Nikolay Zabolotsky
All that was in the soul...

All that was in the soul, all was lost again;
I lay down in the grass, sad and bored,
And a flower lifted its lovely form above me,
A grasshopper standing in front of it on guard.

Then I opened the weighty volume I had before me,
And on the first page saw a drawing of a plant.
Black, dead, the truth of the flower reached out
From the book towards nature — or was it the lie it contained?

And the flower, surprised, gazed at its reflection,
Tried to absorb its strange and alien wisdom.
A tremor of thought, unwonted, passed through its leaves,
In an effort of will that cannot be conveyed.

And the grasshopper raised its trumpet, and nature awoke —
The wistful creature sang a Gloria to the mind.
And in my old book the flower's likeness stirred,
So that my heart stirred too and moved towards it.

Translated by Daniel Weissbort