Отплывающие корабли (Ships That Sail Forth…) by Yuri Terapiano

Ships that sail forth,
trains that speed away,
remaining in the distance,
forever forsaken!

A white kerchief means farewell,
as does a hand’s frozen wave,
wheels creak, a final whistle –
and even now the shores are far away.

The shores can no longer be seen;
as you turn from them I dare you,
to love (if you can) your enemies,
to forget (if you can) your friends.

by Юрий Константинович Терапиано
(Yury Konstantinovich Terapiano)
translated by Bradley Jordan

Отплывающие корабли

Отплывающие корабли,
Уносящиеся поезда,
Остающиеся вдали,
Покидаемые навсегда!
Знак прощанья – белый платок,
Замирающий взмах руки,
Шум колёс, последний свисток –
Берега уже далеки.
Не видать совсем берегов;
Отрываясь от них, посмей
Полюбить – если можешь – врагов,
Позабыть – если можешь – друзей.

Additional information: Ю́рий Константи́нович Терапиа́но (Yury Konstantinovich Terapiano) (21 [o.s. 9] October 1892 – 3 July 1980) was a Russian poet, writer, translator, literary critic and a prominent figure in White émigré cultural life.

Terapiano‘s poetry shows the influence of the Acmeist school, though formally he wasn’t a member of the circle. He aspired toward “simplicity in his artistic method, self-awareness, moderation and purity of expression, and an intense search for God,” according to critic Konstantin Mochulsky. Terapiano‘s subjects included Russia, The Crimea, the Russian Civil War, his own war experiences, daily émigré life in Paris, and his exploration of religious issues and questions.

In 1911 Terapiano graduated from the classical gymnasium of his native Kerch, the ancient city on the Black Sea coast that guards the entrance to the Sea of Azov. He studied law at the University of Kiev, where he graduated in 1916. In 1919 he joined the Volunteer Army of the Whites. After the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War he emigrated to Paris; there he became the first chairman of the Union of Young Poets and Writers.

Terapiano studied Egyptology, ancient history, and theosophy and became widely known as a deeply religious poet, though he was even more notable as a critic whose work was published in Germany, Paris, and New York. His first poetry collection, Luchshii zvuk (The Best Sound), came out in 1926. His most serious accomplishments include Vstrechi (Meetings) (1953), a book of recollections, and Muza diaspory (Muse of the Disporia) (1960), an anthology of emigration.

Biographical information about Terapiano, p.238, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

Надвигается осень. Желтеют кусты… (Autumn Nears…) by Aleksey Eisner

Autumn nears. The branches yellow.
And again the heart is ripped to shreds…
A human’s life begins with sorrow, while you
cling to a butterfly-brief happiness.

A human’s life begins with sorrow. Just look:
the hothouse roses in him choke to death.
While from some distant path awaiting sunrise
the steamboats wail of parting in the night.

A human’s life begins… No, wait a second,
There are no words to help us here at all.
Outside the window poured a heavy rain.
You’re ready for the rain, as a bird of flight.

In the woods our footprints melt,
as pallid passions melt into the past –
Those meager storms in a glass of water…
And again the heart is ripped to shreds.

A human’s life begins… Briefly. From the shoulder.
Goodbye. Enough. An enormous dot…
Sky, wind, and sea. And the seagulls cry.
And from the stern a handkerchief is waved.

Sail away. Only circles of black smoke.
The distance already lasts one hundred years.
Take care of that many-coloured happiness of yours –
one day you’ll be a human too, you know.

The sky-blue world will ring, then fall to pieces,
you snow-white throat will moan like a dove,
and the polar night will swim above you,
and, Titanic-like, a pillow will drown in tears.

But already dipping in the arctic ice,
those fervent hands are growing cold forever.
And the wooden steamboat then casts off
and sails, rocking, for the Separation Pole.

The wet kerchief writhes and the trace grows foamy,
as on the day… But I see you’ve forgotten it all.
In thousands of versts, and for thousands of years,
the censer clangs, hopeless and doomed.

Well that’s that. Only dark, gloomy rumors of paradise…
The Mediterranean makes an indifferent noise.
It’s growing dark. All right, then. Sail and die:
A human’s life begins with sorrow.

by Алексей Владимирович Эйснер
(Aleksey Vladimirovich Eisner)
translated by Bradley Jordan and Katya Zubritskaya
(1932)

Надвигается осень. Желтеют кусты…

Надвигается осень. Желтеют кусты.
И опять разрывается сердце на части.
Человек начинается с горя. А ты
Простодушно хранишь мотыльковое счастье.

Человек начинается с горя. Смотри,
Задыхаются в нем парниковые розы.
А с далеких путей в ожиданьи зари
О разлуке ревут по ночам паровозы.

