Human Injustice

Written by Vyacheslav Kupriyanov

Translated from the Russian by Francis R. Jones

Narrated by Bill Wolak

Russia

Two hands
to feed
many mouths

and many hands

to gag

a single mouth

A single rib
to make
a woman

and twenty-four ribs
to cage
a heart

Thirty-two teeth
waiting to bite off
a tongue

struggling to find
a universal tongue
for a humankind                                                                                                                   

armed

to the teeth

 

Viacheslav Kupriyanov graduated in 1967 from the Moscow Foreign Languages Institute.  He is a member of the Russian & Serbian Writers Unions. He has been awarded several prizes for his poetry: the Prize for International poetry in Gonnesa, Italy, 1986; the European Literature Prize, 1988, Yugoslavia; the Branko-Radicevic-Prize, 2006, Serbia;  the Bunin-Prize, 2010, Russia; “Poet of the Year 2012”, Russia; the Prize “European Atlas of Poetry” 2017, Respublika Serbska; and the Naji Naaman Literary Prize, 2018, Japan/Lebanon.

Francis R. Jones was born in Yorkshire in 1955. He studied Modern Languages at St John’s College, Cambridge, Modern Serbo-Croat Poetry at the University of Sarajevo, and Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading. He has published two collections of the verse of the Yugoslav poet Ivan V. Lalic—The Works of Love and The Passionate Measure (Anvil, 1981 and 1989) – and has co-translated Vasko Popa’s The Cut (in Poetry World I, 1986); The Passionate Measure was awarded the 1991 European Poetry Translation Prize.