Mikhail Svetlov
The Artist

To Iosif Utkin*

Fresh oats he’ll feed
To the horses on top the Bolshoi**,
Four spirited steeds
Strong and fast1 as a river in spate.
We’ve caught up with that woman...
Are you called Cleopatra? My joy,
Come to me, come,
I’m waiting for you at the gate.

I shall show you the well
And my favourite ash-tree,
You'll meet all my friends,
And my parents you also shall see.
Look at me!
No disguise do I use, no pen-name,
I stand here as I am,
To my countrymen ever the same.

I'll never forget them,
Even far away from my land.
They'll come in my dreams
In an ever resounding chord:
Those peaceful vast fields
Brought to life by man’s hand,
Where a stork’s strolling by —
Like a nobleman proud and bored.

I shall open to you
All my innermost thoughts and desires —
What I love, what. I read,
What I’m craving to meet on my way.
Let me feel the warmth
Of Art’s never waning fire,
In the house of talent
Let me rightfully stay.

Oh, to sing a new song that bursts out
Of my heart to an orchestra strains,
Fall in love at first sight with a girl.
Unbelievably shy, with no trace of a vain cocotte,
Die the death of a deathless soldier
In a play of heroic vein,
In a tragedy painfully ponder
The eternal — to be or be not.

May the streets of new houses rise
Where only cold ashes once, lay
All children be happy and smile,
All mothers he content and secure.
On this planet tortured for ages
May hunger never hold sway,
May not he hurt or degraded,
And never insults endure.

It is not God’s command
Nor a rule of my own creation,
It's as old as is the world,
A law passed down year after year
That our past
Should escape cancellation,
That a man who is born an artist
Should into the future peer.

Like a field of rye am I
That is nearing its golden prime,
Like an ambulance am I
That will reach the needy in time.
Anxious thoughts I cannot defy,
Over my mind they hold sway,
I feel drawn to the Paris Commune,
To the man of a bygone day.

Through Caucasian valleys
Famished Gorky is roaming alone,
Pushkin is shot in a duel,
Lomonosov’s in a dire plight...

That’s why I am trying to catch you,
Spurring on, with a shout and a groan,
The quadriga that my village seclusion
Brings to eerie life night after night.

___
*Iosif Utkin (1903-1944), a Soviet poet killed during the war.
**“...the horses on top the Bolshoi”, reference to the quadriga sculpture surmounting the facade of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

Translated by Valentina Jacque