Человек начинается… Нет. Подожди.
Никакие слова ничему не помогут.
За окном тяжело зашумели дожди.
Ты, как птица к полету, готова в дорогу.

А в лесу расплываются наши следы,
Расплываются в памяти бледные страсти –
Эти бедные бури в стакане воды.
И опять разрывается сердце на части.

Человек начинается… Кратко. С плеча.
До свиданья. Довольно. Огромная точка.
Небо, ветер и море. И чайки кричат.
И с кормы кто-то жалобно машет платочком.

Уплывай. Только черного дыма круги.
Расстоянье уже измеряется веком.
Разноцветное счастье свое береги, –
Ведь когда-нибудь станешь и ты человеком.

Зазвенит и рассыплется мир голубой,
Белоснежное горло как голубь застонет,
И полярная ночь проплывет над тобой,
И подушка в слезах как Титаник потонет…

Но, уже погружаясь в Арктический лед,
Навсегда холодеют горячие руки.
И дубовый отчаливает пароход
И, качаясь, уходит на полюс разлуки.

Вьется мокрый платочек, и пенится след,
Как тогда… Но я вижу, ты всё позабыла.
Через тысячи верст и на тысячи лет
Безнадежно и жалко бряцает кадило.

Вот и всё. Только темные слухи про рай…
Равнодушно шумит Средиземное море.
Потемнело. Ну что ж. Уплывай. Умирай.
Человек начинается с горя.

Additional information: Alexey Vladimirovich Eisner (Алексе́й Влади́мирович Э́йснер), (5 October 1905, St. Petersburg – 30 November 1984, Moscow), was a Soviet poet, translator and writer.

After the October Revolution of 1917, his stepfather brought the young Eisner to the Princes’ Islands. Thus began a life in exile. Eisner graduated from the Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich Russian Cadets Corps in Sarajevo. He remained in Europe where he made a living washing windows and working at construction sites. He started writing poetry and met with many famous Russian émigrés such as Georgy Adamovich, Marina Tsvetaeva and her husband Sergei Efron.

At the end of the Spanish Civil War which he took part in, he reportedly ran into Ernest Hemingway who wrote him a blank cheque that Hemingway ensured him he could draw upon should he choose to visit Hemingway in the United States. Eisner returned to the Soviet Union in January 1940 without cashing the cheque. Four months later, his was searched by the secret police, who found the blank cheque signed by Ernest Hemingway. He was arrested and sentenced under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the USSR to 8 years of hard labour in the Vorkuta camp. After completion of this period he was sent for “perpetual exile” to the Karaganda region in Kazakhstan. In 1956 he was rehabilitated and was permitted to return to Moscow where he was active as a translator and journalist. He wrote several books and published memoirs on General Lukács, Haji Mamsurov (who fought in Spain under the name of Colonel Xanthi), Ilya Ehrenburg and Ernest Hemingway.

His poem “Looming Autumn, Yellow Bushes…” was published in 1932 and was very popular in literary émigré circles. The line “Man begins with grief…” from this poem is often cited.

Eisner lived most of his life in emigration in Prague. He was called “the most talented of the Prague writers” by Yury Ivask in his anthology of two waves of emigration. Eisner was a member of the Prague group Skit poetov (Monastery of Poets), led by A. L. Bem, which made a cult of Boris Pasternak and pursued metaphorical language, in contrast to the Parisian writers, who followed Vladislav Khodasevich and Georgy Adamovich and defended subtlety and precision.

Biographical information about Eisner, p.538-539, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

Прогнали иродов-царей… (We Banished the Tyrant-Tsars…) by Nikolai Tryapkin

We banished the tyrant tsars,
the tsarist cannibals were smashed,
and afterward – faster! To the wall!
We ourselves were dragged.

And afterwards – our fine young reapers
came out swinging with such zeal,
that all those murder-loving tsars
turned over in their graves.

by Николай Иванович Тряпкин
(Nikoai Ivanovich Tryapkin)
(1981)
translated by Bradley Jordan

Прогнали иродов-царей

Прогнали иродов-царей,
Разбили царских людоедов,
А после — к стенке, поскорей
Тянули собственных полпредов.
А после — хлопцы-косари
С таким усердьем размахнулись,
Что все кровавые цари
В своих гробах перевернулись.

Additional information: There is little about Tryapkin in English except a Russian site with a few details. Much of his poetry involved rural imagery. Tryapkin was born 19 December 1919 and died on 20 February 1999. He was buried at the Rakitki cemetery in the Moscow region.

The original version’s first line refers to Herod (Ирод) but the translation subtitutes this with the more secular ‘tyrant’.

