Russian Silver Age poetry translations (occasional), 36/?
Nowadays Sophia Parnok (1885-1933) is known best for being the lover of Marina Tsvetaeva from 1914 to 1916. But she was a poet, translator (from French) and highly respected literary critic in her own right, writing excellent criticism of the post-Symbolism poetic movements, without adhering to a movement herself. She concisely characterized the styles of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, but rejected acmeism as a school of thought. She also wrote libretti — she had been raised in a musical family. (Her brother Valentin Parnakh — they both changed the spelling of their Jewish last name, Parnokh, in different ways — as well as being a poet and playwright, is considered the introducer of jazz to the Soviet Union in the 1920s.)
She was married (with a wedding by Jewish rite) to the poet and dramatist Vladimir Volkenstein for two years, but afterwards turned her attention exclusively to women. According to a line in her English Wikipedia article sourced to Diana Burgin’s biography of her, “She also survived a train crash, owned a pet monkey, and was Russia’s first openly-lesbian poet… Parnok finally succumbed to her illness in 1933 with three of her lovers at her bedside. Her funeral procession of her friends and fans extended 75 kilometers outside of Moscow.” (Which I find lovely to contemplate but hard to believe — 75 km is pretty darned long.)
There are only four of her poems on Russian Wikisource, which bear the numbers they had in her collected poetry edition, presumably the one edited by Sophia Poliakova and published in Ann Arbor in 1979.
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Poem #25
If you find out you’ve by stubborn friends been rejected,
If you find out that Cupid’s bow wasn’t so taut,
If unkissed lips had by another’s caress been affected,
And one laconic with you shares with others all thought…
If gardens have turned to desert through loss and privation —
Strike, still, with distracted fingers the lyre’s bright strings:
Poet, recall in your grief your fellow’s Latinate declaration:
“Swifter still pass days deceived by the lying that sings.”
Sophia Parnok, 1912; translation by Tamara Vardomskaya, September 2016.
Tamara Vardomskaya 
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