Mio Grand. Translated by Dmitri Manin

Also in World:

1. 7104699c-cfe0a963eca407c7745cb6a9de5ac7c8
Mio Grand. Translated by Dmitri Manin

 
* * *
 
Hey, I found a girl! I found a girl!

Her nose, a nimble hose, can twist and twirl,

For a mouth she has a rubber sheet,

Her eyepieces are clogged with soil and sleet.
 

I feel like hugging her right then and there,

But she gives me such an eerie stare…

And l see her eyes, big, blank and round,

And I hear her burble, “beat it, now!”
 

And her belly swells, and swells, and swells,

Though already bloated like a bell!

“Feed me!” she commands, and off I skip

Plucking grass on the disputed strip.
 

“I am hungry!” – still, she swells and bloats.

And I bring her houses, people, goats,

Music notebooks, pupils of my eyes –

To this girl with her rust-eaten scythe.
 

She pulls out the safety pin and grieves

Gobbling up a man. I cannot leave.

Looming like a swarm of wasps, she nears,

The gigantic girl who knows no tears.
 
 The Original

Девочку я, девочку нашла!

Носик у неё — подвижный шланг,

Ротик у неё — резины пласт,

В окулярах глаз — земля и наст.
 

Захотелось девочку обнять,

А она так смотрит на меня…

И я вижу, вместо глаз — круги,

И я слышу булькает: «Беги»!
 

И растёт, растёт её живот,

Пухнет, но растёт, растёт, растёт!

«Накорми!» — приказ, и я бегу,

Рву траву на спорном берегу.
 

«Есть хочу!» — и пухнет всё сильней.

Я несу людей, дома, коней,

Нотные тетради, свой висок —

Девочке с заржавленной косой.
 

Плачет, пожирая, сняв чеку

С человека. Я не убегу.

Нависает тёмной тучей ос

Девочка огромная без слёз.
 

About the Author:

1. Mila Ilyina photo
Mio Grand
Moscow, Russia

After she graduated from the Gorky Literature Institute, she worked as editor of the social-patriotic television program Street of Your Destiny. She performed her poems in the Tchaikovsky Moscow Philharmonic Hall, the House of Composers, the Center for Slavic Literature and Culture, the Orthodox Youth Club, and other organizations. Her poems were published in various magazines and set to music. A collection of stories for children with disabilities was published. She writes prose and poetry. She also paints, draws, and engages in other types of artistic creation.
Mio Grand is a pen name.

About the Translator:

manin_2021 (1)
Dmitri Manin
California, USA

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.

Mila Ilyina Мила Ильина
Bookshelf
by Aleksandr Kabanov

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.

by Mark Budman

Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)

by Andrey Kneller

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.

by Osip Mandelstam

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.

by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

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.

 

by Victor Enyutin

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.

Videos
Three Questions. A Documentary by Vita Shtivelman
Play Video
Poetry Reading in Honor of Brodsky’s 81st Birthday
Length: 1:35:40