How cleanly the skies are extinguished.
With what delicate caprice
The distant forests recede to those
Heights we knew as azure...
In your eyes there is no reproach:
Like a memory you meet the
Burning - out of sunset clouds
And the bluish-pink reflection.
But I do not conquer my anguish:
In the wastes of the burnt-out sky
I see the lifeless daybreak
From a never-setting Erebus.
Let us depart... I can no longer
Stand the congealing of these clear-cut
Lines and this pasteboard-blue canopy...
Let there be sun or night!..
Как чисто гаснут небеса,
Какою прихотью ажурной
Уходят дальние леса
В ту высь, что знали мы лазурной…
В твоих глазах упрека нет:
Ты туч закатных догоранье
И сизо-розовый отсвет
Встречаешь, как воспоминанье.
Но я тоски не поборю:
В пустыне выжженного неба
Я вижу мертвую зарю
Из незакатного Эреба.
Уйдем… Мне более невмочь
Застылость этих четких линий
И этот свод картонно-синий…
Пусть будет солнце или ночь!..
«For a hundred days grenades have been piercing / The bloodstained Malakhov hill.1 / And the red-haired British soldiers / Are storming it, marching to a harsh drum’s beat. And the fortress, Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka, / Is submerged in peaceful, normal sleep. / A lieutenant with a limp,...»
«We saw death at rather close range, / and perhaps we could have died ourselves, / we walked wherever it was possible to walk, / and looked at everything that one could look at. / We climbed into trenches / drenched with the smell of creosote / and “sake” spilt on the sand, / where ...»
«To A. Surkov Remember, Alyosha, the roads of Smolensk, / The cruel, the endlessly falling rain, / The tired women bringing us earthenware vessels, / And hugging them, like children, from the rain, How they wiped their eyes, stealthily, / And whispered on parting: “May God protect you! / ...»
«On an accordion which had seen plenty, / Moving his fingers over husky keys, / In an unfamiliar car the blind man played / The song “Along the Highway.”1 Blinded near Molodechno, / Back in that other, different war, / Straight from the clinic, he had set out, crippled, / His eyes sh...»