An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets
AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN WOMEN POETS
EDITED BY VALENTINA POLUKHINA
AND DANIEL WEISSBORT
PREFACE BY STEPHANIE SANDLER
Contents
Title Page
Preface by Stephanie Sandler
Introduction by Daniel Weissbort
A Note on Transliteration
BELLA AKHMADULINA
translated by Catriona Kelly
In the Botkin Hospital
To Await Arrival
POLINA BARSKOVA
translated by Peter France
Evening at Tsarskoe Selo
[The poet has passed away]
TATYANA BEK
translated by Robert Reid
[Beneath the flakes of Russian snow]
[We’ve all got history on our hands …]
NATALYA BELCHENKO
translated by Robert Reid
[I’d happily survey the world]
[It’s boring looking at the same old contents]
[Chameleons are fine]
LARISA BEREZOVCHUK
translated by Richard McKane
[Calm rocks to sleep in your usual place]
MARINA BORODITSKAYA
translated by Ruth Fainlight
[Now I am a fan of silence]
Christmas Eve
Sound Letter
[So much gentleness from unknown men]
[Poor composer]
EKATERINA BOYARSKIKH
translated by Richard McKane
[A person is reflected by the whirlpool, not the face]
ZINAIDA BYKOVA
translated by Robert Reid
[Close of day]
At the Stop
[Potatoes in flower]
SVETLANA DENGINA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
Autumnal Equinox
Russia
REGINA DERIEVA
translated by Kevin Carey, Alan Shaw
[I don’t feel at home where I am]
[Beyond Siberia again Siberia]
[On the sea-shore, smell of iodine]
Theory of Recruiting
MARINA DOLIA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
from Silence
IRINA ERMAKOVA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
[… toward morning around seven]
Gethsemane
Lullaby for Odysseus
GALINA ERMOSHINA
translated by Gerald Janecek
[And also—the Minotaur, farmer, owner, respondent]
[Autumn your bellringing, the apple of bright weeping]
ZOYA EZROKHI
translated by Daniel Weissbort
A Day at Home
Repetition
ELENA FANAILOVA
translated by Stephanie Sandler
[Better this way: it’s you with nothing to hold on to]
Frida’s Album (Frida Kahlo’s Album)
NINA GABRIELIAN
translated by Peter France
A Phoenician Statuette
Tortoise
from the cycle Erebuni
MARIYA GALINA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
Ghazal
[What, in July’s honey heat, do you weep for, poor goy]
[I said to him—Just don’t throw me into that briar patch]
DINA GATINA
translated by Chris Jones
[I’m being stalked by a bird]
[My eyes are]
ANNA GLAZOVA
translated by Max Nemtsov
solo
the grant of death
from Cities
LINOR GORALIK
translated by the author, revised by Robert Reid
[Here I am]
[Every few weeks I see there is an empty chair in our local nursery]
NATALYA GORBANEVSKAYA
translated by Elizabeth Krizenesky Daniel Weissbort
[I will not be able to explain why]
[The rhymes picked me in a ditch]
[What I drink is not hot, not sweet]
[We live—sometimes]
Notes of a Cold War Veteran
[Epiphanies]
ANNA GORENKO
translated by Peter France
[There the folk museum alone lies in its embers]
[Flowers live faster than rotting of cherries]
[death covers up nakedness]
[houses like piles of children’s books]
Translated from the European
NINA GORLANOVA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
Three-Liners
FAINA GRIMBERG
translated by Richard McKane
[The reflection of a wet finger …]
ELENA IGNATOVA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
[Then there was the rose I fell in love with]
[To sob, pressing oneself against the officer’s greatcoat]
NINA ISKRENKO
translated by Stephanie Sandler
Another Woman
OLGA IVANOVA
translated by Jenefer Coates
To Russian Women
[Do I hold the past in my hands]
[Time turned inside out]
[I meet myself each and every day]
SVETLANA IVANOVA
translated by Jenefer Coates, Angela Livingston
[O caterpillar, daughter of the butterfly]
[Bird, start up your moan, your whine]
Subterranean River Poem
INNA KABYSH
translated by Fay Marshall and Alex Marshall
Making Jam in July
[Whenever the prodigal son returns home]
KATIA KAPOVICH
translated by Richard McKane
[Something from an untidy Russian life]
[Parting makes simple sense]
SVETLANA KEKOVA
translated by Ruth Fainlight
[Space is arched like a sail]
[With much effort, I glimpse in the darkness and rubbish]
[Running water is cold, the river from Eden flows east]
[The tsar sits on his throne as if he sat on bones]
[Look, a man is flying and]
[Already, no more suffering, no]
MARINA KHAGEN
translated by Linor Goralik
