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The Visual Poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya

August 1, 2024 Poetry, Translation

By ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA
Translated from the Russian by ANDREW WACHTEL

Poems appear below in English and the original Russian.

Translator’s note

Anzhelina Polonskaya frequently writes poems inspired by visual artists. These are not, however, ekphrastic renderings of an image in words, but rather a snapshot of the emotions that a given painter’s work evokes. In the poem “After Breughel,” published here, we need to ask, what precisely makes the text Breughelesque? To me, it is the anthropomorphized image of snow, with its dead white eyes in the first stanza, contrasted with the scarlet color (of blood, hell, the burning bush). This unsettling juxtaposition creates the Breughelesque landscape which has destroyed the artist, as in the painting Dulle Griet from 1563. But Polonskaya provides her picture without the scaffolding of a narrative, and, as far as the translator’s job goes, I needed to avoid explaining the poem, rather allowing the translation to be as allusive and mysterious as the original.

—Andrew Wachtel

After Breughel

Snow, listen up. Your eyes are dead.
We know full well we’re being led
like hostages of universal blindness.
Who are we, then? Unknown and homeless.

November 2021 Poetry Feature

November 26, 2021 Poetry, Translation

New poems by our contributors.

Table of Contents:

POLINA BARSKOVA | Joy (translated by Valzhyna Mort, appears in both Russian and English)

ALDO AMPARÁN | Parable of the Haunted Cloak

TOM SLEIGH | A Dictator Walks into a Bar

MICHAEL DUMANIS | Ordeal

Review: Three Apples Fell From the Sky

January 26, 2021 Reviews

BY NARINE ABGARYAN

(Translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden)

reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

A brave writer begins her novel with the deathbed. Instead of hooking a reader the way the proverbial gun on the wall might, opening with a death scene threatens her with the inevitable backstory.

Luckily, Narine Abgaryan is both a brave and an experienced writer. Three Apples Fell from the Sky is her fifth full-length novel, which won Russia’s prestigious Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award in 2016. Maine-based Lisa C. Hayden translated this novel for Oneworld, and after a COVID19-based delay, the book was released in the UK in August 2020. The novel opens with Anatolia Sevoyants, the protagonist, as she lies down “to breathe her last.” Soon, though, we learn that while Anatolia fully intends to die, life is far from finished with her.

August 2020 Poetry Feature #2: Philip Nikolayev translates Alexander Pushkin

August 28, 2020 Poetry, Translation

Two poems by Alexander Pushkin, translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

Table of Contents:

Night
The Burned Letter

Philip Nikolayev is editor of Fulcrum. His poetry collections include Monkey Time (Verse / Wave Books) and Dusk Raga (Salt).

Alexander Pushkin (1799-83) is widely regarded as the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.

Night

It’s for you that my soft and affectionate voice
Disturbs at this late hour a silent night’s repose.
Where by my bed a melancholy candle glows,
My verse rushes along, burbles and overflows
In brooks of love, filled with you, and at last I see
Your eyes, out of the dark shining, smiling at me,
And finally my ear makes out the cherished words:
My gentle, tender friend… I love you… I am yours!

Anzhelina Polonskaya: Russian Poetry in Translation

August 13, 2020 Poetry, Translation, Uncategorized

Poems by ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA
Translated from the Russian by ANDREW WACHTEL

Translator’s note:

Recreating the poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya in English is tricky because her favorite poetic trope is ellipsis, which is easier to achieve in Russian. Russian, as an inflected language (like Latin), can place words in pretty much any order within a sentence, and the poet can use case endings to indicate the relationship of nouns to each other and adjectives to nouns. When something is left out of a sentence, the empty space can be filled in by the reader. Thus, a Russian poem, at least grammatically speaking, looks like a Lego construction, from which many blocks can be removed without destroying the structure. By contrast, English translations in our (almost) non-inflected language are more like houses of cards – and when you try to remove pieces of the grammatical structure the whole thing tends to fall down.

Kazakhstani Poet Aigerim Tazhi in Translation

May 14, 2020 Poetry, Translation

Poems by AIGERIM TAZHI

Translated from the Russian by J. KATES

Translator’s Note

For the most part, the Russian poets I have translated—however different in style and school—have been of my own generation and share many of my persuasions. How much more distant from me is Central Asia? Russian serves as a shaky bridge I cross with trepidation. But for the Kazakhstani poet Aigerim Tazhi, born in 1981 in Aktobe—formerly Aktyubinsk—Russian is solid ground underfoot. “I live in Kazakhstan,” she has said, “but I was born in the Soviet Union… I did not choose the Russian language, did not evaluate it… It’s just the language that I’ve spoken since childhood.”¹

Immigrant Ditty

June 11, 2019 Poetry, Translation

By VLADIMIR GANDELSMAN

Translated from Russian by OLGA LIVSHIN and ANDREW JANCO

Poem appears in both Russian and English.

Translators’ Note:

Born in 1948, Vladimir Gandelsman is very much the literary child of the poets of the Russian Silver Age. He draws on their dramatic, spiritually intense version of modernism, the acme, or the highest point of expression, whether meditating on fleeting moments or on major historical events. His literary parents include Pasternak and Mandelstam. Proust and Wilde are his relatives: he draws on and develops their respective fascinations with the sensuous quality of everyday life. Gandelsman’s exquisite diction and surprising collages of words help us remember our own moments of heightened feeling.

After the War, in the West

October 29, 2018 Issue 16, Issue 16 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By POLINA BARSKOVA

Translated by VALZHYNA MORT

Old Lady Gippius
of a tumorous Adam’s apple
from a damned balcony
watches
an officer fool with a puppy.

I Went Sick as a Child

April 1, 2015 Issue 09, Issue 09 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By ARSENY TARKOVSKY

Translated by VALZHYNA MORT

I went sick as a child

with hunger and fear. I’d rip the crust
of my lips—and lick my lips; I recall
the fresh and salty taste.
And I’m walking, I’m walking, walking,
I sit on the steps by the door, I bask,
I walk delirious, as if a rat catcher led me
by my nose into the river, I sit and bask
on the steps; I shiver this way and that.

from SANKYA

April 1, 2014 Fiction, Issue 07, Issue 07 Fiction, Translation

By ZAKHAR PRILEPIN

That winter they hired a small bus—Mother had suggested that Father should be buried in the village. Where he was born.

Sasha hadn’t argued.

“What do you think, son?” asked Mother in a completely unfamiliar tone. Until then, there had always been a man’s voice that had the final word in the house. Now, that voice was dead.

All posts tagged: Russian

The Visual Poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya

November 2021 Poetry Feature

Review: Three Apples Fell From the Sky

August 2020 Poetry Feature #2: Philip Nikolayev translates Alexander Pushkin

Anzhelina Polonskaya: Russian Poetry in Translation

Kazakhstani Poet Aigerim Tazhi in Translation

Immigrant Ditty

After the War, in the West

I Went Sick as a Child

from SANKYA

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