Golden-Hearted Man

Written by Vyacheslav Kupriyanov

Translated from the Russian by Francis R. Jones

Narrated by Bill Wolak

Russia

His acquaintances
wished him well.
The unacquainted
wished to make
his acquaintance.

Day and night

businesslike men with shovels

tramp past him

and stare at him

accusingly.

The businesslike men with shovels

have a twofold

task:

to bury him

in public

and exhume him

in secret.

In his heart
they suspect
gold
dust.

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.