Just so notes
I only started to appreciate Pasternak’s work a short while ago, but there are a few poems I have always enjoyed, one of them — On the Steamboat (1916) ending like this: ‘Twas a chilly morning. Jaws got cramped,And the…
Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
I only started to appreciate Pasternak’s work a short while ago, but there are a few poems I have always enjoyed, one of them — On the Steamboat (1916) ending like this: ‘Twas a chilly morning. Jaws got cramped,And the…
The story goes this this. Brothers Daniil and Dmitry Pokrass were Soviet composers who wrote a good deal of more or less popular songs and marches from the 1930s to the 1950s. They had a brother or cousin named Samuel…
And all plants press themselves To the glue-like window-glass And with astonishment observe The grave of people’s reason. Zabolotsky, 1933
There’s one poem by Akhmatova that keeps getting translated into English over and over; it’s about drinking, of course. I’ve dug up a few links — English versions by Eric Gillan, William Minor, and Judith Hemschemeyer — the (sub)Standard Version…
Thanksgiving For all, for all I thank you: For the secret pangs of passions, For the bitterness of tears, for the poison of the kiss, For the revenge of enemies and the calumny of friends; For my soul’s ardor wasted…
A lane in the factory quarters O dreadful children of abandoned courtyardsMurderers of pallid womanhoodHeeding a call of heartCome to their wretched mateTo the Penia of the streets, her orphan breast,Already half-alive from hands insatiable And now, when taken as…
I’ve stumbled upon the ending and dating of this poem. It’s even more radical considering a Russian émigré penned it down in France in 1949. Here’s a rhythmically irregular (deliberately so) translation. I am for war and foreign intervention;I’m for…
A Sociological Treatise in Verse on the Phenomenon of Alcoholism This 1971 poem by Sergei Stratanovsky, one of the best living Russian poets in my opinion, ends somewhat like this: And the man down the pavement Creeps with a sodden…
or, To those who have read Buddha’s Little Finger by Victor Pelevin, and those who have not Baron Jungern’s “protagonist” is, in an uncanny sense, Baron Ungern-Sternberg, the White commander who captured the capital of Mongolia in 1921, driving out…
Tonight was the first time I’d seen McDonald’s’s “I’m lovin’ it” translated into Russian — it’s already evaporated from my memory, which means the translation wasn’t catchy enough. Until then, I thought Ronald had given up on Russian: McD paper…
While I’m pondering upon Political Philosophie, here’s a translation attempt. [Edited in 2017.] The original poem dates back to the early 1920s. A half-forgotten comfort, The blessing of a night carouse! A sip — and you need nothing, A sip…
A piece of Soviet wit, to keep us entertained. A contaminated stanza from a Soviet children’s poem: Don’t be ashamed, o drunkard,Of your nose,For it is of the same colorAs our red banner. Perhaps I should write about Soviet “black”…