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...
«Every second of our time together / We exulted, as if it were epiphany, / We two alone in the world. Lighter / And braver than a bird’s wing, / You flew down the stairs / Like dizziness, skipping half of them, / Through wet lilacs into your realm / On the other side of the mirror. ...»
«Here, a house once stood. Inside, some old man / lived with a child. And now the house is gone. A hundred kilo bomb — the earth, blacker than black. / A home, now none. That’s war; what can be done? On a heap of gray rags, a samovar gleams. / A dresser, nearby a horse. Above the horse, ...»
«The gun battery was over there, behind that hill. / We cannot hear it, but its thunder remains still, / around us, the corpses lie beneath the snow, / and in the icy air, their arms are still flailing. / Who would dare to trample this field now? / Today, the dead ones rise again. Now they...»
«I bid farewell to everything I was, / everything I despised, disliked, and loved. And now, a new life begins, / I bid farewell to yesterday’s skin. About me, I no longer need any news. / I bid goodbye — right to the marrow. At last, I look down on what I was, / see my separate soul, n...»