For a list of poems published elsewhere, please visit my dedicated poetry page!
What can I say about this one? It’s a shorter prose poem, one published toward the end of this book and written later than most of the others, in November 1879. I chose this one to translate next because it was quick, and the language was fairly accessible…but the content was rather deep and complex, … Read more
Y’all, I know it’s been a while since my last translation. But I’m easing back into it (and back into writing in general, I suppose) after a busyness- and pandemic-induced hiatus by beginning with some prose poems! For years I’ve had a dual-language copy of Ivan Turgenev’s prose poems — in the original Russian with … Read more
When I asked a professor of Russian at my university for suggestions on lesser-known and less frequently translated Russian poets, she suggested Silver Age poet Maria Petrovykh. Petrovykh was friends with such luminaries as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, and although they appreciated her work, she didn’t publish much or get a whole lot of … Read more
This poem began as a response to Mary Oliver’s “I Have Decided” (found in A Thousand Mornings) and quickly flew off in its own direction, until during my revisions I had to cut the response part of it entirely. The original remains scribbled in my notebook, which I’m glad I had with me at the … Read more
Fall seems to be the time of speeding up — but also of slowing down. The academic year begins; schools and families launch into a flurry of activity; summer sleepiness rouses into the frenzy of harvest and winterization (and I don’t just mean the fields and tractors). On the other hand, something in the soul … Read more