Boris Pasternak
Parting

A man out of the courtyard gapes,
Not knowing what to say.
Her leave was much like an escape.
The house is disarrayed.

There’s chaos all around the room.
He cannot comprehend,
Because of tears, because of gloom,
The damage’s extent.

He hears a ringing in his ears.
Perhaps he’s going mad?
How come the notion of the seas
Is growing in his head?

When icy windows block the light
And one can barely see,
The suffocating grief is like
The deserts of the sea.

He dearly loved all of her traits
And he and she were close,
Like shores are intimate with waves
Along the whole wide coast.

Like rushes, after passing storms,
Can drown in the tide,
So drowned all her features, forms,
Within his soul that night.

In time of conflicts, struggles, when
His life had lost all sense,
The wave of fortune brought her in
To him out of the depths.

Through obstacles, in a frenzied stir,
From hazards they had steered.
These waves had carried, carried her
Until they brought them near.

And now, she suddenly took off.
Yes, she was overpowered!
The parting will consume them both,
By grief, they’ll be devoured.

The man now overlooks the place.
Before she left, she tossed
Out of the cupboard in a haste
Her dresses and her clothes.

He wanders, and until the night,
He folds the things she scattered.
Into the drawer on the side, —
Her scrap, her sewing patterns.

Next to her work, he slowly kneels.
The needle’s pointing up.
Before him she again appears,
And he begins to sob.

Translated by Andrey Kneller