Since it’s still spooky season (happy Halloween!), here’s another of the creepier prose poems in Turgenev’s Senilia collection! Meet “The End of the World,” which is as dark as it sounds — or rather darker, since “the end of the world” is a phrase that has come to be used with comic melodrama. I read … Read more
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
I promised Facebook I would, and so it is done! Presenting a Russian-to-English translation of this brief but beautiful poem by famed Silver Age poet Marina Tsvetaeva: You can listen to a nice reading of it here. I loved this poem as soon as I saw the word рябина (ryabina) — rowan. Besides the Siberian birch, which … Read more