What a sweet little day, what a day!
All day long such rubbish.
In my soul and at the market and in the church
And in romantic verses,
In the drabbest hut, in a palace…
And no period at the end…
What a sweet little day, what a day!
Foggy day. And a shadow of the abyss
In my soul, at the market, in church,
And in dramatic poetry.
And if the sun comes up,
And leads death by the hand,
Then it’ll be the same –
It’s both cramped and dark in a coffin.
by Юрий Павлович Одарченко
(Yury Pavlovich Odarchenko)
translated by Nina Kossman
Денёчек, денёчек, вот так день!…
Денёчек, денёчек, вот так день!
Весь день такая дребедень:
В душе, на ярмарке, в церквах
И в романтических стихах,
В последней хате, во дворце…
И точки нету на конце…
Денёчек, денёчек, вот так день!
Туманный день. И бездны тень
В душе, на ярмарке, в церквах
И в драматических стихах.
А если солнышко взойдет
И смерть под ручку приведет,
То это будет все равно —
В гробу и тесно и темно
Additional information: The Russian language Wikipedia entry about him. A PDF of a collection of some of his poetry and prose in Russian. This poem is on page 54 of the PDF.
Odarchenko was born in the Ukraine and little of his life is known until he emigrated. He lived in emigration in Paris, where he owned a boutique selling silk dresses that he hand-painted. He lived outside the Paris émigré literary world, though in the 1930s he became a close friend of Vladimir Smolensky and in 1947 published an almanac with the participation of Ivan Bunin, Gregory Ivanov, Aleksei Remizov, Boris Zaitsev, and others. His poetry began to appear seperately in journals in 1948 and he managed to publish a single slim volume of collected verse, Deniok (Little Day), in 1949.
His underappreciated poetry was highly professional, reaching the level of Ivanov, one of the finest poets of emigration. Odarchenko and Ivanov share the capacity to write not by lines but by stanzas; in their poetry a quatrain seems not made of collected parts but cast as a single piece. Odarchenko’s verse can be at once bother solidly dense and light-bodied. He chose to take his own life.
Biographical information about Odarchenko, p.453, ‘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).
Rambling At The Bridge Head 