Nothing but anniversaries, anniversaries...
Our liter reeks like a kitchen!
To judge by it, all Russia
Is teeming with great men:
After their deaths, it’s certain.
Following magnificent empty sanctimonies,
A hundred Pantheons
And a hundred Westminster Abbeys won’t suffice.
Всё юбилеи, юбилеи…
Жизнь наша кухнею разит!
Судя по ним, людьми большими
Россия вся кишмя-кишит;
По смерти их, и это ясно,
Вослед великих пустосвятств,
Не хватит нам ста Пантеонов
И ста Вестминстерских аббатств…
«Let your Mind’s fire break through the roaring, / Just concentrate, forget the past / And try to grasp that a new era / Has come; you’re now the least, the last. And all you knew, all you discovered / In your books’ jungles, your dream’s shout / Lies as a trace that’s hardly not...»
«She stands there with a sly expression, smiling. / Holding a huge scroll in her marble hands. / She notes life, death, and fame in her compiling, / Records all time, all people in all lands. And she (who’s not to blame) gets bored and weary / With fates of slaves, chiefs, races, patriarch...»
«Wedding wreaths crown the mountains. / I’m ecstatic... I’m young. / And all over my mountains / Such a pure chill is hung. And behold — to my rock / Came a gray-haired hunchback, shuffling-stumbling. / And the gift that he brought / Was pineapples from an underground dungeon. O h...»
«Once there lived both he and I; / To be friends we had to die. Skeleton, he'd visit me... / Winters, summers... frequently. Simple heart and solid bone; / We strolled this graveyard alone. And with laughter he’d recall / That gay day: our funeral. How they bore box behind box... / Ho...»