Boris Pasternak
To Anna Akhmatova

I seem adroit at picking words
As primordial as your words are.
If wrong, — it’s all the same to me,
I’ll go on making errors anyway.

I hear patter on wet roofs, and eclogues
That fade from boardwalks and cobblestones.
A certain city, distinct from the first line,
Thrives and sounds in every syllable.

Encircled by spring, but can’t get out
Of town. Clients press with orders.
By lamplight, eyes with tears still sew
As dawn, whose back can’t straighten, burns.

Inhaling the placid Ladoga in the distance,
She hurries to the water with her strength
Exhausted, and finds no picnic party.
Canals reek of stagnant shipping packing.

The hot wind surfs along the surface
Like a nutshell and flutters the eyelids
Of stars and boughs and lamps and landmarks,
While the seamstress stares of in the distance from a bridge.

Eyes can see quite sharply in different ways,
Images can in different ways be quite sharp.
But an expanse of terrible strength
Stretches each night of the white nights’ gaze.

So I see the way you look, and the way you look.
It does not hint at the pillar of salt
That five years ago froze you in rhyme
With the dismay of your looking back. 

But from the shoots of your first books
On which the grain of prose grew ripe,
The way you look, like an electric spark,
Compels events to pulse.

Translated by Don Mager