Boris Pasternak
The Christmas Star

The winter brought chill
And winds from the steppe.
The newborn was feeling the cold in his crib
Inside of the hill.

To warm him, an ox came to breath in their midst.
Home beasts round the cave
Stood still in a daze;
The manger was steeped in a warm floating mist.

Done shaking their sheepskins to shed the bed chaff
And remnants of millet seed,
The waking shepherds took heed
And peered through the dark from the top of the cliff.

Way off was a field, all but snow at a glance,
Some graves with fences around,
A shaft abandoned snowbound,
And over the graveyard - a sky full of stars.

Up close, not ever before revealed to them,
More hesitant than a bowl,
A star in flight to its goal
Was glimmering on the way to Bethlehem.

It glittered above like a rick in a blaze
Aside from the skies and god,
Like arson embers still hot,
Like farmland on fire with a barnfloor in flames.

It towered as would have a bright burning stack
Of straw and hay ready-made,
Amid the universe swayed
And alarmed by the star in flight on its track.

The glowing above was amazingly bright
And had some meaning, for sure.
Three wise men followed the lure
And hastened toward the unspeakable light.

Behind them were camels with gifts of goodwill
And donkeys, each tinier to a degree,
Descending in minuscule steps down the hill.

And oddly some visions arose quite as real
Of all future things that were later to be:
All thoughts and all worlds and all dreams to fulfill,
All destinies of galleries and museums,
All fairies’ capers and all sorcerers’ whims,
All things children dream of and all Christmas thrill.

All fluttering candles and all the gold thread,
All sumptuousness of the colorful frill…
…All wicked and wild, the wind swept from the steppe…
…All apples and baubles, all laughter at will.

The pond was half shadowed by an alder tree;
The other half, though, was a good view from here
Through nests of the rooks and the branch canopy.
How camels and donkeys passed on by the weir
The shepherds had excellent chances to see.

“Let’s walk to the miracle - one to revere,”
They uttered and straightened their sheep coats in glee.

It got pretty hot from the shuffling on snow.
Like wedges of mica that shone in the night
Were prints of bare feet at the hut left and right.
The dogs would all growl in the star’s vivid glow
At footprints as though at a faint candlelight.

The night was itself like a magical tale,
And someone from snow-pummeled summits would slide
And join imperceptibly in with their kind.
Along came the dogs looking back down the trail
And tailed the young herdboy and looked quite uptight.

Down that very road, through the same very scene
Came several angels who stayed in the crowd.
Their incorporeity made them unseen
But steps they were taking left prints on the ground.

A mass of humanity thronged by the rock.
The daylight just broke. It illumined the pines.
“And who might you be, folks,” asked Mary of them.
We’re shepherds by trade and stewards of the skies.
We’ve come to see both of you and eulogize.
“No, wait. You’re too many,” she said taking stock.

At dawn gray as ash before early sunrise,
The drovers and sheepmen milled round and gawked;
Some horsemen and walking folks angrily talked;
The beasts for their drink to a hollowed log flocked
Where camels stood moaning and mules rolled their eyes.

Day broke and was sweeping the stars off the skies
Like last tiny embers that someone forgot.
And it was the magi she took in the grot,
Of all the riff-raff in so many a guise.

He shone while asleep in his crib made of oak
As if a bright moonbeam inside a tree hole.
To give him some warmth, there was not a sheep coat
But bovine nostrils and the lips of a mule.

They stood in the shadowy dusk of the shed
And whispered but felt at a loss what to say.
Then someone from twilight stepped forth on the left
And patted a magus aside on the way.
He turned: right behind him, a star like a guest
Was watching the Virgin on that Christmas day. 

Translated by Yuri Menis