[in the branches’ shade]
OLGA KHVOSTOVA
translated by Tatyana Retivova
Flood Songs
MARIYA KILDIBEKOVA
translated by Roy Fisher
[Pizza’s a populous island]
[Everybody was going on talking the same talk]
NINA KOSSMAN
translated by the author
[A bomb said to a city]
Cassandra to Agamemnon
Backward Sound
ELENA KOSTYLEVA
translated by Max Nemtsov
[A vacancy instead of you]
IRINA KOVALEVA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
[I can still make you out]
[… And there was beauty]
ELLA KRYLOVA
translated by Yury Drobyshev and Carol Rumens
The Pilgrims
Cornflowers
MARINA KUDIMOVA
translated by Catriona Kelly
[Prison, zona, the camps, Taldái-Kustanái, and the low road]
[The pleated strata of air]
INNA KULISHOVA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
[Till now]
[Total darkness]
YULIYA KUNINA
translated by Richard McKane
Inconsistent Self-Portrait
INGA KUZNETSOVA
translated by Max Nemtsov
[speech is a stream]
[I’m trying to fit my destiny into]
[repairs are like the fall of Pompeii]
[for a centenary]
[a seagull shrilly in my head]
[breadcrumbs falling from the table]
A Wand
EVGENIYA LAVUT
TRANSLATED BY YURY DROBYSHEV AND CAROL RUMENS
About Love
[In the body of the town I’m a pupil]
ELENA LAZUTKINA
translated by Robert Reid
[The wind’s mane]
[I stand and inspect the phenomena drawn up]
[Ruined so many romances]
INNA LISNIANSKAYA
translated by Ruth Fainlight, Daniel Weissbort
Ode to the Computer
[Between hope and failure]
[Like the earth turning, I creak, and dream]
Triptych of Reflection
Jealousy
[Quiet days and quiet evenings]
SVETA LITVAK
translated by Daniel Weissbort
[Shadows of the plane-tree leaves]
[I catch the smell of beans]
MARA MALANOVA
translated by Nika Skandiaka
Morning
[Many films begin with a funeral]
[Among the men some carved-bone dice are thrown]
[Like a faded painting]
KSENIYA MARENNIKOVA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
[I, Mariya, burn your fingers]
[Mother, squatting hurts]
[Don’t let me leave you, I may die]
[my head is spinning to the right]
OLGA MARTYNOVA 
translated by Elaine Feinstein
[What does the river know of its own bed]
[Night unwraps the true stuff of the world]
IRINA MASHINSKAYA
translated by the author
[So I stood by and watched]
Newspapers on the Plateau
LARISA MILLER
translated by Richard McKane
[The light cross of lonely strolls]
[Let’s fill in the form: date of birth]
[The heavens are playing with the earth]
TATYANA MILOVA
translated by Robert Reid
[Sometimes, not often, it’s true]
[… I’ve overslept my stop … the train will spit me out]
STELLA MOROTSKAYA
translated by Vitaly Chernetsky
[morning sleep]
[Screams and hair come out]
Tomato
RAISA MOROZ
translated by Max Nemtsov
[There’s a cinnamon tree that grows on the Moon]
NEGAR
translated by Richard McKane
[Forgive me that I opened your door silently]
Dust
OLESIA NIKOLAEVA
translated by Catriona Kelly
[Once I used to study languages dead for millennia]
[You can go on holiday now, you can dabble in verse]
REA NIKONOVA
translated by Gerald Janecek
[The earth is burning]
[Six charred leaves drift]
[Along the threads of veins]
[I sit over grief]
VERA PAVLOVA
translated by Maura Dooley and Terence Dooley, Jason Schneiderman, Steven Seymour, Derek Walcott, Daniel Weissbort
Grass
Heaven and Earth
from Signs of Life
[This is the way a row of official tulips]
[And God saw]
[On the way to you]
[Armpits smell of linden blossom]
from Letter from Memory
ALEKSANDRA PETROVA 
translated by Dennis Silk
[Tarantino’s languor and dreaming back]
[Again sick]
[In Juda desert]
LIUDMILA PETRUSHEVSKAYA 
translated by Daniel Weissbort
Poor Ruth
OLGA POSTNIKOVA
translated by Richard McKane
Archangel Cathedral
IRINA RATUSHINSKAYA
translated by C. J. K. Arkell, Alan Myers
[Thus you lived your life without regret]
[Penelope, the screaming is all over]
TATYANA RETIVOVA
translated by the author
Elegy to Atlantis
TATYANA RIZDVENKO
translated by Daniel Weissbort
[Frost and sun, as needed]
[It was such a pearly, pink season]
OLGA SEDAKOVA
translated by Catriona Kelly, Robert Reid
Rain
Sant’ Alessio, Roma
In Memory of a Poet
EVELINA SHATS
translated by Daniel Weissbort
[A rose]
Sleep soundly, dear poet
TATYANA SHCHERBINA
translated by J. Kates, Derek Walcott, Daniel Weissbort
About Limits
[Except for love everything]
[They cut off my hot water]
[What’s it you’re howling, siren-telephone]
[Where are the future’s clawlets?]
