(in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum)
While working as a war correspondent during the Russo-Turkish War, in 1877, Vereshchagin witnessed the death of thousands of Turkish prisoners, who froze to death as they were being marched to Russian prisoner of war camps.
Evgeny Vinokurov
Евгений Винокуров
(1925-1993)
(1925-1993)
Весна
Ночь выла, кружила, трубила округой.
И каждому падающему мертвецу
Так жизнь и запомнилась - белой вьюгой,
Наотмашь хлещущей их по лицу.
А утром всё стихло,
И мир открылся
Глазам в первозданной голубизне.
Я вылез на бруствер и удивился
Вновь - в восемнадцатый раз - весне.
Сырые холмы порыжели на склонах,
Весенние ветры сходили с ума.
И только у мёртвых в глазах оголённых,
В широких,
На веки застыла зима.
И каждому падающему мертвецу
Так жизнь и запомнилась - белой вьюгой,
Наотмашь хлещущей их по лицу.
А утром всё стихло,
И мир открылся
Глазам в первозданной голубизне.
Я вылез на бруствер и удивился
Вновь - в восемнадцатый раз - весне.
Сырые холмы порыжели на склонах,
Весенние ветры сходили с ума.
И только у мёртвых в глазах оголённых,
В широких,
На веки застыла зима.
Literal Translation
Spring
Night wailed, whirled, blared all around,
And each man, falling dead,
Remembered life as a white blizzard
Backhanding his face with fierce slaps.
And each man, falling dead,
Remembered life as a white blizzard
Backhanding his face with fierce slaps.
But in the morning all was settled,
And the world opened
Its eyes in primordial blue.
I climbed out on the breastwork and saw, amazed
again -- for the eighteenth time -- spring.
And the world opened
Its eyes in primordial blue.
I climbed out on the breastwork and saw, amazed
again -- for the eighteenth time -- spring.
The damp hills had turned rusty red on their slopes.
The spring winds were going insane.
And only in the dead men's eyes, bare
And open wide,
Was winter frozen forever.
The spring winds were going insane.
And only in the dead men's eyes, bare
And open wide,
Was winter frozen forever.
translated by Douglas Logan
d
Literary Translation/Adaptation by
U.R. Bowie
Spring
The night
played its trumpet blare,
Whirled
round and howled,
And the
last thing the dead boys
Recalled in
farewell
Was the blizzard’s
stark fury
And a
memory befouled,
Of an
ice-blow backhand
To the
face as they fell.
But then
came the morning
In
stillness entangled,
And the
world showed itself
With its
blue hues bespangled,
To all of
the eyes that still saw.
I crawled
out on the rampart
And I
looked, was in awe—
For the
eighteenth time now—
At the
coming of spring
Through
the thaw.
On slopes
of damp hillocks
A reddish
glow shone,
The spring
winds romped,
Capered,
cavorted.
But in
wide-open stark naked
Eyes of
the dead
Bereavement
with winter consorted.
d
Translator’s Note
In 1943,
Evgeny Vinokurov was eighteen years old, as is the I narrator of this poem, and
fighting the Germans in the Great Fatherland War (WW II). A war poem entitled “Spring”
seems something of an oddity, but the seasons turn in the same old way, no
matter what horrors Homo sapiens happens to be concocting at the time.
The war
seems somehow in the background for most of the poem, intruding most forcefully
with the use of one foreign word, бруствер (“breastwork” or “rampart”). In a
striking image the eyes of the dead soldiers are described as оголённых (past participle, “denuded,” “stripped bare,” with an
additional sense of “left defenseless”). This is especially appropriate here, since
a secondary definition of the verb оголить has a military connotation: “to leave open to enemy attack;
to leave undefended,” as in the phrase, “They left their right flank exposed.”
Spring in Kolomenskoe
(by a different Evgeny Vinokurov, the artist born in 1946)
