Marina Tsvetaeva
An Attempt at Jealousy

How goest your life with another?
Any easier? One oar in the water, plink!
And off drifts the erstwhile once-lover.
Did all too soon the memory shrink

Of me, the island that sails astray
(Through sky and not through watery mass)?
Souls, souls! You’re to be siblings now, hey!
No more being lovers; that’s passed.

How goest your life with a lass who’s
Conventional? Deprived of the gods that you slew,
You who dethroned your exemplary empress
When you acted to abdicate you?

How goest your life, with a fidget and sway?
With a shrinking flaccid? Standing tall? Just how?
How do you cope with the tax you pay
On the everyday triteness you live with, poor pal?

“Enough with convulsions, the jerkings around,
Your fits and your frenzies; I’m out!”
How goest your life with a gal who’s earthbound,
O you, whom I built strong, my lifelong redoubt?

Is the grub more dear to the bone,
More edible? No bellyaching, friend, if it palls on you…
How goest your life with a semblance alone,
You who once fondled Mt. Sinai’s soft dew?

How goest your life with an alien creed,
Pure pedestrian? I ask you point blank — is it “love”?
Does shame, mounted high on his chastening steed,
Not lash at your full-of-blame brow from above?

How goest your “relationship”? With a howdy, how do?
With a no can do? With a ho-hum song, just how?
How do you go about coping, poor you,
With a conscience in pangs, with a milkless milk cow?

How goest your life with the merchandise
From the flea market selloff? Price too steep for rust?
After the marble walls of Carrara, how’s the downsize,
Huh? How’s things with the wood rot and dust?

For God was hewn out of that stone by a comet,
Then smashed into crumples and sheen,
So how goest your life with quintessence of common,
You who once frolicked with Lilith the Queen?

Your newly bought marked-way-down toy of a thing,
Does she “meet your needs?” You who dispensed
With the magic, how goest your life without bling,
With a wench sorely lacking in sense of sixth sense?

Okay now. Tell me true: you happy?
No? In your ditch without depth and bereft of a plan,
How goes your life, my dear?

Harder maybe, more sappy?
Or just the same way as goes my life
With a mundane and commonplace man?

Translated by U. R. Bowie