I hadn’t been aware of TYPO: The International Journal of Prototypes (at least I’m not aware of having been aware of it…), but I like the cheeky name; their new issue, #14, is out, and Alex Cigale, in a FB post, writes:
With my gratitude to Editors Norman Conquest and Paul Rosheim, I’m delighted to have 5 translations from the Russian of poems by Russian Futurist Elena Guro (circa 1910) in TYPO: The International Journal of Prototypes. Please consider purchasing Issue 14 to support the work of this restlessly inventive journal dedicated to keeping the spirit of literary Modernism alive. I’m particularly delighted to share the issue with poetry translations and introduction to Nikolai Zabolotsky, a member of Oberiu (second generation Russian Futurist), by Дмитрий Манин/Dmitry Manin, who presents a side of Zabolotsky, an acknowledged master of philosophical nature poetry, known to few English readers. There are also two “Biblical Sonnets” by Genrikh Sapgir of the Lianozovo School who helped revive the spirit of Russian Futurism post-Stalin. The issue includes translations from Italian, French, Hungarian, German (Rilke’s prose, “The Testament”), visual poetry by John Vieira and Kristen Szumyn, and much else that will keep this reader newly informed and entertained for some time to come. https://blackscatbooks.com/2026/03/31/typo-14-spring-break/
Suddenly
autumnalvernalThe earth breathed with willows into the near sky;
under the skittish clamor of raindrops it thawed.
It may be that she felt surpassed,
perhaps, she had been slighted,
but she continued believing in miracles.
Believing in her own high window:
small sky among the dark branches,
she never deceived us – guilty in nothing,
and so here she sleeps, breathing….
and it has become warm.1912
I really like that translation; it has the ring of an English modernist poem of the era, say by Pound. Guro’s original Russian, “Вдруг весеннее,” is here. I don’t seem to have mentioned Elena Guro at LH (the stress in Guro is on the second syllable — apparently it’s from French Gouraud); she was a painter, playwright, poet, and fiction writer, and probably would be better known if she hadn’t died of leukemia at 36.
Update. Alex realized he’d had a slip of the brain when doing the draft translation, and he’s changed “autumnal” to “vernal” to match the Russian (see my comment below).
Unable to read the original, I liked a lot in the translation, especially the first line, “skittish clamor”, and the last three lines. But i had a problem with the pronouns. At first reading, I thought “it” in the second line was the earth, and “she” was a person. But that “it” is the impersonal weather “it” of “it has become warm”, right? That was a problem for me, unless the original offers the same garden path.
Kusaal seems to be in the process of moving from a system in which o is animate “he/she/it” and li is inanimate “it”, to a setup where li is only used for dummy-subject “it” (as with weather verbs, or “it’s necessary that …”) and o is used for everything else, animate or inanimate.
Contemporary speakers (unlike written texts) seem to use the “new” system, unless you make them self-conscious about it by asking them to repeat what they just said. It just goes to show that you don’t need an actual prescriptivist tradition to produce speakers who say “yeah, we say that, but really we ought to say …” Insecurity about the correctness of one’s own speech is clearly a linguistic universal. Charles Hockett missed that one.
@JF: I checked the original – the English translation is wrong, it’s the earth that thaws. It should have been “she” in English, same as in Russian (or the translator should have stayed with “it” throughout).
Why autumnal? That’s more or less the opposite of весеннее. And it’s so obvious that this must be intentional on the translators part, not simply an error.
I think the change from it to she is intentional also: as if the coming of spring turns the earth from something dead into a living being. But the original poem doesn’t have this change: земля is treated as a living, breathing being from the very start (дышала).
Another poem by the author at Hat’s link:
Слова любви и тепла
У кота от лени и тепла разошлись ушки.
Разъехались бархатные ушки.
А кот раски-и-с…
На болоте качались беловатики.
Жил был
Ботик—животик:
Воркотик
Дуратик
Котик — пушатик.
Пушончик,
Беловатик,
Кошуратик —
Потасик…
—
(my trans)
Words of love and warmth
The cats ears widened from laziness and warmth
Spread out the velvety ears
And the cat ya-awned
White fur swayed in inertia
Once upon a time, there was
Bootie-creetcha
Purry
Silly-birry
Kitty-waddly
Fluffy
White-furry
Cathurrahy-
Purrtastic
As the old jazz standard put it, Весна Can Really Hang You Up the Most. (The internet claims the lyric-writer was riffing on the earlier phrase “April is the cruelest month,” but I haven’t fact-checked that.)
Why autumnal? That’s more or less the opposite of весеннее. And it’s so obvious that this must be intentional on the translators part, not simply an error.
Yes, that’s very odd. I’ve left a comment on his FB post asking him about it.
Thanks, Hans and ulr.
I thought “autumnal” was interesting—the day starts wintry and only as it warms up becomes autumnal. Maybe I should write a poem like that.
Fun translation, PP!
By coincidence I just saw someone on the internet post the text of Delmore Schwartz’s springtime poem, set in April 1937. Has anyone translated it into Russian?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42633/calmly-we-walk-through-this-aprils-day
I’ve left a comment on his FB post asking him about it.
And he’s responded as follows:
So I’ve corrected the title in the post.
Is it in print with “autumnal”? Ouch. Makes you want to avoid publishing on paper.
By the way, permit me to express the hope that “Norman Conquest” is not the name that the editor of TYPO‘s parents gave him.
It appears to be a pseudonym of this guy. That one perhaps was real.
Cigale, I imagine, is a form of Segal or such, not a French cicada. Or is it?