Tryapkin was born into a peasant family; his father was a joiner. In 1930 his family moved into the trading village Lotoshino near Moscow. Though his father’s income was slight and times were difficult, something about country life enchanted the future poet forever. From 1939 to 1941 he studied in Moscow at the Historical Archive Institute (from 1956 to 1958 he also studied at the Higher Literary Courses). Rejected by the army for health reasons during World War II, he was evacuated to a tiny village in the far north near Solvychegodsky, at first to plow and then to work as an accountant on a collective farm. Here Tryapkin’s creative life began; his first poems were published in 1945.

At first it seemed that he was no more than a talented balalaika player whose fingers skillfully played the strings at a time when the Russian peasant was writhing under the lash of a system directed against both the land and the people who loved the land. But when the era of glasnost began and the censor was no longer able to defend the system from the bitter truths about itself, Tryapkin suddenly appeared with a magic tablecloth of Russian folklore that had been hidden until the time was right. He unfolded it and wrapped in its white fabric was not the traditional abundance of food, but the bones of so many nameless people, the testimony of their suffering.

Biographical information about Tryapkin, p.678, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text).

Farewell, Captain… by Vladimir Korvin-Piotrovsky

Farewell, Captain. In bygone days,
Your features suddenly transformed,
You’d whirl away on that mad steed.
Wherever the four winds blew.
You’ll not return. Near a kiosk now,
Chewing on tobacco whiskers,
In a raincoat soiled to the shine,
You silently check your watch.
But time, violating its term,
Runs on like a mountain stream,
And it seems that a giant hand
Blends the clouds with water.
And it seems a crazed horse
Or Pegasus, caught in raging rapids,
Breaking its carriage into kindling,
Looks on, half-strangled by its trace,
Looks on mockingly at us.

By Владимир Львович Корвин-Пиотровский
(Vladimir Lvovich Korvin-Piotrovsky)
(1891-1966)
translated by Bradley Jordan

Additional information: Vladimir Lvovich Korvin-Piotrovskii (Владимир Львович Корвин-Пиотровский) was born 15 May 1891 in Kiev and died on April 2 1966. His place of birth is sometimes identified as Bila Tserkva, Ukraine, where he spent much of his childhood. During World War I, he served as an artillery officer in the White Army. After being taken prisoner and barely escaping execution, he crossed through Poland and made his way to Berlin around 1920.

In Berlin, he became active in the Russian emigre literary community. There he met Yuri Ofrosimov and Vladimir Nabokov (during the period he used the pen name Vladimir Sirin). He also became involved with the Berlin Poets’ Club, a group of Russian emigre poets founded by Mikhail Gorlin. In addition to Ofrosimov, Korvin-Piotrovskii and Sirin, members included Raisa Blokh, Nina Korvin-Piotrovskaia (née Kaplun), Vera Nabokov, and Sofia Pregel.

Vladimir and his wife left Germany before World War II began. Nina Korvin-Piotrovskaia worked at the French embassy in Berlin, and they were able to travel to Paris with embassy staff. During World War II, Korvin-Piotrovskii was active in the French Resistance movement. He was arrested and imprisoned for approximately eight months in 1944. His fellow prisoners included the French writer André Frossard, whose memoir La maison des otages documents this time period. Vladimir and Nina Korvin-Piotrovskii were close friends with Italo and Leila Griselli and visited them many times in Italy. Italo Griselli, a sculptor, made busts of both Vladimir and Nina Korvin-Piotrovskii.

In 1961 the family moved to Los Angeles, California, where Vladimir Korvin-Piotrovskii died on April 2, 1966 and Nina Korvin-Piotrovskaia died in 1975.

Korvin-Piotrovsky was descended from ancient Russian aristocracy and Hungarian kings. In the Civil War he served as an artillery officer in the White Army. As an émigré in Berlin, he worked as a chauffer while heading the poetry department for the journal Spolokhi (Nothern Lights). He published under the name P.V. In 1939 he moved to Paris, where he took part in the Resistance, and spent almost a year imprisoned by the Gestapo. His poems and essays from prison were published in the book Vozdushnyi zmei (Aerial Serpents) under his real name. A two-volume collection of his work, Pozdnii gost’ (Late Guest), was published in Washington in 1969.
While his early lyrics were often unrhymed, Korvin-Piotrovsky’s later verse returned to classical forms of rhymed iambic tetrameter. The content often turned from contemporary events to bygone centuries, to pictures of night, fog, autumn, and winter, continuing a tradition of Russian romanticism. He was both a poet and a playwright who left a heterogeneous legacy, a unique poetic testimony to Russia’s fate and his own.

