My days are awkward and absurd:
For bread I'm begging from a poor,
While alms I offer only to a rich.
I thread a needle by the ray,
To a burglar I suggest the key,
And pallor, I by ceruse only bleach.
But all these efforts are obtuse:
The poor and reach, they both refuse,
The ray is always missing needle's eye.
The burglar enters with no key.
Again in vain I spent my day
And, silly woman, I'm reduced to cry.
Мой день беспутен и нелеп:
У нищего прошу на хлеб,
Богатому даю на бедность,
В иголку продеваю — луч,
Грабителю вручаю — ключ,
Белилами румяню бледность.
Мне нищий хлеба не даёт,
Богатый денег не берёт,
Луч не вдевается в иголку,
Грабитель входит без ключа,
А дура плачет в три ручья —
Над днём без славы и без толку.
«I will not be wandering about / Trampling goosefoot in the bushes any more; / And I know you"ll never come around / In my dreams, oat-haired, as before. / / You were tender beautiful and fair, / Berry juice upon your skin, so light. / You resembled rosy sunset glare, / And, like...»
«in memory of Glina Straovoitova That’s how it was: I turned my sickroom gazes / on the yard outside the ward, as though on groves / or open fields. I tried to write ‘quite simply’: / as it turned out, the impediment was this: my mind was racked, tortured by constant fretting / about ...»
«To tell the truth, I'm kin / to the house cricket. / I sing a secret song / above the oven's ash. / For me, one brings / the water to a fierce boil, / For me, another / prepares a hearth of gold. A traveler will recall / ...»
«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. ...»