A Nereid
translated from the Russian by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Among the glaucous waves that kiss gold Tauris’ beaches
I saw a Nereid, as dawn flushed heaven’s reaches.
I barely dared to breathe, hid in the olive trees,
While the young demigoddess rose above the seas;
Her young, her swan-white breast above the waters lifting,
From her soft hair she wrung the foam in garlands drifting.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 4, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“A Nereid” was translated and published by Babette Deutsch and her husband, Avrahm Yarmolinsky, in Modern Russian Poetry: An Anthology (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921). In Folktales and Fairy Tales: Traditions and Texts from around the World (Greenwood, 2016), edited by scholars Anne E. Duggan, Donald Haase, and Helen J. Callow, they write, “[Pushkin’s] interest in and deep knowledge of folk traditions, songs, lyrics, and proverbs, as well as myth, is also manifested in several poems." In their introduction to Pushkin’s poetry, Deutsch and Yarmolinsky write, “He is an over-shadowing figure [of Russian poetry], and his work is an essential part of Russia’s literary endowment.”
Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, born on June 6, 1799, in Moscow, was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic Movement.