Our climate is so awful
that all the peripatetics
sink to the bottom of an endless black winter
before they can agree
on anything useful
Our climate is so awful
that the ever coughing Diogenes
has relocated from his dank container
under the elevated heating main
and into the fields of blooming asphodels
Our climate is so awful
that Dante and Beatrice left
after their first conjugal night
for a honeymoon in Thailand
but have never come back
living there happily ever after
and never dropping us a line
Our climate is so awful
that cynocephalic cyclopes
have migrated from the fringes of the world
to our industrial landfills
they talk like us walk like us
and are in no way different from us now

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Maria Galina, poet, writer, critic, and translator, was born in Tver. She writes both literary and science fiction (with ten SF books to her credit); her literary fiction contains a strong element of magical realism. She is the author of the novels  Volchja Zviezda (2004, The Wolf Star ); “Iramification” (2004; Russian version Givi and Shenderovich – award for the best science-fiction/fantasy novel of International Assembly Portal, Kiev, Ukraine, 2005 and Academia Rossica award for the best translation from Russian,  Great Britain, 2009); Malaya Glusha (2009/0; short-list of the Big Book (Bolshaya Kniga) award (2009) and long-list of  Russian Booker Award; Ground Crayfish, 2011, short-list and reader’s choice for the Big Book award-2012, and Autochthons” (2015),  short-list and reader’s choice for the Big Book award, short list for the National Bestseller award). She also has more than ten genre awards in the field of Science Fiction and Fantasy. As a poet she has been awarded with numerous prestigious Russian poetry awards. Galina currently works for Russia’s oldest literary magazine Novy Mir (Moscow) as the deputy governor of the department of literature critique and social problems, and as a columnist.

Investigation –– fear
What broke us?
-–against drops, against walls.
Did we appear to anyone afterwards?
Only to you alone, oh God.
And You protect my hand
When I throw
millet of words.
And I will betray right away –– wait for me
at the embankment
on the shore
I’ll make sure
I escape
from them.
Translated from the Russian by Anna Halberstadt

*

Maria Vladimirovna “Masha” Alyokhina (born 1988) is a Russian political activist. She is a member of the anti-Putinist punk rock group Pussy Riot who has been imprisoned for her political poetry, performance, and activism against the Putin regime in Russia

We trembled
Then we were told we had to live
This life got imprinted in our heads
and turned into itself
the kids left
we found what we could give them
and it was fine
recently there was a cold night
a cool dawn and sleep
there are a few of us
not a hair not a handful not an inch
we will yield to you and the conscience
was crushed
the garbage can
was taken out.
Translated from the Russian by Anna Halberstadt

*

Maria Vladimirovna “Masha” Alyokhina (born 1988) is a Russian political activist. She is a member of the anti-Putinist punk rock group Pussy Riot who has been imprisoned for her political poetry, performance, and activism against the Putin regime in Russia.

They’ve unveiled a new Stalin monument
With a granite mustache and pedestal.
It seems his ample ass cannot find rest
And from the grave still dominates it all.

He towers like a mushroom from the earth
So that all folk may dwell in peace and mirth!
He’s one of us, of proletarian birth,
And we adore his overcoat’s plain cloth!

So that the humblest cur may to this day
Lift a hind leg by popular demand
At his foot. As to the cap, what can one say?
O motherland. O motherfuckerland.

Translated from the Russian by Katia Kapovich

*

Katia Kapovich is a bilingual poet, originally from Moldova, who has been living in the US since the mid-1990s. She is the author of a dozen Russian poetry collections, of two volumes of short fiction in Russian, and of two volumes of English verse, Gogol in Rome (Salt, 2004) and Cossacks and Bandits (Salt, 2008). In Russia, she has received the prestigious Russian Prize twice: for fiction in 2013 and for poetry in 2015. Her original English language poetry has appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry, The New Republic, Harvard Review, The Independent, The Common, Jacket, Plume and numerous other periodicals, as well as in several anthologies including Best American Poetry 2007 and Poetry 180 (Random House). She was the recipient of the 2001 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the U.S. Library of Congress, and a poet-in-residence at Amherst College in 2007. She co-edits Fulcrum: An Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics with her husband, the poet Philip Nikolayev.

Moscow in mid-March
drowning in fog and sleet
gloomy weather—
for getting high on sweets
or warming oneself
with vodka.
Stalin cardboard cutouts
on Old Arbat
pedestrian walkway
tyrant’s photos in windows
of thrift shops
next to
a bronze chandelier
or a porcelain bear.
People are longing
for the old era
of communist past
food prices
going down
radio in the communal kitchen
translating bombastic
marches
and the famous tenor
Kozlovsky
singing Lensky’s aria
before the young poet
falls in a fateful duel
with Eugene Onegin
the cynical dandy.
The times
when children believed
they lived in the country
of fairness
and brotherly love
among the inhabitants
of the republics.
And comrade Stalin
made sure nothing bad
would ever occur
to all his children
innocent
young pioneers
in red ties
saluting
hopefully looking
towards the dawn
red with the blood
of his enemies
imagined
or real.

