Andrei Voznesensky
Nostalgia for the present

I don’t know about the rest of you,
but I feel the cruelest
nostalgia — not for the past —
but nostalgia for the present.

A novice desires to approach the Lord
but is permitted to do so only by her Superior.
I beg to be joined, without intermediary,
to the present.

It’s as if I had done something wrong,
Not I even — but others.
I fall down in a field and feel
nostalgia for the living earth.

No one can ever tear you away,
and yet when I embrace you again
I feel overcome by terrible pain
as if you were being stolen from me.

When I hear the nasty tirades
of a friend who has taken a false step,
I don’t look for what he seems to be,
I grieve for what he really is.

A window opening on a garden
will not redeem loneliness.
I long not for art — I choke
on my craving for reality.

And when the Mafia laughs in my face
idiotically, I say:
“Idiots are all in the past. The present
calls for fuller understanding.”

Black water spurts from the faucet,
Brackish water, stale water,
rusty water flows from the faucet — I’ll wait
for the real water to come.

Whatever is past is past. So much the better.
But I bite at it as at a mystery,
nostalgia for the impending
present.
And I’ll never catch hold of it.

Translated by Vera Dunham and H. W. Tjalsma