The Yellow Kite, by Gennady Katsov, translated by Nina Kossman

The Yellow Kite, by Sergei Sudeikin (Russia) mid 1910s.

The Yellow Kite (Russian)

The Yellow Kite

Straight lines, loops, and coils ...    
A yellow kite in the summer sky
Fiercely fighting for its life,
Flying now left, now right,                               

Now straight, like a window
In a train car, with  a lamp;
Its yellow light is out, but 
From the outside it seems on.         

There a passenger is alone
With himself amid shadows:
He watches - in a dream - a yellow kite
Hover in the summer sky.

Gennady Katsov, translated by Nina Kossman

Gennady Katsov (born 1956, Evpatoria, Crimea) is an editor-in-chief of the Russian-American Internet news portal RUNYweb.com, which includes the Encyclopedia of Russian America.  His book Slovosfera, published in 2013, is a collection of poems about art. After Slovosfera, three more of his books were published: Between the Ceiling and the Floor (New York), 365 Days around the Sun (New York) and 25 years with the right to correspondence (Moscow); all of these are poetry collections in Russian. He lives in New York.
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Moscow born, Nina Kossman is an artist, bilingual writer, poet, translator of Russian poetry, painter, and playwright. Her paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in Moscow, Philadelphia, and New York. Her English short stories and poems have been published in US, Canadian and British journals. Her Russian poems and short stories have been published in major Russian literary journals. Among her published works are two books of poems in Russian and English, two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems, two collections of short stories, an anthology (Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths) published by Oxford University Press, and a novel. Her new book, Other Shepherds, was published in July 2020. Her work has been translated into Greek, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. She received a UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award, an NEA translation fellowship, and grants from Foundation for Hellenic Culture, the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, and Fundacion Valparaiso. She lives in New York.