A whispering, timid breathing,
A nightingale’s warbling,
The silver and the flux
Of a drowsy stream,
Night light, night shadows,
Shadows endlessly,
A series of magical changes
Of a dear face,
The purple of a rose in smoky clouds
A sheen of amber,
And kisses, and tears,
And the dawn, the dawn!..
Шёпот, робкое дыханье,
Трели соловья,
Серебро и колыханье
Сонного ручья,
Свет ночной, ночные тени,
Тени без конца,
Ряд волшебных изменений
Милого лица,
В дымных тучках пурпур розы,
Отблеск янтаря,
И лобзания, и слёзы,
И заря, заря!..
«If all silver that falls to us / At night from the moon, / And all gold that goes to us / From the sun at noon, I'd just bring to her...She'd tell me, / "Oh, my dear poet, / Give me such a precious metal / That is underground!"»
«When the moonlight dispassionately illuminates / The world that is asleep at night,quite all this world, / Sometimes it seems this light just penetrates / In the departed world like under a burial vault. By the moonlight it seems this world is afterlife, / And that before this life we lived...»
«A capricious, avaricious kind — / Like fire, the Russian mind is dire: / Irrepressible, lucidity for hire, / So gay — and gloom will always find. Like an undeviating needle, / It sees the pole in ripples and murky still; / From abstract daydreams in life’s cradle / It shows the co...»
«In my dreams I was catching the vanishing shadows, / All the vanishing shadows of fast-waning day, / I was mounting a tower, the stairs were atremble, / All the stairs were atremble as I went on my way. And the higher I mounted, the clearer I saw them, / All the clearer I saw them, the outl...»