They’ve cut a hole..., and I pardon all your sins...
- They’ve cut a hole..., and I pardon all your sins...
They’ve cut a hole in the deepdense blue of the ice:a breathing space for big fish and little,water for bringers of buckets,a way out for a weary travelerif she and life turn out after allto be traveling different roadsand she has nowhere to go.
1931
I pardon all your sins—but two I can’t abide:You read poems in silenceand kiss aloud.
So sin, blossom, be merry—but take my advice:a kiss, my darling, is not for the ear,and music is not for the eyes.
1931 [End Page 146]
Sofia Yakovlevna Parnok (1885–1933) studied music at the Conservatory of Geneva and law in St. Petersburg before devoting herself to poetry. In 1909, after divorcing her husband, she settled in Moscow and converted to Orthodox Christianity. In 1914 she met Marina Tsvetaeva, and the two women fell passionately in love. Parnok wrote of it in her first book, Poems (1916). No Russian poet before Parnok had written so directly about female, let alone lesbian, sexuality, and as a lesbian and an Orthodox Christian, she was doubly isolated in Soviet society. In a poem written in 1927 she speaks of herself as an invisible woman. She titled her last published collection In an Undertone (1928) and her last unpublished cycle “A Useless Good.”
Robert Chandler is the author of Brief Lives: Alexander Pushkin (Hesperus Press, 2009). His translations of Vasily Grossman and co-translations of Andrey Platonov were published by NYRB classics. He has edited anthologies of Russian short stories and Russian magic tales for Penguin Classics. Together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, he has recently completed an Anthology of Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky (Penguin Classics, 2014). His translation of stories by Teffi will be published by Pushkin Press in summer 2014 in a collection entitled Subtly Worded.
