Anna Akhmatova
By night I make my way through Tsarskoe Selo...

By night I make my way through Tsarskoe Selo,
this artificial world, perfect garden of the Tsars,
unreal and ideal as a scene in a snow-globe.
I know there’ll be winter games and play here,
come daylight, the dry crunch of skis on the slopes
of these delightful hills, now pale
in the moon’s illumination.

Lights burn in the windows of the palace
which is so far away it seems silent.
There are no longer any proper roads
through the park, just footpaths hacked in the ice.

There’s a willow here beside its frozen brook;
they say that in these trees live rusalki,
water-spritis, the souls of girls
who drowned themselves for blighted love.

Rusalka, let me pass. Willow, you whose branches
are ghostly with snow—offer your cold shelter
to the crows, to the black crows, not to me.

Translated by Seraphina Powell