The Big Green Tent

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Unless otherwise indicated, all excerpts of poems quoted in this edition are translated by me. In order of appearance, the poems are:

“Outside it was cold…”: Mikhail Kuzmin.

“Gogol”: Pyotr Vyazemsky.

“To an army wife, in Sardis”: Sappho, trans. Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958).

“The Sparrow. From Catullus”: Francis Fawkes (1761).

Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, trans. Waclaw Lednicki (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955).

“Thus it begins. At two or so they rush…”: Boris Pasternak.

“Some are of stone, some are of clay…”: Marina Tsvetaeva.

“The Stormy Petrel”: Maxim Gorky.

“Hamlet”: Pasternak.

“When in the country, musing, I wander…”: Alexander Pushkin.

“Flux”: Vladimir Narbut.

“Let me not go mad—”: Alexander Pushkin.

“Deaf-mute Demons”: Maximilian Voloshin.

Deaf-mute Demons

by Maximilian Voloshin

Who is blind, but my servant? or deaf, as my messenger whom I sent? who is blind as he who is perfect, and blind as the Lord’s servant?

—Isaiah 42.19

They walk the earth

Blind and deaf and dumb

And draw fiery signs

In the spreading gloom.

Illuminating the abyss,

They see nothing.

They create, not knowing

Their own predestination.

Through the murky underworld

They beam a prophetic ray …

Their fates are the face of God

Casting light amid the storm clouds.

29 December 1917

“Childhood”: Boris Pasternak.

“Letter to General Z.”: Joseph Brodsky (1968).

“Memory is an armless equestrian statue…”: Eduard Limonov.

“It will not perish in our wake—” from “Three Poems for Joseph Brodsky”: Natalia Gorbanevskaya.

“In the madhouse…” from “To Yuri Galanskov”: Natalia Gorbanevskaya.

“Brush the bliss of half-sleep from your cheek…” from “To Dima Borisov”: Natalia Gorbaevskaya.

“Koktebel”: Maxim Voloshin.

“The Hurricane”: Eshref Shemi-Zade.

Hamlet: William Shakespeare.

“The Old House”: Innokenty Annensky.

“Winter’s Eve”: Boris Pasternak.

“When will the pall on my / Ailing heart disperse?”: Evgeny Baratynsky.

“August”: Joseph Brodsky.

“Bagatelle (To Elizaveta Lionskaya)”: Joseph Brodsky.

“The secret is…” from Glory: Vladimir Nabokov (Wellesley, 1942).