Boris Pasternak
The highest sickness

The shifting riddle glitters,
the siege goes on, days go on,
the months and years go by.
One lovely day, the messengers,
panting and falling off their feet,
came bearing news: the fort had fallen.
They believe and don’t believe, set fires,
blow up the vaults, seek the points of entry,
they come and go — the days go by.
The months and years go by.
The years go by — in shadow.
It’s the rebirth of the Trojan epic.
They believe and don’t believe, set fires,
agitate and wait for the break;
they falter, go blind—the days go by —
and the walls of the fort fall apart.

I grow more and more ashamed every day
that in an age of shadows
the highest sickness escapes censure
and goes by the name of song.
Is Sodom the proper name for song
learned by ear the hard way,
then hurled out of hooks
only to be skewered by spears and bayonets?
Hell is paved with good intentions.
The current notion is
that by paving your poems with them
your sins will be forgiven.
Such gossip rips the ears of silence
on its way back from the war,
and these devastating days have shown
how taut our hearing’s strung.

In those turbulent days everyone
was infected with a passion for rumors,
and lice made winter twitch
like the ears of spooked horses,
and all night snowy ears
rustled quietly in darkness
while we tossed fairy tales back and forth,
reclining on peppermint cushions.
In Spring the upholstery
of theater boxes was seized with trembling.
Poverty-stricken February
groaned, coughed blood,
and tiptoed off to whisper
into the ears of boxcars
about this and that,
railroad ties and tracks,
the thaw, and babbled on, of troops
foot-slogging home from the front.
You sleep, waiting for death,
but the narrator doesn’t care.
In the ladles of thawed galoshes
the cloth lice will swallow the lie
tied to the truth without
ceasing to twitch their ears.
Although the dawn thistle
kept on chasing its shadow
and in the same motion
made the hour linger;
although, as before, the dirt road
dragged the wheels over soft white sand
and spun them onto harder ground
alongside signs and landmarks;
although the autumn sky was cloudy,
and the forest appeared distant,
and the twilight was cold and hazy;
anyway, it was all a forgery.
And the sleep of the stunned earth
was convulsive, like labor pains,
like death, like the silence
of cemeteries, like that unique quiet
that blankets the horizon,
shudders, and beats its brains
to remember: Hold on, prompt me,
what did I want to say?

Although, as before, the ceiling,
installed to support a new cell,
lugged the second story to the third
and dragged the fifth to the sixth
suggesting by this shift that everything
was as it used to be —
and anyway, it was all a forgery;
and through the network of water pipes
rushed the hollow reverberation
of a dark age; the stench
of laurel and soybean,
smoldering in the flames of newspapers
even more indigestible than these lines,
rises into air like a pillar
as though muttering to itself: Hold on, prompt me,
what did I want to eat?

And crept like a famished tapeworm
from the second floor to the third,
and stole from the fifth to the sixth.
It gloried in callousness and regression,
declared tenderness illegal.
What could be done? All sound
drowned in the roar of torn skies.
The roar passed the railroad platform
then vanished beyond the water tower
and drifted to the end of the forest,
where the hills broke out in rashes,
where snowdrifts
pumped through the pines,
and the blinded tracks itched
and rubbed against the blizzard.

And against the backdrop of blazing legends,
the idiot, the hero, the intellectual
burned in decrees and posters
for the glory of a dark force,
that carried them with a grin
around blind corners, if not
for heroic acts, then because two and two
won’t add up to a hundred in a day.
And at the rear of blazing legends,
the idealist-intellectuals
wrote and printed posters
on the joys of their twilight.

Huddled in sheepskin, the serf
looked back at the darkening north
where snow gave all it had
to ward off death by twilight.
The railroad station glistened
like a pipe organ in mirrored ice,
and groaned with opened eyes.
And its wild beauty quarreled
with an empty Conservatory
shut down for holiday repairs.
The insidiously silent typhus
gripped our knees, and dreamt
and shuddered as he listened
and heard the stagnant gushing
of monotonous remorse.
The typhus knew all the gaps in the organ
and gathered dust in the seams
of the bellows’ burlap shirts.
His well-tuned ears implored
the fog, the ice, and the puddles
splattered over the earth
to keep their silence out of the rain.

We were the music of ice.
I mean my own crowd — we pledged
to quit this stage together,
and I will quit — someday.
There is no room left for shame.
I wasn’t put on this earth
to gaze three ways into men’s eyes.
More insidious than this song
is the double-crossing word “enemy.”
I am a guest, and guests all over
the world are the highest sickness.
I wanted to be like everyone else,
but our glorious age
is stronger than my grief
and tries to mimic me.

We were the music of cups,
gone to sip tea in the dark
of deaf forests, oblique habits,
and secrets flattering to no one.
Frosts crackled. Pails hung.
Jackdaws soared and the frostbitten year
was ashamed to show up at the gates.
We were the music of thought
and sought to sweep the stairs,
but as the cold froze,
ice blurred the passage.

