suggests divination by prisoners’ bones
by the flight of birds over the great river’s mouth
But they’ve burned all prisoners and who knows when they’ll capture new ones
and the birds learned clever tricks and migrated south
By the dying cries of maidens when soldiers rape and maim them
the astrologist says without looking Qin in the eye
But in order to have live soldiers we need live maidens
and ours are all made of clay we are running dry
So the Emperor says and he summons the guard
The astrologer grovels and crawls feet first to the door
They grab him and cut out his heart he touches the gore
They want you to tell their fortunes speak up my heart
The astrologer’s heart relaxes contracts relaxes contracts
Qin Shi Huang’s dead army rises for an attack
The Original
Победим мы или нет спрашивает император Цинь
Отвечает астролог все зависит от фазы луны
Но у нас говорит Цинь луна ушла из страны
а луну из глины видят только слепцы
Тогда по костям пленных гадать предлагает астролог
по полетам птиц над устьем великой реки
Но всех пленных сожгли ждать новых придется долго
птицы стали хитры и не попадают в силки
По предсмертным крикам дев когда солдаты насилуют их убивая
говорит астролог не глядя Циню в глаза
Но чтоб были живые солдаты девы нужны живые
а у нас все из глины без дев больше нельзя
Так говорит император и призывает охрану
Простершись астролог ползет задом к двери
Его хватают вырезают сердце он щупает рану
Ну сердце по тебе гадают давай говори
Сердце сжимается разжимается сжимается разжимается
Мертвая армия Цинь Шихуанди на бой поднимается
Julia Nemirovskaya was part of Kovaldzhi’s Seminar and Poetry Club New Wave Poets. She published several collections of verse and short stories, a novel, and a book on Russian Cultural History (with McGrow-Hill, 1997, 2001). Her work appeared in Znamya, LRS, GLAS, Asymptote, Vozdukh, Novyi Bereg, Okno, Stanford Literary Magazine, etc. in Russian, French, English, and Bulgarian. She is currently teaching and directing student’s theater at the University of Oregon.
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.