Fresh from launching our Fall 2016 issue yesterday, featuring exclusive writing from 31 countries, by such authors as Stefan Zweig, László Krasznahorkai, and Anita Raja, we present a selection from “Written in the Dark,” a new, groundbreaking anthology out from Ugly Duckling Presse. The poems gathered therein were written in 1942, during the most severe winter of the Nazi Siege of Leningrad, in which one million people perished. Charles Bernstein compares these poems to “the sparks from two sticks of wood, creating a fire that warms even in an apocalypse.”
. . .
The creek sick of speech
Told water it took no side.
The water sick of silence
At once began again to shriek.
—Gennady Gor
translated from the Russian by Ben Felker-Quinn, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Matvei Yankelevich