*

Anna Halberstadt has been widely published in Russian, English, and Lithuanian. Eileen Myles s first collection of poetry in Russian translation by Anna Halberstadt, Selected Selected, was published by Russian Gulliver in Moscow in April 2017. Anna’s translations of poetry by Edward Hirsch into the Russian, Nocturnal Fire, were published by Evgeny Stepanov’s publishing house in 2017. Halberstadt was a finalist in the 2013 and 2015 Mudfish poetry contests and in the Atlanta Review 2015 contest and a winner of the International Merit Award in Poetry 2016,  the International Poetry Competition in the Atlanta Review,  and awarded a Poetry prize 2016 for a group of poems in Russian by Children of Ra journal. Her Vilnius Diary in Lithuanian has become one of TOP10 books, published in Lithuania in 2017, as named by the Lithuanian news site Lt.15. It was also chosen for the list of most important books in translation 2017 by the Lithuanian Translators Association. Нalberstadt was named Translator of the Year by the literary journal Persona PLUS 2017 for her translation into the Russian of Bob Dylan’s poem “Brownsville Girl.”

The Red Square in Moscow
Has become even redder today.
Another political killing
just reminds you
the Red Square used to have a place
for public executions in the old times.
Red Square with a red mausoleum
red brick walls and red ruby stars on Kremlin spires
like inflamed from insomnia eyes.
Mostly red with swirls of color
like a fancy dessert Vassily Blazhenny*
but dark and with no space for praying inside.
Red background seems to have been created
for red warm spilt blood
not to stand out.

*Saint Basil the Blessed, a church in Moscow, Russia

*

Anna Halberstadt has been widely published in Russian, English, and Lithuanian. Eileen Myles s first collection of poetry in Russian translation by Anna Halberstadt, Selected Selected, was published by Russian Gulliver in Moscow in April 2017. Anna’s translations of poetry by Edward Hirsch into the Russian, Nocturnal Fire, were published by Evgeny Stepanov’s publishing house in 2017. Halberstadt was a finalist in the 2013 and 2015 Mudfish poetry contests and in the Atlanta Review 2015 contest and a winner of the International Merit Award in Poetry 2016,  the International Poetry Competition in the Atlanta Review,  and awarded a Poetry prize 2016 for a group of poems in Russian by Children of Ra journal. Her Vilnius Diary in Lithuanian has become one of TOP10 books, published in Lithuania in 2017, as named by the Lithuanian news site Lt.15. It was also chosen for the list of most important books in translation 2017 by the Lithuanian Translators Association. Нalberstadt was named Translator of the Year by the literary journal Persona PLUS 2017 for her translation into the Russian of Bob Dylan’s poem “Brownsville Girl.”

The court ruled in favor of the cold,
legitimizing its war on warmth,
with clouds’ indelible stains
overhanging the excavation
of our motherland, ever pregnant with a monster.

When the oldest dies off, a young one is born,
a fresh cobweb king or death cap shroom,
as cuttlefish spout sincere black gore,
besprinkling the sky and emitting clouds
by way of unanimous collective gesture,
and there’s always more where that came from.

But humanists insist history’s court will sort out
the crooked judges, will make their shady lot
kneel on nuts, will boil them into soap.
That’s when there will come an eternal summer morn,
and from then on only poets will be born.

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Tatyana Shcherbina is a poet, essayist, journalist, prose writer, and translator. In 1989–1994, she served as a staff writer for Radio Liberty. Founder and chief editor of Estet magazine (1996), until 1986, she published poems and prose in samizdat (author’s books, publications in Mitin magazine). Her first book of poems, Zero Zero, was published in 1991. She also wrote poetry in French; L’ame deroutee won a prize from the National Center for Literature of France in 1993. She translated many modern French poets and compiled the anthology Modern French Poetry (1995). Her poems are translated into many languages, her books in English are published in the USA (The Score of the Game); Great Britain (Life Without); and New Zealand (An Offshoot of Sense). She has participated in many international poetry festivals (Holland, Canada, France, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Italy, Great Britain, Greece), and she performs poetry readings and lectures internationally.

In Russia, the true medal is the bullet.
A gold pistol embroiders crosses
In crude white thread over golden heroes’
Black case files, as knots for memory.
A blood trickle’s red thread escapes
Across ages, exploding into a fountain,
When the sling is vested with such power:
In the order of the mantle of the bloody lining
Execution rhymes with executive branch.

