“The girl dreams of her lover”
Konstantin Vanshenkin
1925- Russian
translated by Daniel Weissbort

The girl dreams of her lover at night,
And he of her.
He dreams of her full lips,
Her long eyelashes.

The elderly poet dreams
Of splendid lines.
Never did life call forth from him
Poems so fine.

Of sums and calculations the schoolboy dreams,
Of inkwells.
The happy woman dreams her man’s
Unfaithful.

And all these folk have different,
Incongruous dreams.

While, like children, pilots dream
Simply of flying.

“It seems to me I’m resurrected”
Leonid Martynov
1905-1980 Russian
translated by J.R. Rowland

It seems to me I’m resurrected.
I lived. My name was Hercules.
Then, I weighed at least a ton.
Roots and all I tore up trees,
Stretched my hand and touched the skies.
When I sat down I broke the chairs.
I died. And now I’m resurrected:
Normal height and normal size
Like other people. Kind and gay,
When I sit down I don’t break chairs.
But all the same, I’m Hercules.

“How terrible it is”
anonymous
Russian
translated by Bradley Jordan

How terrible it is to trust no one,
to have neither joys, nor friends,
and to never open when someone knocks
at the fettered doors of the soul.

But it’s worse to be the one who knocks,
calling another from inside yourself
to open the door, to see, to take fright,
then quickly to lock up again.

“Encounter”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
1933- Russian

We were sitting about taking coffee
in the aerodrome cafe in Copenhagen
where everything was brilliance and comfort
and stylish to the point of tedium.
The old man suddenly appeared
or rather happened like an event of nature,
in an ordinary greenish anorak
his face scarred by the salt and burning wind,
ploughing a furrow through the crowded room
and walking like a sailor from the wheel.
His beard was like the white foam of the sea
brimming and glistening around his face.
His gruffness and his winner's certainty
sent up a wave around him as he walked
through the old fashions aping modern fashions
and modern fashions aping old fashions.
He in his open collar and rough shirt
stepping aside from vermouth and pernod
stood at the bar demanding Russian vodka
and waving away soda with a 'No'.
He with the scars marking his tanned forearms
his filthy trousers and his noisy shoes
had better style than anyone in the crowd.
The solid ground seemed to quiver under
the heavy authority of that tread.
Somebody smiled across: 'Look at that!
you'd think that was Hemingway,' he said.
Expressed in details of his short gestures
and heavy motions of his fisherman's walk.
He was a statue sketched in a rough rock,
one treading down bullets and centuries,
one walking like a man hunched in a trench,
pushing aside people and furniture.
It was the very image of Hemingway.
(Later I heard that it was Hemingway.)

“He Loved...”
Anna Akhmatova
1889-1966 Russian
translated by Judith Hemschemeyer

He loved three things in life:
Evensong, white peacocks
And old maps of America.

He hated it when children cried,
He hated tea with raspberry jam
And women’s hysterics.

...And I was his wife.

“Waiting”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
1933- Russian

My love will come
will fling open her arms and fold me in them,
will understand my fears, observe my changes.
In from the pouring dark, from the pitch night
without stopping to bang the taxi door
she'll run upstairs through the decaying porch
burning with love and love's happiness,
she'll run dripping upstairs, she won't knock,
will take my head in her hands,
and when she drops her overcoat on a chair,
it will slide to the floor in a blue heap.