When the moonlight dispassionately illuminates
The world that is asleep at night,quite all this world,
Sometimes it seems this light just penetrates
In the departed world like under a burial vault.
By the moonlight it seems this world is afterlife,
And that before this life we lived somewhere,
That we — is not we but an echo of other life
Like prisoners in a prison without an exit there.
We scurry about this mysterious prison as shadows,
The future is alien to us, the past we just forgot,
And being wrapped in dreams so steeped in leaden drowse,
We do not live but only the right to live just hold...
Когда свет месяца бесстрастно озаряет
Заснувший ночью мир и всё, что в нём живет,
Порою кажется, что свет тот проникает
К нам, в отошедший мир, как под могильный свод.
И мнится при луне, что мир наш — мир загробный,
Что где-то, до того, когда-то жили мы,
Что мы — не мы, послед других существ, подобный
Жильцам безвыходной, таинственной тюрьмы.
И мы снуём по ней какими-то тенями,
Чужды грядущему и прошлое забыв,
В дремоте тягостной, охваченные снами,
Не жизнь, но право жить как будто сохранив...
«I do not deserve this praise, rather, / And Sappho doesn’t matter in that, / I know the reason another, / But nothing of it can be read. / Let somebody save self by running, / And others — by nods from their "bliss". / These poems were all underlying / With text, that’s like look...»
«The twenty first. Monday. Night. / The outline of the capital in mist. / It had to be some idler who contrived / The happy fantasy that love exists. And from laziness or acclimation, / All believed him, and moved along: / Awaiting dates, and dreading separations, / And venerating love i...»
«I'm careless of the ode’s exalted sentence / And of the elegy’s delicious guile. / I say the verse should ill befit the senses, / Escape the common file. If you could know what gibberish empowers / The verse that grows, from all abashment freed, / Like dandelions’ yellow summer fl...»
«How is your life with that other one? / Simpler, is it? A stroke of the oars / and a long coastline — / and the memory of me is soon a drifting island / (not in the ocean — in the sky!) / Souls — you will be sisters — / sisters, not lovers. How is your life with an ordinary / ...»