Eduard Bagritsky
The bird-catcher

A bird-catcher’s job takes practice:
Learn the habits of the birds,
Know the time of their migrations.
Duplicate their different calls.

But as he roams down the roadways,
Spending a night by a fence,
Diedel is happy, Diedel does
Sing his songs and catch his birds.

Nightingales jug-jug their song-pipes
In the moist, round elder bush;
Titmice twitter in a pine tree;
Finches warble in a birch.

Diedel then pulls out precisely
From his precious haversack
Three lures, and to each bird singing
He now dedicates a lure.

He blows on a lure of elder,
And the lure of elder sings.
And within the elder bushes
Soon a nightingale replies.

He blows on a lure of pine wood,
And the lure of pine wood rings.
In the pine a titmouse twitters,
Scattering its tiny bells.

Diedel then pulls out precisely
Front his precious haversack
This, the smallest and most ringing —
The lure whittled out of birch.

He checks all the stops most gently,
Blows into the singing hole,
And beneath his breath the birch wood
Sings out in a high-pitched voice.

And when hearing that voice singing.
That voice of both tree and bird,
From the roadside’s slender birches
A finch warbles his loud song.

On beyond the country byways,
Where the din of carts is mute.
Over a pond thick with duckweed,
Diedel has put out his nets.

Many shades of blue above him.
Green below him, and the world
Is a giant bird before him,
Warbling, trilling, full of sons.

Happy Diedel thus goes walking
With a stick, a bird, a pack...
Through the Harz, the thick-grown forest.
By the green banks of the Rhine...

Through Thuringia with oak trees.
Through Saxonia with pines,
Through Westphalia s elder bushes.
Through Bavaria’s hopbines.

Martha, Martha, should you cry tears
Because Dicdcl walks the fields,
Because your dear Diedel whistles
To the birds — and laughs perchance?

Translated by Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks