18/03/2024
NEW BOOK (Ukraine)
This is the first bilingual Russian-English book by Ukraine’s major poet Aleksandr Kabanov. Poems that predicted and now chronicle the Russian-Ukrainian war, filled with intimate confessions, epic verdicts, surreal fantasies, hard facts and exquisite metaphors, gain additional interpretative layers via the caring and daring input of twenty gifted translators.
Kabanov’s poems written in wartime Kyiv have become a symbol of Culture confronting Evil. The fact that these verses were originally written in Russian is crucial. Kabanov’s poetry is the best vindication of the great language of his father’s ill-fated homeland, once again taken over by a monstrous tyranny. The courage and vulnerability of these verses, their sorrow and wit, defy death and celebrate life in our turbulent times.
* * * *
Just before daybreak, when darkness starts to reveal
the age of foliage, snow, grass, sleeping people,
glass shattered bloody, wounds beginning to heal –
don’t cry, my dear, it’s impossible to defeat evil.
At the hour when no one’s left to crow three times,
for the rooster’s been roasted and ended his days as food,
silverware stolen, Mein Kampf published and advertised,
don’t cry, my dear, it’s impossible to defeat good.
Dead birds hugging their nests are falling from trees,
dolphins are drowning, it’s the last chance before doom,
given to save us, but god disallowed lend-lease –
our immortality, yours and mine, is an equilibrium.
Hunger, death, devastation, fear, the original sin –
there is no axe to hack them, they won’t die,
and only love chomps up slime and filth, sucks it in,
but only love is your smile, only love will win,
and now, my dear, is the time to cry, to cry.
Translated by Dmitri Manin
ELEMENTS FOR GOD-poems from different times: ДЕТАЛИ ДЛЯ БОГА-стихи разных лет
