Why am I too amicable with others
Feeling that of all he is the farthest?
Why can’t I though shunning him elsewhere
Still not run him into, here and there?
Why on seeing him do I get angry,
At all exasperated, all and sundry?
Why when I am left with him in private
Do I scoff at him offended by it?
Afterwards the night through I'll be crying.
Who can tell the answer, who is prying?
Отчего со всеми я любезна,
Только с ним нас разделяет бездна?
Отчего с ним, хоть его бегу я,
Не встречаться всюду не могу я?
Отчего, когда его увижу,
Словно весь я свет возненавижу?
Отчего, как с ним должна остаться,
Так и рвусь над ним же издеваться?
Отчего — кто разрешит задачу? —
До зари потом всю ночь проплачу?
«Take for joy from my outstretched palms / A little honey and a little sun / As we were implored by the bees of Proserpine. No one can loose a boat that is unmoored. / No one can hear the shadow shod in fur. / One cannot track down fear in the dense forest of life. We are left only with kis...»
«Through the dark gypsy camp, the streets of night, I shall be rushing / Seeking a blossoming alder branch in a black-springed sleigh, / For a bonnet of snow I shall be searching, for the endless mill-wheel noise. I remember a chestnut strand of hair — as a misfired shot / Smoked through wit...»
«I cannot breathe; the solid earth wriggles with worms / and not a star speaks out. / Yet the gods know there is music aloft, / for the station trembles, the Aonians sing, / and, soon to be rent by the engine s whistle, / the air sleeps like a violin. A gleaming park. The glass dome of the...»
«Return to my city, dearer to me than tears, / to its veins, the swollen glands of childhood nights, / return, remembering — swallow, O quickly then / the codliver oil of Leningrad’s rivered lights. / Recognize swiftly that small day of December: / see, in the sinister asphalt, egg yolk...»