To E.S.

It’s easy to hate Russia from Latvia.
It’s easy to hate Russia from America.
It’s more or less easy to hate Russia from some parts of Ukraine,
But from Crimea or Donbass it’s not so easy.
It’s relatively easy to hate Russia from Moscow.
It’s a lot less easy from Perm or Omsk,
Where they entertain locals with life-sized model gallows.
It’s not easy at all to hate Russia on a hunger strike in Labytnangi
prison.
Your head spins, weakness overpowers,
your fingers tingle, touch is numb.
Your thirst is too great for water to quench

 

Translated from the Russian by Michael Wachtel, Charles Bernstein, Leonid Schwab, Katherine O’Connor, and James McGavran 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 galleryFaces 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, 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.

these fisheyes see right through folk to the full depth
they unfold the angle of vision to a straight line
with folk to the right folk to the left and folk ahead
one must navigate this viscous milieu slowly
pushing one’s way through the jelly of the folk
wherein the bottom relief is bizarrely refracted
and goads and tasers are bashfully concealed
these calm leadership fisheyes round out the line
of the horizon tucking the edges inward while
everything is dark abroad there’s no there there
light from the east cannot escape from its black hole
Einstein’s god is sophisticated but not malicious
folk are teeming most vigorously on all sides
and those fisheyes cannot be turned off nor away

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

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 galleryFaces 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, 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.

it’s great to be insane in russia
free to beg for bread and vodka
doesn’t mean you’ll get it
you pacifist faggot

for you’re no airborne paratrooper
and your civilian unpatriotic ass
won’t march with any portraits (party pooper)
nor killed even a kitten in donbass

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Igor Bozhko is a painter, screenwriter, musician, poet, and actor. He is a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine and the National Union of Journalists and of the creative association “Mamai.” Bozhko’s paintings are on display at the National Art Museum of Ukraine and other museums, as well as in private collections. In 1988 he published his first book of stories, Memory Paints. The feature film Grafitti was based on his story “Faces on the Clouds”; Bozhko also wrote the script for Kira Muratova’s “Boiler No.6” in her film Three Stories and acted in various motion pictures by Muratova and other directors. He is published in the magazines Smena, Oktyabr, Khreshchatyk, Novyi Mir and several Odessa issues of the Deribasovskaya–Rishel’evskaya almanac. Bozhko’s poetry collections are Dry Grass, Queue, Year of the Sparrow, After the Year of the Sparrow, and Lyrics.

you are ivan and i am ivan
but we’re on opposite sides man
and trench digging has begun

you are moscow’s friendly act
i’m one whose neck is incorrect
the trench digging is all done

the general doesn’t give a fuck
about trenches filled with muck
still he wishes us good luck

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Igor Bozhko is a painter, screenwriter, musician, poet, and actor. He is a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine and the National Union of Journalists and of the creative association “Mamai.” Bozhko’s paintings are on display at the National Art Museum of Ukraine and other museums, as well as in private collections. In 1988 he published his first book of stories, Memory Paints. The feature film Grafitti was based on his story “Faces on the Clouds”; Bozhko also wrote the script for Kira Muratova’s “Boiler No.6” in her film Three Stories and acted in various motion pictures by Muratova and other directors. He is published in the magazines Smena, Oktyabr, Khreshchatyk, Novyi Mir and several Odessa issues of the Deribasovskaya–Rishel’evskaya almanac. Bozhko’s poetry collections are Dry Grass, Queue, Year of the Sparrow, After the Year of the Sparrow, and Lyrics.

“Fuck this, I’ve got to buy some lipstick!
What are you looking at, old cunt?”
I know my homefolk by their talk
More than their clothes. They are so blunt!
I wince, turn pale, grow numb and dumb,
I eye them and I follow them.
But as I stalk them I am anxious
Not to reveal my homeboy presence.
I’m so alone in London’s desert,
Russian cusswords are my dessert.
I’m drawn wherever Russian speech is,
Like a pooch on the trail of bitches.

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Oleg Dozmorov is a Russian writer, poet and critic born in Yekaterinburg, Russia in 1974. He is the author of several collections of poetry including Vosmistishiya, a 2004 collection of octaves, and Take a look at the hippopotamus (2012), which was awarded the Russian Prize and Moscow Score literary prizes. His poems are translated into Italian, English, Dutch and Ukrainian. His semi-fictional story “Marble Award” was published by Znamia in 2006. Since 2009 he has lived in London.

Let’s put some likes on people dying
And on a hunger strike in jail,
On all those suffering and crying,
On everyone whose life is hell.
But hunger causes us to make
A sandwich, so we take a break
And construct a sandwich
Reinforced with sausage.
We, humble intelligentsia,
Support all the best causes, yea?

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Oleg Dozmorov is a Russian writer, poet and critic born in Yekaterinburg, Russia in 1974. He is the author of several collections of poetry including Vosmistishiya, a 2004 collection of octaves, and Take a look at the hippopotamus (2012), which was awarded the Russian Prize and Moscow Score literary prizes. His poems are translated into Italian, English, Dutch and Ukrainian. His semi-fictional story “Marble Award” was published by Znamia in 2006. Since 2009 he has lived in London.

Scumbags don’t owe the poets anything,
But you’ve decided somehow that you owe us,
Which only goes to show that you don’t know us
Thinking that poems cannot be menacing.
So here’s a poem – visionary boldness –
A prophet’s dream of rights and liberties.
While your patriotland stays strangely wordless.
Devour it! I’m in your antipodes.
War is the patriots’ only motherland,
Their feeders are fable news and fake TV,
They are all lies, delusional and violent.
So your Crimean and Donetsk fans are silent,
Speechless. Don’t you agree? Yes, you agree.

