TRANSLATION Translated from Russian by Rainie Oet TRANSLATION Translated from Russian by Rainie Oet
My day on Earth draws to an end:
Five Poems by Sophia Parnok
There's No Way for Me to Go Back:
Four Poems by Sophia Parnok
Sophia Parnok
Sophia Parnok was a queer Russian-Jewish poet, journalist, translator, and librettist who lived from 1885 to 1933. She published literary reviews under the name Andrei Polianin. At a time when Stalin’s government termed homosexuality a disease, Sophia Parnok wrote openly of her romantic relationships with women, including the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Parnok’s works remained censored until 1979, when an edition of her collected poems was published in the United States. Despite the strength of her work and her influence on the poetry of her contemporaries (Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, etc.), Parnok remains relatively unread and unknown.
