Alexander Korotko was born in the Ukraine in 1952 and lives in Kiev. He writes in Russian and says his personality was formed by Russian culture. For me he has virtually no biography outside his poems. I have only the powerful titles of his early books: Window (1989), Night Well, The Humdrum of Reason (quoted in the first poem in this book), Clapping of Dead Hands; and Faded Dreams in Ukrainian, and a long poem: To Meet the Dawn, or given the nature of the Russian word ‘zarya’: To Meet the Sunset. There is also a prose book: Moon Boy. This to pun in Russian is ‘korotko o Korotko’: Korotko ‘in brief’, for that is one meaning of his name.

Russian English poetry books – I list most of them since they are so rare – a tradition started by Dimitri Obolensky’s Penguin Book of Russian Verse in 1960, form a very important cultural phenomenon. In recent years Gennady Aygi (translated by Peter France), Leonid Aronzon, Olga Sedakova, Negar Hasan-Zadeh and, forthcoming – Larissa Miller (all translated by Richard McKane),Yelena Shvarts (translated by Michael Molnar and Catriona Kelly) Yevgeny Rein (edited by Valentina Polukhina), forthcoming – Inna Lisnyanskaya (translated by Daniel Weissbort) Tatiana Shcherbina (translated by Sasha Dugdale), In the Grip of Strange Thoughts, Russian Poetry in a New Era, Zephyr Press US (edited by J. Kates) and several poets writing in English, the other way i.e. into Russian under editors Alexander Deriev and Vladimir Gandelsman with Ars Interpres; have appeared or are about to, and, in my biased view, are most significant cross-cultural standard bearers, though these poetry books are never going to be best-sellers and publication remains difficult in the West or in Russia. It is to this small readership, who are searching for a genuine cultural dialogue, for a true knowledge of the soul of Russian and Russia, that we offer the poetry of Alexander Korotko. The potential of parallel English Russian poetry on the Internet has yet to kick off, likewise the field of samizdat, computer generated and photocopied poetry booklets or books has not been ploughed despite the phenomenal advantages of modern technology over the six or seven carbon copies in a Russian typewriter of, say, the 70s. Good poetry has always been ahead of time and even technology, and Alexander Korotko and the poets above prove this thesis.

I first met the poetry of Alexander Korotko through my friend Alexander Tkachenko, the latter I had met with a third poet and friend Andrei Voznesensky when I was invited to attend the Pasternak Readings in Moscow in 1990. The Voznesensky book I was working on turned out to have a prophetic title and contents. It was called On the Edge and came out in 1991. Alexander Tkachenko on his trips to England for International PEN kept up our friendship – I translated him and we read together his poems at the Pushkin Club of which I have been co-chair for over a dozen years. Tkachenko mentioned our fellow PEN member, the poet Alexander Korotko and on one of his recent visits he brought me a copy of the handsome book Thought Transcription with poems by Alexander Korotko and pictures by Mikhail Kazas, a virtually unknown painter from the Crimea who flourished in the Silver Age and died in 1918.

Thought Transcription is a series of one line poems. Sergei Papeta in his brilliant introduction to the book calls them ‘neoalexandrines’ punning on Korotko’s first name and the verse form. Since these were my first Korotko poems and first impressions are always vital in poetry and especially in translating, I want to dwell a while on this book. It is not my role here to discuss the wonderful paintings of Mikhail Kazas and their exoticness – I use this word not in the clichéd sense – but I do want to comment on the photograph at the beginning of the book: Alexander Korotko is posing behind a pile of books, the only ones whose author is legible are three volumes of Mandelstam in the republished in Russia western edition – that accompanied my life since the mid 60s. The full publication in the Soviet Union of Mandelstam (how he would have loved Korotko’s three word poem: ‘Amnesty of thoughts’) was the surest sign of glasnost. Of course it’s a statement on Korotko’s part – presumably these are the books he would take with him if he were to be isolated on a desert island.

These brief one line poems in Thought Transcription are not fragments. They are whole poems. I would like to show you some of them that captured my imagination, and inspired me to translate them into English – as a preface to a discussion of this book: On the Other Side of Love.

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Sad beginning of joy.

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Provincial eternity.

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A face like a broken-off story.

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The carrier pigeons of dreams.

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Better to guess than know.

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Epilepsy of summer stars.

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The blind rain hung on the gallows of the rainbow.

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The orchestra pit of the underworld.

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The pause suffered from asthma.

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The hieroglyphs of the leaf fall.


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We are the living targets of our own aims.

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The Mongol-Tartar yoke of love.

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Terror is my guardian angel.

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Stubborn horizon.

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Silent creation of night.

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The age-old tiredness of rains.

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Sharp talons of hurts.

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Naïve ghetto.

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Scaffold of time.

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Night walked away from all embraces.

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If you go straight on, without turning off, you’ll reach heaven.

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Dawn gnaws at the depth of night.

