Literature in Translation

Literature in Translation |

“Beyond Time”

“Life descends, we can walk / The footstep illuminates / The immense fear of being oneself in time // Our two almond hands are steel gates // And, look, how all the love of forests was needed / To adopt the eyes of the invisible.”

Literature in Translation |

“Pagans Love Poetry”

“Pagans love poetry / they use it to enchant their gods and their kings, / to curse other gods and kings.”

Literature in Translation |

“B’s Grave,” “September 18, 1953” & “February 21, 1954”

“The past comes and walks by your side once more. / Don’t change your heart, don’t be charmed. / Don’t linger, take leave of the time …”

Literature in Translation |

“An Obituary for Roman”

“I called upon all residents of Omsk who follow me on social media to contact the fitness club where Roman was working and demand his firing for threatening women. My request went far and wide — tens of thousands of reposts, scores of news items in major media.”

Literature in Translation |

“The Train”

“The train has stopped in a sleepy, quiet time, / this is the time of memory, / of waiting. / Mother says we will come back soon / to this land where my navel was buried, / where the / morning cicada sings and where flowers / never die.”

Literature in Translation |

“I laughed in my kingdom and as king I laughed,” “no doubt a rain sleeps in the hand,” “a child shows his hands,” “life looks like you,” “but we / do nothing but follow” & “the world transforms at a rapid pace”

“but we / do nothing but follow / traces / we ourselves are / nothing but traces / of life / that is why we need so profoundly / to hold on to ourselves …”

Literature in Translation |

“Translators and Traitors” & “A Writer’s Decalogue”

“Do your best to say things in such a way that the reader will always feel that, deep down, he is as intelligent as, or even more intelligent than, you. From time to time, he will be more intelligent than you are in earnest; but in order to convey this to him, you will need to be more intelligent than he is.”

Literature in Translation |

from The Cremulator, a novel by Sasha Filipenko

“When his assistants carry out a sentence, I often have to collect pieces of skull after moving the bodies, which takes extra time. When you have to cremate fifteen-twenty people in a night, you don’t want to be distracted by things like that.”

Literature in Translation |

from Mammoth

“About an hour later, a woman strolled in wearing a mink coat, her hair wavy from sleeping in rollers. An old man in a beret clung to the crook of her arm. For whatever reason, I glanced at the barman, and he gave a calm nod.”

Literature in Translation |

from Dendrites

“Nine years ago Leto was still a toddler—how old was she then, two? three?—yes, she’d just turned three when the fires broke out and the whole city burned for three days and nights, for three days and nights stores and houses were looted, the smoke seemed to trap and incite unspoken fears …”