Konstantin Simonov
By The Campfire

The Spanish record turns.
Her slender body arching,
A black-shawled woman
Dances in a spinning circle.

Supported by a passionate faith
That someday he’ll return,
The everlasting words “Yo te quiero”
The dancing woman sings.

Inside a smoke-filled, frozen cottage
Under a ceiling made of logs and earth,
A man in a sheepskin and a cap with earflaps
Wants the record to be played for him again.

Now by the fire with the canned rations frying
He seeks some comfort for his wounds.
In the battle of Madrid he was wounded the first
And in the battle of Stalingrad the fifth time.¹

He closes his eyes in exhaustion.
He and the song — nothing more.
Is he sad? Perhaps. Who knows?
Who’d dare to ask him?

Gnawing their way silently through barbed wire,
His men are crawling over the snow.
The southern record, freezing,
Makes its final turns.

The dying light shines,
Shots and the blue of the snow...
In one of the little streets of Del Campo,
If you are still alive now,

If with the help of an unseen power
I could entice you straight to this cottage
And ask you where he is, that blue-eyed sweetheart
The man that you once loved so dearly.

You then, raising your lowered eyelids,
Would never recognize the man you knew
In this corpulent gray-haired fellow
With the new and formidable calling.

Well, now it’s time. Adjusting their machine guns
All of them will rise. But, stopping by the door,
He’ll suddenly remember and wink at the soldier:
“Come, wind it up so it follows us.”

A slender ray will flash brightly from the door,
And the snowstorm will at once embrace them.
But as before, rejoicing and believing,
The woman’s song will follow in their wake.

When the snow conceals him completely,
let her sing some more and let her wait.
The general is stubborn. At whatever cost
He’ll get to Madrid sometime.

____
1. Though Simonov explained that the poem was dedicated to many people who fought in Spain and not to any one person, the prototype of the poem’s hero is General M. S. Shumilov (1895-1975), who was a military adviser in Spain during the Civil War until he was forced to leave the country in 1939. Just four years later he was an army commander at the battle of Stalingrad and accepted the surrender of German General Von Paulus.

Translated by Lubov Yakovleva