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Oleg Dozmorov is a Russian writer, poet and critic born in Yekaterinburg, Russia in 1974. He is the author of several collections of poetry including Vosmistishiya, a 2004 collection of octaves, and Take a look at the hippopotamus (2012), which was awarded the Russian Prize and Moscow Score literary prizes. His poems are translated into Italian, English, Dutch and Ukrainian. His semi-fictional story “Marble Award” was published by Znamia in 2006. Since 2009 he has lived in London.

after troubles steep
the city’s asleep

the peaty smoky sun festers
shining upon rows of baltica #9 beer bottles
with rampant withdrawal symptoms
and cubes of ice and lard in the kvass soup
while the land’s thief-in-chief
with his court of unbelievers and underbelievers
now all full and sweating
– the blue prison tattoo of mother
oozing a blurry tear –
are sitting down to some stos (Russian faro
with six decks of 52 cards pooled into one coffin)
the dark suits the spades and the clubs
when killed off keep bouncing back revived

the sun will soon sink into the asphalt
and come dusk the whole country
gambled fully away will fall silent
a shank stuck in her side and freeze
in astonishment in the tight plywood pit
of the fourth row of a rerun cinema

ice cream heavily dripping

mica stains reflected in the sightless eyeglasses
as the movie projector’s shutter keeps whirring
though the film broke off in the opening credits

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Sergey Kruglov was born in 1966 in Krasnoyarsk. He lives in Siberia and serves as an Orthodox priest in Minusinsk. He is author of the poetry collections Taking the Serpent from the Cross, Scribal, Folk Songs, Nathan, Zerkaltse, Maranafa, Lazarev Spring, The Queen of the Sabbath and several books of church journalism published in Russia and abroad. He is winner of the Andrei Bely Prize in poetry (2008), the Moscow Score and Antologia prizes, and columnist for the Internet publication Orthodoxy and Peace. In 2013–2016 he was writer and presenter of modern Russian poetry, Poetry, the Movement of Words, on the Russian show Radio Culture.

By the rivers of victorious atheism,
on the banks the Rybinsk Reservoir,
there we sat and wept, yea, when we remembered Zion.
We hung our village harps
upon the pussy willows of that land,
among the hanged.
We were questioned there,
by the nurturers of human souls
who had carried us away captive,
about the lyrics of our songs, and they said:
“Sing us some of those songs of Zion.”
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in the hypophrygian sixth mode of the Octoechos
upon the dead waters in a strange land?
We remember neither the tune nor the words,
only the pericope headings.
If I forget thee Jerusalem (I forget),
let the Lord forget the actions of my hands (may He forget, forget)!
Let my tongue cleave
to the roof of my mouth (and it cleaves, sticks, is braced to it)
if I do not remember thee (I won’t),
if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy (there is
no more joy, none at all,
only stupor and torpor)!
Remember, O Lord, the children of the USSR
and remind them, who said on the day of Jerusalem’s destruction:
“Raze it, raze it, even to the foundation thereof,
for the time will come when it will rise
and glorify its executioners!”
And o thou unfortunate daughter of the USSR,
angry prophetess, confident
and so inexorably accurate,
happy shall he be that rewardeth thee
as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be that rewardeth us,
who have done a million times more evil
Happy shall he be who seizeth
the idols of your mausolea
and smasheth them on hard stones!
And who also smasheth along with them
us, children of that captivity,
now long grown old.

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Sergey Kruglov was born in 1966 in Krasnoyarsk. He lives in Siberia and serves as an Orthodox priest in Minusinsk. He is author of the poetry collections Taking the Serpent from the Cross, Scribal, Folk Songs, Nathan, Zerkaltse, Maranafa, Lazarev Spring, The Queen of the Sabbath and several books of church journalism published in Russia and abroad. He is winner of the Andrei Bely Prize in poetry (2008), the Moscow Score and Antologia prizes, and columnist for the Internet publication Orthodoxy and Peace. In 2013–2016 he was writer and presenter of modern Russian poetry, Poetry, the Movement of Words, on the Russian show Radio Culture.

the sky is for pilots and the sea is for sailors.
they move around circularly, feeding the flames of war,
but solid land too is within reach, of course,
and far from far.

sing of bohemian brick cellars and of tobacco smoke,
keeping your soil samples clean, don’t intermix the clays,
protect your chitin, don’t let the bastards make a joke
of your verse lines.

remember: you have survived half a million years
and you will live just as long, a seashell, a trilobite;
the style of heroic death doesn’t strike you as quite yours,
you don’t care a mite.

the air is for angels, while fishing control owns the waters,
prowling the waves in a speedboat like a night owl on;
but the vertebrae of the earth and time’s mesozoic lifeforms
are for you alone.

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Gennady Kanevsky is a Moscow poet and essayist. He has been published in Homo Legens, Vozdukh, Volga, Banner, Novy Bereg, New World, October , and Ural. He is the author of six poetry books, a book of selected poems, Séance, and is published in anthologies of Russian and U.S. poetry. He has been a participant in poetry festivals in Russia and Ukraine, the poetic program of the Art Biennale in Thessaloniki, and has had poems translated into English, Italian. Hungarian, Ukrainian and Udmurt. With Anna Russ, he was the winner of the 2007 Moscow Poetry Slam, the Moscow Observer Award (2013), the Megalit Independent Award (2013), October Award (2015), and a Special Award of from Moscow Schyut (Moscow Score) for Seance (2016).