Boris Pasternak
Night

The night is now departing
It’s lifting its dark shrouds,
And pilot, voyage starting,
Is bound for heaven’s clouds.

He’s swallowed in the vapour,
In jet plane disappeared,
A cross as marked by draper,
A blotch on linen sheared.

Below in foreign places
Are gay nocturnal bars,
And soldiers’, stokers’ faces,
And station’s railway cars.

Its wing is shadow spreading
Across the cloud on high.
And clustered stars are treading
Around it in the sky.

With dreadful, dreadful churning
And sickening display
To other worlds is turning
The slick of Milky Way.

And in the boundless spaces
Are continents on fire.
In subterranean places
The sleepless stokers tire.

In Paris under gable
Some Venus or a Mars
Is scanning tawdry playbill
Announcing some new farce.

At safe remove some fellow
In garret cannot sleep,
And candle flickers yellow
In tile-reflected leap.

A planet he peruses
As if the starry vault
Connection somehow chooses
With anxious night’s assault.

Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, but labour,
To work don’t set a bar,
Fight nodding off with sabre
Like pilot, like a star.

Don’t rest from art’s creation,
To sleep do not succumb.
For time’s incarceration
Must endless beat its drum.

Translated by Rupert Moreton