Envy not your friend if hes more handsome,
More intelligent or wealthier than you.
Let his merits and let his successes
Not tear up the laces on your shoe.
Move along your way without a care,
Smile still broader out of his success!
Maybe hell face darkness and despair
And your porch will be adorned with bliss!
Laugh with him, and cry with his distresses:
Feel him with your heart, and for all time!
Do not block your friend from his successes:
Its a sin to do so! Truly, its a crime!
Не завидуй другу, если друг богаче,
Если он красивей, если он умней.
Пусть его достатки, пусть его удачи
У твоих сандалий не сотрут ремней…
Двигайся бодрее по своей дороге,
Улыбайся шире от его удач:
Может быть, блаженство — на твоём пороге,
А его, быть может, ждут нужда и плач.
Плачь его слезою! смейся шумным смехом!
Чувствуй полным сердцем вдоль и поперёк!
Не препятствуй другу ликовать успехом:
Это — преступленье! Это — сверхпорок!
«Don’t seduce me into captivity, / Don’t entice me with hearth and home, / Don’t immure me living and breathing / Inside four walls. There’s no chamber for which a poet / Would exchange her homelessness, – / That’s why the cuckoo cuckoos / That she hasn’t got a nest.»
«Voice Enormous city. Wind. Evening. / Lights flicker in the dark, / And you, madman, are off in search of / A soul mate in each passerby. / Calm down, stop acting crazy, poet, / Resign yourself to orphan-hood / And do not pester with your cries / The people there who pass you by. Poe...»
«Kneeling on the hard window sill / And thrust out the window – a gaping fish mouth! / A breath…a breath of air…Like a living corpse / Who sucks life from a gray oxygen bag, / And whose heart thumps: time to go! time to go! / And sky’s heavy arch weighs on the earth, / And the whi...»
«As a shade with three dimensions, brother, / It isn’t easy to drag out one’s fate! / Moscow’s madhouse now is overcrowded, / And the cemetery also has no space / For your dust in roomy crypts or coffins, – / Now you’re buried in a metal saucepan. Seems the world’s no longer s...»