tsarina

Yan Satunovsky (1913-1982) was one of the key contributors of the Lianozovo School, which employed vernacular Russian as the language of its poetry. Like many of the "unofficial" poets of his generation, Satunovsky took shelter in producing some twenty books of children's verse. Five of his "Children's Rhymes" where set to music by Sophia Gubaidulina, the renowned Tatar-Russian avant-garde composer. Satunovsky passed away without publishing his serious poetry but having collected it in a typescript, Chopped Prose, of which he made seven copies. The excerpts above appear in Chopped Prose and were translated from a subsequent anthology,Samizdat Veka (Minsk-Moscow: Polifact, 1997)

Alex Cigale’s poems and translations can be found in The Cafe, Colorado Review, Global City Review, Hanging Loose, McSweeney's, Zoland Poetry, Stranger at Home: American Poetry with an Accent, and in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry. New poems are forthcoming in Gargoyle, Many Mountains Moving, and North American Review. Born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine in 1963, he has lived in New York City since 1975, apart from six years at the University of Michigan where he won a Hopwood Award.