Yet I witnessed the Ninth Congress
of the Soviets¹ and, in the raw twilights,
ran from place to place in the city,
cursing life, cursing the cobblestones,
and on the second day, the fabled
day of celebration, went
to the theater in a frantic mood
with a pass to the orchestra pit.
While walking soberly on somber rails
I glanced around: the entire countryside
was a smoldering ash heap,
stubbornly refusing to rise
off the railway ties.
The Karelian question² stared
from every poster and raised
the question in the eyes of anemic birches.
Thick snow ribboned the crossbars
of telegraph poles and in the fabric
of branches the winter day was shutting down,
not of its own accord, but in response
to a command. At that instant,
like a moral in a fairy tale,
the story of the Congress was revealed:
telling again how the fever of genius
is stronger and whiter than cement.
(Whoever didn’t help push that pushcart
should suffer it in the future.)
How suddenly, at the end of a week,
the walls of a Citadel arose
in the blinded eyes of the creator,
or at least a dwarfish fort.³

The new feeds the rows of ages,
but its golden pie, wolfed down
before tradition can steep the sauce,
sticks in your throat.
Now, from a certain distance
the trivial details blur,
the stereotypical speeches are forgotten.
Time levels the details
where trivia once prevailed.
The farce was not prescribed
to cure my trials and tribulations.
And yet I have no memory of how
the voting went so smoothly.
I’ve managed to exorcise that day,
when, from the bottom of the sea,⁴
through a yawning Japanese abyss,
a telegram was able to distinguish
(what a scholarly deep-sea diver!)
classes of octopi from the working classes.
But those fire-breathing mountains
were beyond the range of its concern.
There were countless dumber things to do
than classifying Pompeii.
For a long time I knew by heart
that scandalous telegram
we sent the victims of the tragedy
to soften the roar of Fujiyama
with more pabulum from our Trade Unions.

Wake up, poet, show your pass.
You can’t yawn at a time like this.
Msta, Ladoga, Sheksna, Lovat.⁵
Leap from box seats over the chairs into the pit.
Once again from Proclamation Hall,⁶
through the door that opened southward,
Peter the Great’s arctic blizzard
fanned past the lamps.
Again the frigate went broadside.
Again gulping tidal waves
the child of treason and deceit
doesn’t recognize its country.
Everything was drowsing, while
from under the Tsar’s train,
with a wild shout,
hunters’ packs scattered over the ice.
Tradition hid its stature
behind the railroad structure,
under the railroad bridge.
The pullman cars and the veiled
two-headed eagles lingered
in a black field where the earth
heaved with the odor of March.
At Porkovo, a watery tarpaulin
billowed for a hundred nautical miles;
the gunpowder factory yawned
over the long Baltic shore.

And the two-headed eagle slowed down,
and circled the Pskov region
where the ring of anonymous rebellion
was tightening.
If only they could find a road
not marked on maps!
But the stock of railroad ties
checked on maps was melting fast.
Still meticulous in crisis
they stoked with only the choicest cloth.
Streams gamboled along the tracks;
the future sank in the mud.
The circle shrank, the pines thinned out —
two suns met in the window:
one rising over Tosno;
the other sinking over Dno.⁷

How should I finish my fragment?⁸
I remember his turn of phrase
that struck at me with a white flame
like a whiplash of lightning bolts.
The audience rose and with squinting eyes
scanned the far table
when he grew onto the platform,
grew before he reached the stage.
He slithered invisibly
through rows of obstacles
like a ball of storm
bolting into a smokeless room.
The roar of ovations broke over us
like relief, like the explosion
of a nucleus that has to explode
in a ring of hurdles and supports.
And he opened his mouth. “We are here
to remember... the monuments...” What in that moment
came to exemplify only him?

He was — like the thrust of a rapier.
Chasing the stream of his talk
he thumbed his vest, planted his heel,
and hammered his point home.
He could have been talking about axle grease
but the taut bow of his body
exuded that naked essence
which tore through the layers of husks.
But his naked guttural tones
punctured our ears with truths
implied by the blood of fables:
he was their sound reflection.
Envious with the envy of ages,
jealous with their singular jealousy,
he lorded over their thoughts
and because of that — over their country.

When I saw him there on the stage
I dwelled endlessly, to no end,
on his authority and right
to strive from the first person.

From the rows of generations
someone steps to the front.
A genius, bearing the promise of thaws, enters
and revenges his departure with terror.

____
1. The Ninth Congress of Soviets took place in 1921 in the Bolshoi Theater.
2. The “Karelian question” concerned the strengthening of Soviet power in Karelia, which was later annexed as the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic after the war with Finland.
3. Reference to events in the French Revolution.
4. In the spring of 1924 a gigantic earthquake in Japan killed about 250,00 people in Tokyo alone.
5. The reference is to the delegates from these small towns.
6. In the Smolny Palace where Lenin made his proclamation of Soviet power.
7. Tosno is a small town southeast of Leningrad. Dno is a small town due south of Leningrad.
8. Pasternak gives his impression of Lenin’s speech to the Ninth Congress of Soviets.

Translated by Mark Rudman and Bohdan Boychuk