Translation of poem by Евгений Винокуров, EVGENY VINOKUROV, "SPRING"

                         Vasily Vereshchagin, "The Road of the War Prisoners," 1878-1879
                                          (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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)