[Tell me, Comrade God, how can life, over this stretch]
IRINA SHOSTAKOVSKAYA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
[Sailor sailor got ashore]
[The boy bears a gray shield]
[Today I’m a proper king’s daughter]
ELENA SHVARTS
translated by James McGavran, Stephanie Sandler
Memorial Candle
Conversation with a Cat
A Portrait of the Blockade through Genre Painting, Still Life, and Landscape
NATALYA STARODUBTSEVA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
[Roundabouts solidly turn]
[And it is cold here and a bit strange]
MARIYA STEPANOVA
translated by Richard McKane
Airman
DARYA SUKHOVEY
translated by Christopher Mattison
Spring Scales
OLGA SULCHINSKAYA
translated by Richard McKane
The Kite
Crimea
[The wind paces on the lower branch]
ELENA SUNTSOVA
translated by Nika Skandiaka
[Beyond is where the passersby end]
[as old salts know]
[city of summer you inhabit a fluff-light city of little claws]
[as you and i stand long]
VITALINA TKHORZHEVSKAYA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
Wild Rose
[He wouldn’t sign the death warrant]
Silence
YANA TOKAREVA
translated by Daniel Weissbort
Brief reflection on the greatness of God
[Why is she sleeping on some steps]
from On Russian Poetry (1996–2000)
ELENA VASILEVA
translated by Max Nemtsov
[I wish I could look]
[I used to be your echo]
[She’s calling God, she wants to ask Him]
EKATERINA VLASOVA
translated by Peter France
[A little sympathy]
[On an old grand piano]
[I see]
[Create me a world]
[There is a way to sew wings on arms]
TATYANA VOLTSKAYA
translated by Catriona Kelly, Richard McKane, Daniel Weissbort
[The low clouds, the shreds of dry grass]
[Rhyme is a woman, trying on clothes]
[God is the first snow. He is a leaf, a mosquito]
GALINA ZELENINA (GILA LORAN)
translated by Daniel Weissbort
&nb
sp; [With grown-up clever hands]
Shma Yisrael (Hear, O Israel)
GALI-DANA ZINGER
translated by the author, edited by Ashraf Noor
Strategy
[I’m speaking to make you silent]
Lamentation of the Border-Guard
OLGA ZONDBERG
translated by Daniel Weissbort
[The variety of animals, said Khlebnikov]
[cockle-antarctica]
[they all but cry out]
[there were lots of them]
[To die. And be born as an inspector of playgrounds for tiny tots]
Postface A Poet’s by View Elena Fanailova
Appendix The Vavilon Project and Women’s Voices Among The Young Literary Generation by Dmitry Kuzmin
Bibliography
The Poets
The Translators
Index To Titles
About the Author
Copyright
PREFACE
STEPHANIE SANDLER
Anna Akhmatova may be the reason you opened this book. Her name springs first to the minds of Americans who know much about Russian poetry, if I may draw on an entirely unscientific sample of my own chance conversations over the years. Russia must have the only world literature whose poetry has been represented by a woman, an oddity that grows when one realizes that Russia in fact had two great women poets early in the twentieth century: Marina Tsvetaeva may be less known abroad, but only because her linguistic wizardry nearly defies translation. In Russia they command equal respect, and generations of writers have looked to both as exemplary lyric poets.
Some Russian poets look back to Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva as proof that women more than hold their own with men as poets. Thus in “Evening at Tsarskoe Selo,” a poem you will find in this volume, Polina Barskova describes Akhmatova walking through a park where Akhmatova had imagined Aleksandr Pushkin walking a century earlier. In Barskova’s poem, Akhmatova is preoccupied by an unfinished poem, and she pays little attention to her male companion. Barskova wittily rewrites the myth of Akhmatova as a love poet and makes her first and foremost a poet, someone whose mind and heart are taken up with poetry more than with any lover. In another poem you will find here, Olga Sedakova also turns to Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva as poets, although by means of the briefest mention. She adds a footnote to “In Memory of a Poet” telling readers that she has drawn on the poetic traditions of both Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova; their mediation has given form and intonational nobility to a poem memorializing her great contemporary Joseph Brodsky.
These two examples show Akhmatova as muse to later women poets, but she and Tsvetaeva can also, paradoxically, cast a long shadow. Some poets may wonder which is the greater danger, seeking the lofty, stern harmonies of Akhmatova or risking comparison with the wilder linguistic experimentation of Tsvetaeva. Not for nothing did the poet Yunna Morits once see them as Scylla and Charybdis. For her, the Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova traditions had to be circumnavigated. Happily, the women poets included here have avoided one risk, repeating the biographical fates of these two poets, which included exile and later suicide for Tsvetaeva and the doom of seeing loved ones imprisoned for both Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova. Later poets were blessed by the kinder turn of Russian history. No one has had an exile as difficult as Tsvetaeva’s years abroad, and younger poets live more easily in Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, or New York, even if their financial circumstances can be uncertain. Life outside Russia is no longer a form of exile: poets are finally free to visit Russia (this was not true before the late 1980s, which shapes the creative biography of those who left earlier, like Irina Ratushinskaya and Natalya Gorbanevskaya). Today Russian poets living abroad can have intensive, ongoing contact with poetic traditions in Russia itself. They see fellow poets and can travel to Russia if they wish, and the Internet and e-mail have made it easy to remain informed even at a great distance. We in the West have luckily heard some of them read, both those who emigrated and those visiting from Russia; poetry festivals or book fairs in New York, London, Frankfurt, and many smaller cities as well as tours by individual poets have brought their voices very much to life for American and European audiences.