Those poems that I wrote and forgot
and burnt before I could forget them —
there are not enough hammers and chisels
to knock them down and beat them down.
Those poems that I shouted out on the radio
and published in the newspaper:
better for me to have silenced them, so to speak —
I forged not steel but paper.
No matter! I'm still walking and breathing.
I'll still write something more revealing.
Те стихи, что я написал и забыл
И сжег перед тем, как забыть —
Не хватило б резцов, недостало б зубил,
Чтобы их сковырнуть или сбить.
Те стихи, что по радио я прокричал
И в газете опубликовал —
Лучше я бы их, так сказать, промолчал,
Я не сталь, а бумагу ковал.
Ничего! Я покуда хожу и дышу.
Я еще настоящее напишу.
«If I had known what would come later. / When first my stage career began. / The words will take to blood and slaughter. / Go for the throat and kill a man, To play with such a tangled living, / Point-blank refusal Pd have made, — / So far away was my beginning / My first concern was s...»
«In spring before the dawn we see / Heaps in the kitchen garden, / As pagans for fertility / Their festal altars burden. The fresh-cut clods flame in my plot; / In steams at early morning, / And all the earth becomes red-hot / Just like an oven burning. I cast aside this shirt of mine /...»
«This spring there is a change in everything. / More lively is the sparrows' riot. / I shall not even try to tell of it, / How bright my soul is and how quiet. My thoughts and writings are quite different, / And from the choir's loud octaves singing / The mighty voice of earth is audible /...»
«The drowsy garden scatters insects / Bronze as the ash from braziers blown. / Level with me and with my candle, / Hang flowering worlds, their leaves full grown. As into some unheard-of dogma / I move across into this night. / Where a worn poplar age has grizzled / Screens the moon’s ...»