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Captive air.

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Death is long-lived.

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What strange behaviour: to die forever.

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Don’t touch the sky with your hands.

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We are sitting on the border of the millennium like children on a fence.

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Amnesty of thoughts.

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Clowns of dreams.

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To live like an uninvited guest on earth.

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The soul left but death did not come.

The rough drafts of memory.

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Adam and Eve never loved each other.

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Dying is like a gift.

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A time comes and everything loses sense.

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No – this is a bridge that others cross.

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Mosquito bites of stars.

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Confession of silence.

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Your name is a flag in the wind.

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Hope’s house of cards.

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Icebergs of words.

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I left the town to friends in my will.

Poetry, though, is not just a transcription of thought but also of feelings and images, speech rhythms and music: the latter two being the most difficult to transpose since English and Russian have different specific gravities. When I first read Korotko’s poems in On the Other Side of Love, I thought ‘Ah, free verse!’ but when my friend Irina Kostyrina read them to me I realised that within the long lines were often hidden rhymes and assonance and that the speech rhythms were subtle and varied. Of course single lines don’t rhyme, but physical rhyme is not the only harmony. Images can be translated (although their cultural significance may be blurred). ‘Icebergs of words’ inspired me in the long days when I was writing this introduction to write a poem of my own:

FOR ALEXANDER KOROTKO

If words are icebergs,
can they cause the crash
that sank the Titanic?
Oh, sensing them should we panic
or let them float to us
in the sea of collective unconscious –
and forget Scylla and Charybdis’ clash?

Feelings can be got across by the translator but have to be captured by the sympathy of the reader. When Korotko writes: ‘Is love really given to us to be a continuation of creation?’, he is indicating the title of the book: On the Other Side of Love. First comes the creation, then the continuation of it in love and then one somehow comes to the other side of love, when the creation can start again. Few poets, but perhaps Pushkin, can love and create at the same time.

To return to Mandelstam and one of the key images of Korotko: the rotation of the earth. Mandelstam has a key poem ‘Eyesight of Wasps’ where he longs ‘to sense the axis of the earth’. Korotko also wants to sense the axis of the earth: in the first poem there is the pendulum in St Isaac’s in Petersburg and elsewhere he mentions: ‘the closed circle we call the rotation of the earth’ and ‘and an alien restless track back from the stream of your unruly fate/ returns its irrationality to the rotation of the earth’. But Korotko’s territory is not Petersburg but the provinces: ‘A provincial, suffering wind,’ ‘the province by the sea’, ‘this small alien town’, ‘A house in the country’, ‘High over the back of beyond’, but finally ‘as though this is not a province but Rome’. One thinks of the successful efforts, led by the poet Vitaliy Kalpidi to put Urals poetry on the map in apposition to the traditional Moscow and Petersburg Schools.

Korotko is a poet of sunrises and sunsets. In the first half of the book autumn is a powerful phenomenon: ‘Autumn is the temple of parting. Terrifying and horrible.’ and ‘Sadness blossoms on autumn’s windowsill’ and ‘we trampled yellowed happiness underfoot’. Migratory birds fly over the poems to the South – they are able to choose their climate unlike us. The waves in the sea, playing with the ship of the desert motif are ‘like a caravan of camels in the desert.’ We find Korotko developing the English ‘food for thought’ with ‘there’s no better food for the soul than thoughts’. In the same way in ‘Thought Transcription’ he developed Akhmatova’s ‘In life we are all in a way guests’ in ‘There Are Four of Us’ with the one-liner: ‘To live like an uninvited guest on earth.’ (My italics). Korotko is fascinating about ‘terror’: ‘Only terror is more terrifying than terror.’ and ‘Waiting time is/ the most terrifying time, a sentence unknown to reason, when fate, / tired of us, begins a conversation not with us.’ In Russian ‘son’ means dream as well as sleep. There is a particularly powerful treatment of dream and non-dream in the poem: ‘Blacker than black’ ,
‘You served alongside/ in my dreams, you loved them more than you did me…/the air/was so weightless that I didn’t know that you were with me,/ that you were weeping tears of desperation late at night,/ whereas I thought it was a dream.’
Most of Korotko’s poems make sense to me but with ‘Bird’s light…’ and ‘The heart is the love’ one just has to ride with the colourful rainbow of images, reminiscent of Dylan Thomas. He has a way with memory: Mnemosyne should be the Muse of Poetry: ‘At this hour memory, like Cinderella,/ gathers the crumbs of memories.’

In the poem: ‘Go on, forgive…’ Korotko intensifies the confessional quality of his work. His landscapes can be grim but I close this piece with his note of optimism from the depths: ‘The blind alley is also a beginning’, and say that spring follows the Russian winter.

The translator would like to acknowledge the help of friends Alexander Tkachenko, Belinda Cooke and Irina Kostyrina. Readers may like to look at the website.