Boris Pasternak
Mephistopheles

Every Sunday they left a circus of dust behind them,
as they poured out on the turnpike in stately, overcrowded carriages,
and the showers found nobody at home,
and trampled through the bedroom windows.

It was a custom at these staid Sunday dinners
to serve courses of rain instead of roastbeef;
on the baroque sideboard, by the Sunday silver,
the wind cut corners like a boy on a new bicycle.

Upstairs, the curtain rods whirled, untouched;
the curtains roared in salvos to the ceiling.
Outside the burghers kept losing themselves,
they showed up chewing straws by cowponds.

Earlier, when a long cortege of carriages
approached the city wall,
the horses would shy
from the shadows of the Weimar gallows.

The devil in blood-red stockings with rose rosettes
danced along the sunset-watered road —
he was as red
as a boiling lobster.

One snort of indignation
would have ripped the lid of heaven
from the skyline's low vegetation;
the devils ribbons fluttered and danced.

The carriages swam through his eyes like road signs;
he scarcely lifted a finger in greeting.
He rolled on his heels, he trembled with laughter,
he sidled off hugging Faust, his pupil.

Translated by Robert Lowell