 

*Boris Yefimovich Nemtsov (9 October 1959 – 27 February 2015) was a Russian scientist, statesman and liberal politician. He had a successful political career during the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin. Since 2000, he was an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. He was shot and killed in February 2015 for his pro-democracy views on Russia, probably by loyalists of Vladimir Putin, on a bridge near the Kremlin and Red Square in Moscow.

 

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Tatyana Shcherbina is a poet, essayist, journalist, prose writer, and translator. In 1989–1994, she served as a staff writer for Radio Liberty. Founder and chief editor of Estet magazine (1996), until 1986, she published poems and prose in samizdat (author’s books, publications in Mitin magazine). Her first book of poems, Zero Zero, was published in 1991. She also wrote poetry in French; L’ame deroutee won a prize from the National Center for Literature of France in 1993. She translated many modern French poets and compiled the anthology Modern French Poetry (1995). Her poems are translated into many languages, her books in English are published in the USA (The Score of the Game); Great Britain (Life Without); and New Zealand (An Offshoot of Sense). She has participated in many international poetry festivals (Holland, Canada, France, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Italy, Great Britain, Greece), and she performs poetry readings and lectures internationally.

You say Russia? What about her,
with her prison camps and torture?
It’s for nothing that Russian folk
overthrew the Mongol Yoke.
Salamanders in black ski-masks
make approach with expert stealth,
violating homes and cities,
bringing terror spiked with death.
Knowing it’s a time of bandits,
people go about their business.
Hardly anyone resists.
They repeat: “God’s court exists!”
Yet it’s still a place for will-
power and knowing how to sail
between charybdises and scyllas
while making tracks from worse godzillas.
Home, at work, in grief, in love
We perfect survival skills.
Life in Russia is a form of
Art and science. Like nowhere else.

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Tatyana Shcherbina is a poet, essayist, journalist, prose writer, and translator. In 1989–1994, she served as a staff writer for Radio Liberty. Founder and chief editor of Estet magazine (1996), until 1986, she published poems and prose in samizdat (author’s books, publications in Mitin magazine). Her first book of poems, Zero Zero, was published in 1991. She also wrote poetry in French; L’ame deroutee won a prize from the National Center for Literature of France in 1993. She translated many modern French poets and compiled the anthology Modern French Poetry (1995). Her poems are translated into many languages, her books in English are published in the USA (The Score of the Game); Great Britain (Life Without); and New Zealand (An Offshoot of Sense). She has participated in many international poetry festivals (Holland, Canada, France, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Italy, Great Britain, Greece), and she performs poetry readings and lectures internationally.

They want to do good
And for themselves, too, but above all for the nation, the people.
For all people, but especially for us, you and me.
For kindred souls, those like themselves.
Well, not quite like themselves, let’s face it.
Not so bright, not so bold.
Not so free — not free inside.
Not ready for anything — afraid of real challenges.
Not ready to pay the price, show true grit.
Unwilling to shut their eyes or hold their noses.
Only — let’s face it — ready to envy those doing good.
Sniping behind their backs.
Pawing into their souls.
Why ask what’s in their souls?
What’s it to you what it cost them?
What they gave — for the good?
How much they got for it?
They did what was necessary — it’s as simple as that.
And did a great job.
Because you can always do the good thing.
Doing the good is always good.

Translated from the Russian by Catherine Ciepiela, Charles Bernstein, Matvei Yankelevich, Katherine O’Connor, and Pavel Khazanov as part of the Your Language My Ear 2019 symposium http://web.sas.upenn.edu/yourlanguagemyear/  Please see translator biographies at http://web.sas.upenn.edu/yourlanguagemyear/participant-bios-2019/

*

Dmitry Kuzmin is a poet, translator, editor and organizer of literary projects. He was born in Moscow in 1968. He has taught at various Russian educational institutions, and in 2014 was visiting professor of Russian poetry at Princeton University. Kuzmin co-authored the first Russian textbook of poetry. He is the founder of the publishing house Argo-Risk (1993), the site Vavilon (1997), and the journal Vozdukh. He has been editor of a number of anthologies, including one of contemporary Russian LGBT poetry. He headed the first almanac of Russian haiku, Triton, and the first journal of LGBT literature in Russia, RISK, and also created the online directory New Map of Literary Russia and the gallery Faces of Russian Literature. He was honored for his organizational work in 2002 with the Andrei Bely Prize. His 2008 collection of poetry and translations was recognized with the Moskovskii schet prize for best debut book of the year. His own poetry has been translated into fourteen languages. Kuzmin has translated into Russian Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Southern Mail, the works of the American poets e.e. cummings, Auden, Charles Reznikoff, and C. K. Williams, as well as the works of Ukrainian, French, Belarusian, German, and Polish poets. Due to his opposition to the Russian political regime he has lived since 2014 in Latvia, where he has founded the Literature Without Borders project—an international poetry foundation and residency for translators of poetry. Since 2017, the project has been funding the Poetry Without Borders festival in Riga.