A Sampling of Poems (PDF file)

            The irony of Sergei Esenin for English speakers is that he achieved a certain celebrity status but never found a translator (as Pasternak, Mandel’shtam, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova and even Maikovskii did) who could bring alive his particular poetic qualities in English.  Because his poems are formal, relatively simple in diction, with delicate nuances of imagery, translations often come off as doggerel seeming simplistic and trivial.  I am not sure my attempts fare much better, but I hope this sampling (PDF file)offers readers a glimpse of Esenin’s range and some of the features that made him one of the most widely read and revered poets of the first half of the 20^th century in Russia despite that fact the Soviet government banned reprints of his work after his death until the Khrushchev thaw in the 1960s.

            On the other hand, because of his marriage to the dancer Isadora Duncan, his stunning good looks and wild hooligan life, he has had a posthumous celebrity in both Russia and the West where he is sometimes compared to Dylan Thomas.  Gordon McVay’s 1988 biography, Esenin: A Life, with new information from Soviet archives was well received.  After the Khrushchev thaw in the 1960s reissues of some of his poems were allowed again in the Soviet Union and in 1977 a six volume complete edition of his work was published in Moscow.  Vanessa Redgrave’s Academy Award winning performance in the 1968 film, Isadora, sparked interest in the free spirited, unconventional and pathos-ridden dancer’s sensational life.  She was the fourth of Esenin’s five wives.  Based on her autobiography, the film did not portray the men in her life with objectivity; nevertheless, her years in Moscow and her short-lived marriage to Esenin were covered to a degree in the film and renewed interest in him for some readers in the West.  From the perspective of his Russian celebrity, his third marriage was as sensational.  Zinaida Reikh was one of the most famous stage actresses and she had major early successes in the cinema.  She later married the famous director Vsevelod Meierhol’d and created many of the roles in his most acclaimed productions. She was murdered by the KGB in 1940.  In 2005 a popular TV mini-series in Russia offered a fictionalized investigation by a detective who believed there was more to Esenin’s 1925 death than the autopsy reported. 

            When he first began publishing he was well received and even lionized in Petersburg in the early 1910s.  He was invited to recite before the Tsar’s wife at the Winter Palace.  With his close friend Nikolai Klyuev, he championed an informal movement of peasant poets who positioned themselves in opposition to the reigning movements of Symbolism, Acmeism and the various Futurisms.  Unlike Klyuev who drew on folk legends, pre-Christian mythologies and details from the nomadic life of Samoyd and other non-Russian northern tribes, Esenin’s “peasant” qualities focused on unsentimental but loving details from nature, rural agriculture and the seasons.

            In my sampling (PDF file), poems such as  «Покраснела рябина, . . . » (“The rowan trees grew red, . . .”),            «Там, где капустные грядки . . .»   (“ There, where red water from the sunrise . . .”) and «Вот уж вечер.  Роса . . .» (“It’s evening.  Dew . . .”) are representative of these qualities.  At his best, these poems written almost a century ago sill startle readers with arresting images.  In the 1920s, Esenin and the poet Anatolii Mariengof became close friends and shared a flat in Moscow.  They led a movement that they called Imaginism which attempted to articulate a mode of poetry generated by the primacy of images.  Sometimes compared to Imagism in England and America, Imaginism was never as clearly articulated nor as profoundly defended and in the wild heyday of Russian and Soviet modernism it proved to be ephemeral as a movement.

            In his last phase, Esenin developed a hooligan persona that celebrated bouts of self-pitying drunken excess in low-life taverns.  Russian readers took these drunken songs to heart and samizdat hand copies were widely read throughout the Soviet Era.  He also attempted to move beyond stanza-based short lyrics and wrote a few poemy (the genre of the longer meditative or narrative poem that after Pushkin often defined a poet’s fullest achievement).  «ИНОНИЯ» (“Inoniía”), perhaps the most successful of these, has garnered the most attention among Russian critics.  It is a self-aggrandizing jeremiad pitting his imagined ideal land of Inoniía (Ee-nohn-ee-ee-ah) against the emerging Soviet reality that he had come to fear already in 1918.  At the time of the 1918 Revolution, Esenin embraced the Bolshevik program because of the land redistribution to the peasants and the commitment to rural literacy and education, and the Bolsheviks embraced him as a people’s poet; but his support quickly soured and as the years of civil war and famine dragged on he grew more and more disenchanted.  On December 39, 1925 he hung himself from a chandelier in a Leningrad hotel room. He was 30 years old.  My sample includes his frequently reprinted suicide poem, «До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья.» (“Farewell, old chap, farewell.”).

            Two poems in this sample, I find particularly striking.  «ЛИСИЦА» (“The Vixen”) depicts a wounded fox as she dies and «ПЕСНЬ О ХЛЕБЬ      » (“Song about Bread”) contrasts the enjoyment of fresh baked bread with the process of the grain’s harvest, thrashing and milling.  Seeing grain as a living aspect of nature, the production of bread is torture and execution.  Some vegetarians have long             seen the slaughter of animals for food as cruel; this poem sees a similar cruelty in the harvest and milling of grain.

            In Russia Esenin’s celebrity and popularity have not been matched with critical acclaim and he is not typically now seen as among the first rank of 20^th century poets but he is historically important and this sample I hope gives readers in English a pleasure comparable to that which his Russian admirers enjoy.

            The sampling of 12 poems I have chosen includes; to download the PDF, click here:

Untitled:  Там, где капустные грядки . . .                                                   

Untitled:  There, where red water from the sunrise . . .         

Untitled:  Вот уж вечер.  Роса . . .                                                               

Untitled:  It’s evening.  Dew . . .       

ЛИСИЦА                                                                                                      

The Vixen                  

Untitled:  За горами, за желтыми до́лами . . .                                            

Untitled:  Past mountains, past the yellow valleys, . . .         

Untitled:  О красном вечере задумалась дорога, . . .                                 

Untitled:  The red evening is settling along the road . . .

Untitled:  Покраснела рябина, . . .                                                              

Untitled:  The rowan trees grew red, . . .                   

Untitled:  Проплясал, проплакал дождь весенний, . . .                            

Untitled:  I cried and cavorted in the spring rain, . . .           

Untitled:  Хорошо под осеннюю свежесть . . .                                          

Untitled:  It’s nice in the briskness of early autumn . . .        

Untitled:  Ветры, ветры, о снежные ветры, . . .                                         

Untitled:  Wind, wind, o snowy wind, . . .    

ПЕСНЬ О ХЛЕБЬ                                                                                        

Song about Bread      

ИНОНИЯ                                                                                                     

Inoniía                                                                                                            

Untitled:  До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья.                                        

Untitled (suicide poem): Farewell, old chap, farewell.