This 1940 cycle of five poems is included in Poems and Long Poems (Stikhotvoreniya i poemy), published in 1979. The poem’s first appearance in the journal Leningrad (1946) was suppressed swiftly, and the publication led to the poem’s condemnation when… Read More ›
Instinct My body is a mystery. As long as the fragile lives you shall feel its power. I shall save the world. Therefore Eros’ blood runs in my lips and Eros’ gold in my tired locks. I need only to… Read More ›
First published in A Large Number (Wielka liczba) in 1976, Wisława Szymborska’s In Praise of Self-Deprecation has been translated by many poets and has even been given slightly different titles, including In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself. It is… Read More ›
I will not crush the world’s corolla of wonders I will not crush the world’s corolla of wonders and I will not kill with reason the mysteries I meet along my way in flowers, eyes, lips, and graves. The light… Read More ›
“I Am Goya” (“Я – Гойя!”), composed in 1957, first appeared in Andrei Voznesensky’s debut collection, Mozaika (Mosaics), which was published in Vladimir, USSR, in 1960, when the poet was 27 years old. It is reputedly “one of the poet’s… Read More ›
Nazim Hikmet’s five-book “epic novel in verse”—some 17,000 lines long—is a major work by Turkey’s most accomplished 20th-century poet. Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları made a significant contribution to the traditions of the long poem and to the genre of verse committed… Read More ›
Published first in 1967 in Jacques Dupin’s poetry volume Proximité du murmure (The Encroaching Murmur), Agrafes de l’idylle is constituted of slow, breathless, fragmentary sentences. Its title in the original French sounds a radical negation of writing: a cognate of… Read More ›
Buddhadeva Bose’s poetry is characterized by pointed images and a visibly meticulous arrangement of words and lines. What shines through most of Bose’s poems is not spontaneity or even literary pleasure, but the workings of a critical mind. The pleasure… Read More ›
“Hiccup” (“Hoquet”), like “Bargain”, is from Damas’s first collection, Pigments (1937). It reveals the inferiority complex felt by blacks of Africa and the Caribbean because of centuries of abuse and exploitation by white European colonials. The solution to this problem… Read More ›
Nima Yushij’s poem Hey, People (Ay Adamha) has been much anthologized in the years following its 1941 publication, often in support of leftist ideologies. The poem was written during the productive period when Nima (the name commonly used) worked for… Read More ›
Published in his first collection Morgue and Other Poems, “Happy Youth” (“Schöne Jugend,” also translated as “Beautiful Youth”) lyrically captures the world of disease and death that the young doctor Benn confronted daily while treating the poor and suffering in… Read More ›
Gunib, composed in 1927, belongs to Titsian Tabidze’s second creative period, after he left behind his early affection for European-inspired symbolism and before he began penning overtly socialist-realist poems on Soviet themes. Gunib is perhaps the most profound meditation in… Read More ›
The Graveyard by the Sea is a meditative poem by French poet Paul Valéry. The poem was inspired by the cemetery in his birthplace, Sète, where his parents were buried. Valéry considered the poem one of his finest meldings of… Read More ›
Written in spring 1971, this poem depicts the desolation of New York City as emblematic of empire. Adonis wrote the poem after a visit to the United States, during which he participated in an International Poetry Forum. Unlike his poem… Read More ›
The Grass The grass lies down Waving in the east wind that drives the rain The grass lay down And finally cried. After crying the more because the day was gray It lay down again. The grass lies down Lies… Read More ›
The Golden Boat, one of Rabindranath Tagore’s most famous and most enigmatic poems, is the title piece of a poetry collection of the same name. It captures the blend of earthy awareness and cosmic mysticism that—as a hallmark of Tagore’s… Read More ›
God’s Shadow: Prison Poems is Reza Baraheni’s powerful narrative, 99 pages long, of the excruciating physical and mental torture he suffered in 1973 at the hands of SAVAK, the Iranian secret police. The account is told through a vivid prose… Read More ›
God Has Pity On Kindergarten Children God has pity on kindergarten children, He pities school children — less. But adults he pities not at all. He abandons them, And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours In the scorching… Read More ›
Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of poems and songs that lamented the disastrous state of Nazi Germany. Germany, dating from 1933, is the most famous. Hitler’s Nazis began their totalitarian control of Germany during February 1933. Like many other communists,… Read More ›
Most, if not all, of Nguyễn Chí Thiện’s poems in the 1984 bilingual edition Flowers from Hell were composed in his head while Thiện was a political prisoner in North Vietnamese concentration camps between 1958 and 1976. Because he was… Read More ›
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