Rasul Gamzatov - High in the Caucasian Mountains live the peoples of Daghestan, who comprise 36 nationalities. Rasul Gamzatov ( 8 September 1923 – 3 November 2003) was the People's Poet of Daghestan. From his pen have come short love lyrics, long narrative poems, ballads, epigrams and philosophical octaves, which have won him millions of devoted readers. "My Dagestan" is his most famous work...This book is a kind of confession; it expresses the writer's thoughts about life and art. "Rasul" is Arabic for "representative" and indeed Rasul Gamzatov is a worthy representative of Daghestan, telling people in all parts of the world of his land and its inhabitants.

ON THE ROAD

I met a rider in the hills
Who bore himself with pride.
A cigarette clung to his lips,
A whip hung at his side.
Beside him with a sleeping child
A weary woman stepped
And so profusely she perspired
It seemed as if she wept.
I stood and watched them out of sight
And felt a burning shame,
For thirty years the equal right
Of women we proclaim!
Here lyric verse is not enough,
Let lines of wrath begin
So mountain folk need never blush
For any of their kin!

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If every loving thought and look
Became a lyric line,
Ther'd be no bigger poetry book
On themes of love, than mine.
But still the book is small-what's worse,
I'm writing nothing new:
Whatever time I have for verse
I'd rather spend with you.

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Zhuravli ( English: The Cranes) is one of the most famous Russian songs to come out of World War II.

Sometimes it seems to me that soldiers,
Who didn't return from bloody fields,
Didn't lie down into our ground,
But turned into white cranes.
And they are flying and screaming to us from afar,
May be therefore we often ruefully falls silent?
Looking in the sky.

The weary wedge of cranes is flying, flying in the sky,
It flies in the fog at the end of day.
A small interval inside this wedge
Probably is reserved for me.
A day will come when me with cranes' flock,
Will fly in the same blue sky,
From the sky calling those, whom I left on the ground,
On birds' language

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IF IN THIS WORLD A THOUSAND MEN…

If in this world a thousand men
With love for you are smarting,
Know that among those thousand men
Am I, Rasul Gamzatov.

If to your love
one hundred men
Enrol as willing martyrs,
Among them seek the mountaineer
By name Rasul Gamzatov.

If ten fine fellows you entrance,
Among those glad to barter
Their fortune for a loving glance
Am I, Rasul Gamzatov.

Should but one lover seek your hand
With fearless, peerless ardour,
Be sure the man's none other than
The mountaineer, Gamzatov.

Should no one for your favours plead,
And sit you broken-hearted,
Upon a graveyard stone go read:

Here lies Rasul Gamzatov.
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My elder brother died twelve years ago
Upon the battlefield of Stalingrad.

My aged mother nurses still her woe
And goes about the house in mourning clad.

And there is pain and bitterness for me
In knowing I am older now than he.
 

Presented by Aksa Garsein