Bella Akhmadulina
Twilight

There is a freedom blissful in a twilight
From the marked ciphers of a century, of year, day.
When? - that's not important. Here's the entrance, rather,
Into the depth of park, into the fires' flash.

Not in a moisture, satiating flower,
Nor in the trees, full with a feel of love,
There's no any proof of such a century,
Take other one — and live another time.

With a mistake of eye, with error of my spirit
I'm taken back into the alleys old
And stroll them through. An old woman oncoming,
As if she recognized, looks strangely on.

At noon this place is dezerted and empty,
In twilight I can see all wit my eyes:
A house, where a happy family
Irrelevantly and with passion loves,

Where any time a guest is waited for a feast —
To fuss, to redden and to kiss the hands,
Where I was beckoned with a hand to it,
Where never I could be a real guest.

But if there the force to the careless voices
Is given to be silence of sky, waters, —
What fingers babble over the keys of piano? —
What laces are to the grief cicle going?

How did I get their charity of welcome,
That slow, settled by the people, waltz,
The old dance, the old and strange token
Of alien melancholy, of love alien also?

It's possible for my mind and for my ear
To keep a play, where a river acts,
And then an old woman, empty field,
A village with the three blind lights.

There my soul's smile inarticulate are roaming
In state of all-forgetting, so far,
In that land native which's strange, vital error
Will give me foreign land of language and of ground.

But, scared by the dakness, my mind
Gets soberness, but races, wants to know
The clear drawing of the living stuff,
My age, my hour, my table, bed and home.

Yet, straying in the vortex, full of dew,
I hear the wild language (maybe curse?),
Of the transistorized reciever anew,
Clutched in the fists, uncompromising claws.

Translated by Lyudmila Purgina