Mikhail Sinelnikov, Russia

Мikhail SINELNIKOV, Member of IWA Bogdani 

Famous Moscow poet. Born in 1946 in Leningrad, in the family that survived the blockade;

he spent his early years in Central Asia. He graduated from the history department of the Osh Pedagogical Institute and continued his education at the Moscow Institute of Literature named after A.M. Gorky.

Author of 31 poetry collections, many articles on poetry, translator of classical and modern poetry of the East, compiler of a number of anthological collection, academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciencesand Peter‘s Academy. Winner of many Russian and foreign prizes, including the Ivan Bunin Prize, the Innocent Annensky Prize, the Andrei Bely Prize, the Arseny and Andrei Tarkovsky Prizes, the Rudaki State Prize of Tajikistan, the Peno Penev Bulgarian Prize, the Georgian Nasimi Prize, the Kyrgyz Nasimi Prize, the Kyrgyz Prize Alykul Osmonov, “Kanteh” Armenian Prize (“Lampada”). Chevalier of many orders and medals.

Poems are translated into many languages, separate books were published in Montenegro, Romania, Turkey and Japan…

He was engaged in research in the field of the influence of world denominations on Russian literature. Now the main occupation is to work as the main compiler in the multi-year project “Anthology of Russian Poetry”.

 

Meeting

I will not outstay and will not leave a sign,

But will knock and roll up the way I am.

An accidental guest, an absent – minded gaper,

I have brought you good news.

 

But at times I recollect and have dreams of

In my childhood so thoughtlessly and knavishly

My dropping into a slot in a rotten floorboard

A hard pomegranate seed.

 

The sun has faded. The faces have tarnished.

But I see without rising my eyelids, –

The tree trunk is rustling and stirring.

And its scion is touching the house roof.

ABAB

 

I am lying in the grass. The mint is washed by dew.

The piles of hay seem a bit flaring.

The dust is lightly pressed by the huge sky.

And the cloud is in a button leave.

 

I recall of a child’s sight angle.

And, trying to melt in young grass,

The sedge of pines makes suspicious

An ant crawling on the elbow.

 

There’s a half desert from the rib to groin.

While you are crawling, your life may pass away.

And the blue coarse shirt

Will replace the firmament in its eyes.

ABAB

 

Kyrgyz Hunting

I was flipped and sprinkled over.  At once

I was torn from the trembling grass…

And the bean of the Sun over the copper wolf eye

Is being covered with the wig of an erne.

The steppe is getting overfilled with growl.

The ground is revolving and moving flat.

And the mouse hears the sleepy tramping of hooves.

And the mole is feeling the blow-back of guns.

Transformed by an evil cunning

With his face all wrinkled and basaltic

The hunter, smelling of a sheep, is going

And the wind is blowing with ashes and lead.

And the wolf is lying instinct with gravity

Already killed and washed by the dew.

And the mournful felicity of the coming death

Is flowing in his eyes and touching his pupils.

The living flesh is getting overfilled with flame,

And the corpse is hot, yielding and with sharp ribs.

But the stuffy and animated ground layer

Smells of soil, blood and worms.

The Moon will rise

Over the vast area,

And the shadow of a bitch – wolf will be running here

To smell the heavy and greasy ground,

To yawl at the Moon.  And to guard the herds.

ABAB

 

​Toprak – Cale  – the Castle of Ashes

​To Gulsara Afidzhanova.

I do not know a more deadly word than the Turk word toprak

That is ashes and ashes of ashes, and the timeline of the timeline, its time.

The scattered skull of a horse skeleton,

The stirrup shot through by the cracked arrow.

 

There is smoke over this tower and black smog over that one…

And the ashes and plague are flowing from the East.

Under the blue whiteness and scarlet blackness

The horizon is curling as the completion of the timelime.

 

The hoof is up in the air, the bow-string is breathing

And the shirt is burning slowly on the horseman.

But the merry grass is murmuring quickly

And the crunching of the ashes is heard in the whistling of arrows.

 

…The hilly firmament resembles a castle.

The clouds resemble the raid of the amazons.

And the green circle of lizards is dancing.

And copper snakes are swinging half asllep.

 

The feather grass and sultry blaze of dust are silent.

And the sand is leaking on the sand in its hot and dumb way.

Onto a hill of eight layers a one-hundred –year old woman

Is coming with her great – granddaughter to milk her mares.

 

The big herd of horses is going, and its lava

Seems to her a multi -leg wave from the top of the hill.

The height has fallen, the depth has disappeared,

They have turned into silence and sloping flatness.

 

And in the old woman’s pupils like forty bright moons

The horses are flaming, as lily as the mountains.

And the grass is listening, and the herd of horses is listening

To the inarticulate talks of the mistress of the century.

 

“I am the echo and the toprak. Oh, eternity, I am yours!

An hour has finished and the evening is coming to its end.

I am the sand of atoms and scale of skin.

And the scaring image of death resembles mine  a little.

 

Having thought that speech, she is falling asleep

And scooping the sand with her palms.

And the hot hill gets pierced with a drop of milk.

The instant of time is has faded. The arm and udder are alive.

 

… And children are drinking koumiss. And one is breathing easily.

And the grease and watery trembling of life are flowing into the ground.

And milk and honey are getting sweeter with every passing day.

And the cold of  petals and hot trembling of a rose.

 

The water is coming out of the bowels of the earth as a tear.

And sward is triumphing in the clefts of the grave,

And the cerulean eyes of a stone old woman

Are peeping into the distance and dreaming frowningly.

ABAB