It’s terrible to be possessed by brittle things.
How can you learn here who taught people to draw
Stars between eyebrows, butterflies over the gristle
Of throats, weeping eye between breasts.
And anyway, who taught them to live with strange
Chasms, with their nocturnal beasts,
With this yawning, this singing, this delirium –
unreachable
Even with open palms outstretched: take them
If you are not afraid of such embraces.
If the faces floating up from an amalgam
Of sploches, from the molding, black, silvery depths
Don’t frighten you.

(translated by Genya Turovskaya)

Elena Fanailova is a poet and journalist. Born in Voronezh, Central Russia, she is a graduate of the Voronezh Medical Institute and the Voronezh State University where she majored in linguistics. Fanailova has worked as a doctor and as a university teacher. Currently, Fanailova is a host of the radio program Far from Moscow that covers various topics from the Beslan siege to new Russian prose for Radio Liberty. Fanailova's poems have been published in leading literary magazines in Russia and abroad. They are featured in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008), The Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (University of Iowa Press, 2005) and Crossing Centuries: the New Generation of Russian Poetry (Talisman House Publishers, 2000). Fanailova is the author of four books and a winner of the Andrey Bely Award (1999) and the Moscow Score Award (2003). She currently lives in Moscow. The Russian Version is Elena Fanailova's the first full-length collection in English translation.

Stephanie Sandler chairs the Slavic Department at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on poetry, film, and cultural theory in and beyond Russia. She has written and edited books on Alexander Pushkin, sexuality and the body in Russian culture, and Russian poetry. Her translations of poems by Fanailova, Alexandra Petrova, and Elena Shvarts have appeared in Circumference, Zoland Poetry, New Russian Poetry, and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets.

Genya Turovskaya is the author of Calendar (UDP 2002), and The Tides (Octopus Books 2007). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, Octopus, jubilat, and other publications. Her translation of Aleksandr Skidan's Red Shifting was published by Ugly Duckling Presse (2008). She has been the recipient of various awards and fellowships including a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Montana Artist Refuge Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Translation Residency at Santa Fe Art Institute, and a Fund for Poetry grant. She holds an MFA from Bard College and lives in Brooklyn, New York where she is the Associate Editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse..

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