A Literary Journal of Critical Thinking
In the Samizdat Tradition of Writing against the Machine
A Forum for Examining the Dark Side of the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex
 

Physicists and Lyricists by Boris Slutsky

Slutsky was born in Slavyansk in the Ukraine and studied at the Moscow Institute of Jurisprudence and at the same time attended the Gorky Literary Institute.

Physicists and Lyricists 

Physicists are somehow much in honor;

Lyricists are somehow pushed aside.

It's not a question of cold calculation;

It's just a question of universal law.

It seems we’ve failed to find out what

We should have discovered long ago!

It seems our wings are rather weak—

Weak our mellifluous iambics!

And our steeds do not take off

And soar like Pegasi...

That's why physicists are held in honor;

That's why lyricists are pushed aside.

This is self-evident.

It's simply useless to dispute it.

It doesn't even hurt us.

And it is more interesting

To observe how, like foam,

Our rhymes keep flopping down,

And how soberly greatness retreats

Into the world of logarithms.