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.