Fyodor Tyutchev
Insomnia

Monotonous dying of the hours:
midnight is telling a tedious tale
in a foreign language we can’t fail
to recognise as ours.

Who can claim it never befell
him to hear time’s muffled groans
stab his soul at night, the drone,
when all’s quiet, of a prescient farewell?

It’s as if the world had been orphaned
by irresistible fate chased and caught,
and nature, after we had fought,
had marooned us, each on his separate island.

Before us there stands our existence,
a spectre on earth’s edge,
and with our friends and with our age
it pales into the distance.

While under the sun there is a birth,
a new and youthful tribe’s begotten
and it has long since been forgotten
that we, our friends, our age, were ever on this earth!

At times, performing some gloomy rite,
we can her metallic sighs
bemoaning our demise
in the silence of the night.

Translated by Frank Jude