Biographical information about Korvin-Piotrovsky p.224, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc.

I was unable to source the Russian version of the poem unfortunately. If anyone knows where to find it online please leave a comment or link.

Cирена (Siren) by Anna Prismanova

In that land we tried to speak
of thirst, unquenchable thirst,
of a mournful cry that pierced us in the dark
and was halted in mid-flight.

But in the silence there reaches out for us
a steamboat’s cry, the crying of its soul,
it pulls us in, inviting and in parting,
as it sails into the age-old twilight.

This high-flown, antediluvian howl,
that the head and insides both absorb,
that even soaks into the legs –
is the union of peace and anxiety.

The steamboat sails off into the darkness and the night.
But it’s as if the siren’s wail died long ago.
As in the time of crusades when knights
were blessed on their way by ringing church bells.

And we, my dear, will leave like this, exactly,
having spent our last small ounce of arrogance,
we’ll leave – moving restlessly into the night,
we’ll have taken little and won’t have weighed the consequences.

The siren awaits us at the end of the earth,
and I know already the torment that she bears:
she wants us all to follow in her footsteps,
and wishes too we’d leave her all alone.

And so the steamboat howls, and howls the darkness.
I’ve not the strength to counteract these howls.
It’s possible that I myself am howling
inside the funnel of just a boat as this.

by Анна Семёновна Присманова (Anna Semyonovna Prismanova)
a.k.a. Анна Симоновна Присман (Anna Simonovna Prisman)
(Date unknown – before 1953)
translated by Bradley Jordan
from the poetry collection Трубы (Trumpets/Tubes/Pipes)

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Additional information: There is a dedication in the Russian version, ‘В. Коpвин-Пиотpовcкому‘, omitted from the translation. This refers to Vladimir Lvovich Korvin-Piotrovsky (1891 -1966) who was a Russian poet, novelist and playwright.

I am unsure of the exact date of the poem but a Russian website listing the poetry collection it is from has an end note stating “The poem was included in the anthology In the West: An Anthology of Russian Foreign Poetry. Comp. Y.P.Ivask. New York. Ed. Chekhov. 1953. p. 226.” which refers to the book published in 1953, under the title Na zapade; antologiia russkoi zarubezhnoi poezii (In the West; an anthology of the Russian émigré poetry).

Prismanova is considered comparable to her contemporary, the American poet, Louise Bogan and challenged traditional ideas of femininity in her poetry.

Prismanova’s origins and early life are obscure. She appears in emigration in Paris in the mid-1920s, and her first published collection, Ten’ itelo (Shadow and Body) (1937), contains poems beginning in 1929. She and her poet husband, Aleksandr Ginger, remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Responding to the wave of patriotic feeling and longing for Russia that appeared among emigres after the war, they both accepted Soviet passports, though they continued to live in Paris.

Prismanova was best known in the emigre world for intimate lyrics that manifest her spiritual searching for real truth in herself, in language, and in literary form. Prismanova’s poem “Vera” (1960), about the heroic, revolutionary populist Vera Figner (1852-1942), amazed readers by its portrait of a figure so unlike the poet and her intimate lyrical themes. Overshadowed by the more vocal figures of emigration, she was nevertheless a highly intelligent, subtle, and sensitive poet.

Biographical information about Prismanova, p.342-343, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc.

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Cирена

В. Коpвин-Пиотpовcкому
Cтаpалиcь мы cказать на cей земле
о жажде и ее неутоленьи,
о кpике cкоpби, pвущем наc во мгле
и оcтановленном в cвоем cтpемленьи.
Но нам навcтpечу тянетcя в тиши
влекущий наc, пpизывный и пpощальный,
кpик паpоxода, кpик его души,
уже плывущей в cумpак изначальный.
Вбираемый нутpом и головой,
пpоcачивающийcя даже в ноги,
cей выcпpенний и допотопный вой
cлияние покоя и тpевоги.
Во мглу и в ночь уxодит паpоxод.
Но cтон cиpены как бы замеp в оном.
Так pыцаpи в кpеcтовый шли поxод,
напутcтвуемые цеpковным звоном.
И мы, душа моя, вот так, точь-в-точь,
утpатив до конца оcтаток cпеcи,
уйдем – вдвигаяcь неотcтупно в ночь,
немного взяв и ничего не взвеcив.
Cиpена ждет наc на конце земли,
и знаю я – томленье в ней какое:
ей xочетcя и чтоб за нею шли,
и чтоб ее оcтавили в покое…
Так воет паpоxод, и воет тьма.
Пpотиводейcтвовать такому вою
не в cилаx я. Я, может быть, cама
в тpубе такого паpоxода вою.