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...
«Over dull grey wastes of water / winds are massing darkening storm-clouds. / There ‘twixt clouds and surging sea-waves / proudly soars the Stormy Petrel, / darting sheer like jet-black lightening. / Now he skims the foam with wing-tip, / now — and arrow shooting cloudward, — / he...»
«There, where the sunrise is sprinkling / Water of red where the cabbage bed sits. / The small maple nuzzling his mother / Impatiently sucks her green tits.»
«Snow gone, mounds of clay are drying. / Mold of mushrooms on the foothills. / On the plains the wind is dancing — / Like a gentle small red donkey. Smells of pine and pussy willow... / Heaven sometimes sighs — and dozes. / And a sparrow reads his psalter / At the pulpit of the fore...»
«It was morning, and in the rye-bin, / Where the rows of gold mats were spread, / A dog littered seven puppies, / Seven puppies, brownish-red. She fondled them until evening / And combed them smooth with her tongue, / While the light snow melted beneath her / Where her warm belly hung. ...»