After plodding year after year
through towns in an alien land,
we have ground enough to despair —
and despair is where we must end.
For despair is our final refuge —
as if, midwinter, we had come
from Vespers in a nearby church,
through Russian snow, to our home.
За столько лет такого маянья
По городам чужой земли
Есть от чего прийти в отчаянье,
И мы в отчаянье пришли.
— В отчаянье, в приют последний,
Как будто мы пришли зимой
С вечерни в церковке соседней,
По снегу русскому, домой.
«You wake, o Baiae, from your tomb / With the appearance of Aurora's rays, / But crimson dawn will not return / The radiance of bygone days, / Will not bring back the cool of sanctuaries / Where swarms of beauties played, / And never will your columns of...»
«Bent o'er his sabre, torrents starting / From his dim eyes, the bold hussar / Thus greets his cherish'd maid, while parting / For distant fields of war: 'Weep not, my fair one! O forbear thee! / No anguish can those tears remove; / For, by my troth and beard, I swear thee, / Time ...»
«Again the snow-clogged pillars, / The Elagin Bridge1 / And the voice of a woman in love, / The crunch of sand, the horse’s snort. Two shadows, fused by a kiss, fly / By wrapped up in a bearskin rug, / But with this new captive lover / I am neither pining nor jealous. It is a sad deli...»
«To Maria Pavlovna Ivanova In the embankment’s mad roar, / A colored kerchief thrown over her hair, / She lies and watches, beautiful / And young, as though alive. With a chaste gait, she had walked / Toward noise and whistling beyond the neighboring wood — / The whole length of the p...»