Arseny Tarkovsky
Things

With every passing day it is becoming harder
To find the things I lived with when a child so well.
Where are the "lightening" lamps? Where is black powder?
Where is black water from the bottom of the well?

Where is "Isle of Dead" in decadency framing?
Where are the photographs of moustached people?
Where are the plush red sofas, who can tell me?
Where are cane airplanes, so nice and simple?

Where's Nadson's sickly TB trimeter?
Where a the cards on pretty-pretty lawyers,
Where are triangular galoshes smelling bitter,
And ostrich comfort from the sloping shoulders?

Where are the curls of tipsy symbolists, who knows?
Where are the futurists' dinner conversations?
Where are chestnuts and lime-trees with their mottoes?
Where are the crazy guns and flagrant violations?

Where are the "hard sign" and the other Russian letter?
One has been gone, the other one was changed,
And what wasn't separated by a comma, later
Was severed by the loss of life and snag and age.

I've done so little for the future, really.
But it's the future that I miss so badly.
And I don't want to start all over, willy-nilly,
Maybe, I haven't worked in vain so heartily.

Where is the new companions `s warnings
That they belong to me by right
I dare encroach on my grandchild's belongings
The bread of great grandson, and his son's glory.

Translated by Alec Vagapov