Mio Grand (Russia)
Translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya (USA)
A fear-numbing lozenge,
A fear-numbing lozenge,
God, give it to people
And to me –its candy shard
Cutting my tongue.
So let be what will be.
A huge Wundermuffin
Flies over the furrows.
The ploughman is happy.
Loose hangs the old sackcloth
Of ashen-gray belfries,
No pressure on breathing
Or the Adam’s apple;
The masses unable
To unsee the ambush,
From skirmish to skirmish
Joined flush edge to edge.
The planet is so large,
It smells like vanilla,
And somewhere, a sackcloth
Dries in the wind, clapping,
Its sleeves and light lancing
Through the laundry line.
So we were as we were,
Enjoyers of summer,
Of fear-numbing candy.
Of humongous baskets
In which, perhaps, fishes
Lay blinking their eyelids,
In their fishful thinking making green blue,
Perhaps it was us who, perhaps, could be even
On disputed pebbles
Be putting out flames.
… my collar ripped open,
a little bell almost,
my city ripped open –
a small puppy lost;
and this is what hurts most –
when I in silence
roll out over Moscow
my weak naked verse…
Конфету от страха…
Конфету от страха,
Конфету от страха,
Дай, Господи, людям.
И мне — карамельно
Порезав язык.
Что будет, то будет.
Летит над земелькой
Огромная плюшка,
И пахарь доволен.
Свободна рубаха
Седых колоколен,
Дышать не мешает,
Не держит кадык.
Не могут низы
Не видеть ловушки,
Жить без заварушки
Почти что стык в стык.
Планета большая
И пахнет ванилью,
И хлопает где-то,
Просохнув, рубаха
Руками и светом
Верёвку пронзив.
И мы жили-были.
Любители лета.
Конфеток от страха.
Огромных корзин,
В которых то ль рыбы
Глазами моргали,
Зелёное вмиг выдавая за синь,
То ль сами, которые, вроде, могли бы
По спорной той гальке
Горелки гасить.
…мой вспоротый ворот
почти колокольчик,
мой вспоротый город —
пропавший щенок;
особенно больно
выкатывать молча
над первопрестольной
свой голенький слог…
Translator’s note. Mio Grand’s original is searingly clear emotionally but, in several places, opaque notionally – quintessentially poetic, one might say. As I regarded certain lines in bafflement, unsure what to make of them, I sent out my first translation draft to the Kopilka group with a question: “Do you think there are parts in the original which I misunderstood?”
One colleague, Maria B., helpfully pointed out that my first interpretation of «по спорной той гальке», which I’d rendered as “doubtful pebbles”, may have been inaccurate: for Maria, «спорная галька» was an evocation of the pebble beaches of the Crimea, and so I changed the translation to “contested pebbles” to reflect the politically and militarily contested ownership of the Crimea.
Maria also thought that «голенький слог» referred rather to poetry than to speech in general; I agreed with that take, and changed “naked speech” to “naked verse” in the final version. I introduced a few other – more mechanical – changes into the final draft based on the discussion with the Kopilka collective, but the two improvements described above, for me, illustrate how helpful it can be for a translator to invite other minds to read the original for a fuller, deeper understanding.
Mio Grand (pen name) is a poet, prose writer, performer and visual artist. She graduated from the Gorky Literature Institute. She performed her poems in many venues including the Tchaikovsky Moscow Philharmonic Hall, the Center for Slavic Literature and Culture. Her poems were published in journals and set to music. She authored a collection of stories for children with disabilities.
Anna Krushelnitskaya is a translator, writer, and language teacher. Her translations have appeared in Poems from the Front (Moscow, 2020); Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (Smokestack, 2022), and journals, including Plume, 5th Wave, and Circumference. She co-edited and co-translated Firefly in a Box (UPM, 2025) and Dislocation (Slavica, 2024), and translated Ilya Ehrenburg’s Babi Yar and Other Poems (Smokestack, 2024).
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