Poetry
Босыя на вогнішчы
Not translated into English
Mihas Charot · 1922
Opening lines
Век новы: агню, дыму, попелу...
Будзе шмат каму горача,
Нам толькі цёпла,
Дармо што мы босыя!
A new age: of fire, smoke, ashes...
Many will find it hot,
For us it is only warm,
No matter that we are barefoot!
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from knihi.com
Synopsis
A long poem in twenty sections, without a continuous plot, which illustrates the years of revolution and of German and Polish occupations in Belarus. The barefoot, peasants and poor workers, stand around the blaze, which figures the class struggle, then enter the uprising, while churches and palaces burn and the lord, the priest, the bourgeois and the official flee. An interlude drawn from folklore, with the spirit of the forest and the water nymphs, cuts the song in its middle.
Context
The poem bears the date 1921 beneath its last lines and appeared in 1922, the same year as the collection Zavirucha. It has no plot: each section is an image, and the barefoot figure a whole people; its author regards the victims of the revolution as inevitable. Dialogues, shouted slogans and narrative verse follow one another. The text can be read today in the Belarusian digital library.
Who it is for
A poem in varied verse, in Belarusian, made up of cries and dialogues; no French or English translation.
Prizes and reception
Counted among its author's best-known works, whose central image, that of fire, it bears.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.