In summery

Recently, EDITUS Publishing has released a collection of selected poems and translations by one of our authors Genrikh Vardenga. It is called "Coda" - that is a part in piece of music that concisely summarises its main topics. In this case, it concerns the main genres of the author's oeuvre. Today we publish the author's foreword to the collection. A selection of poems from the new collection is published in the Russian version of the newspaper. An electronic version of the collection can be purchased at LitRes.

FROM THE AUTHOR

Since childhood, I have dreamed of becoming a litterateur - but the youth of the thaw era and passion for science won: instead of lyrics I took up physics. I graduated from the Faculty of Physics and postgraduate study at Tbilisi State University, then I worked at the Tbilisi Institute of Physics and since 1965 I have come to work in Dubna, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. My scientific biography involves not only the Laboratory of High Energy Physics, where I have defended my Ph.D. thesis and have worked for almost 30 years, but also the Museum of our Institute, one of the founders of which I was. I have been the Head of the Museum since 1992. Today, owing to age, I have started to work as an adviser to JINR Directorate and I have also created a website of artwork of JINR staff members.

Yet, literature has never left me. Throughout these years I have carved out time for it: I wrote a popular science book on the correlation between nuclear physics and astrophysics, "The Universe of Particles" (co-authored with E.O.Okonov. M., Sov. Russia, 1972) and more than two dozen popular scientific articles. But for all these years poetry and verse translation have been my passion. In 1961, wishing to reach the professional level of translation, I graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages in absentia and since the 1970s I have written for well-known journals, firstly, for "Chemistry and Life", which traditionally had a strong literary department, then for "Youth" and other journals. Soon books were also published: the leading publishing houses Raduga, Eksmo, Azbuka, Yauza, Rech and others released my collections of translations of English humorous poetry and poems for children.

However, for various reasons, many of the written works have not been included in these journals: either the topic did not coincide, or the volume did not fit. As a result, I have got a whole series of unpublished lyrics, which I present to your attention in this book. At the same time, it also gives an idea of two other areas of my literary activity - poems for children and translations, a significant part of which has not yet focused attention of publishers either. I have chosen what I especially like. Hence the name of the book, "Coda" - the final part of the piece of music that summarises its main topics.

2022