Blue sky
yellow field.
Blue mountain
yellow field.
Across the empty plain
an olive tree goes walking.
A single
olive tree.
Paisaje sin canción
Cielo azul
campo amarillo.
Monte azul
campo amarillo.
Por la llanura desierta
va caminando un olivo.
Un solo
olivo.
Philip Nikolayev, born in 1966, is a poet living in Boston. He grew up in Moldova in the former USSR. A polyglot, he translates poetry from several languages. He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degrees from Harvard and a PhD from Boston University, where he defended his thesis on Samuel Beckett under the advisorship of Christipher Ricks. Nikolayev’s poetic works are published internationally, including such periodicals Poetry, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, and Grand Street. He is the author of several collections of verse, including Monkey Time (Wave Books; winner of the 2001 Verse Prize) and Letters from Aldenderry (Salt), and coeditor-in-chief of Fulcrum: An Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics. His volume of Pushkin translations, The Star of Dazzling Ecstasy, was published by Tiptop Street in 2021. He has lately been translating Ukrainian War Poetry.
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