Whether I Turn To The Shooting Star Or The Tear

Whether I turn to the shooting star or the tear,

whether I wipe the sky or my face...

Farewell to our youth, our bottomless youth —

let its monument be of salt.

A worthless knowledge about the properties of an angle,

about the strength of the rear and the shore.

Our vision has been burned by a needle of ice.

Let the monument be of snow.

Our hearing has been cut, our speech has been sliced,

and the executions have multiplied, in order to nurture

hope and faith in the sword of fire.

Let the monument be of ashes.

Regina Derieva (1949) has published twenty books of poetry, essays, and prose. Her most recent book is Sobranie Dorog: selected poems and essays in two volumes. Derieva's book of poems, Alien Matter, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. Her works have been translated into English, Swedish, French, and Italian. A compact disc with her readings in Russian of selected poems was issued in 1999. Derieva's work has appeared in the Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry East, Cross Currents, Ars Interpres, Salt, Notre Dame Review, as well as in many Russian magazines. She has translated poetry by Thomas Merton and contemporary American, Australian and British poets. Regina currently lives in Sweden.

Ilya Bernstein lives in New York City. He is the author of one book of poems, Attention and Man (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003). His translations of Daniil Kharms have appeared in Ars-Interpres, and his writings on art history have been published in the magazine RES. He is currently working on a one-act play, An Hour and Fifteen Minutes.

Richard McKane started writing and translating poetry in 1967, while studying Russian at Oxford University. His first book (Penguin and OUP, 1969) was Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova. A vastly expanded edition was published by Bloodaxe Books in 1989. He has also published (co-translated with Elizabeth McKane) The Moscow Notebooks and Voronezh Notebooks (Bloodaxe, reissuing 2003) and The Pillar of Fire, Selected Poems of Nikolay Gumilyov (Commentary by Michael Basker; Anvil Press, 1999). He edited and was main translator of the anthology Ten Russian Poets: Surviving the Twentieth Century (Anvil Press 2003).