Nikolay Zabolotsky
Peasant Spokesmen

In sheepskin coats of homely peasant cut
From villages far south of the Oka
They came, three strangers. Each had left his hut
To put his case about the way things are.

All Russia tossed, distraught by war and famine
With everything confused, disturbed, displaced.
She roared and argued, trains and stations cramming
With human misery, unhidden, open-faced.

Only those three strangers waited mildly
In a crowd that craved for bread and news,
Neither shouting frenziedly and wildly,
Nor upsetting order in the queues.

On the havoc born of need and hunger
Looked three pairs of travel-tired old eyes;
Sorrowful they stood there, lost in wonder,
Saying almost nothing, peasantwise.

There's a trait I treasure in my people:
They never reason with the mind alone,
But their hearts, too, are involved so deeply
That thought and feeling mingle into one.

That is why our folktales are so splendid,
So sincere and sensitive our songs
In that all-expressive language rendered
That to heart and mind alike belongs.

Though little spoke the three, their hearts were burning.
What are words? Real truth is past their power.
All that they had felt upon their journey
Was hidden in their breasts until its hour.

Maybe that was why an anxious flicker
Came into the eyes on faces white
When they stopped, their heartbeats getting quicker,
At the gates of Smolny late at night.

But when their host, a man of over fifty
In a well-worn suit of darkish grey,
Tired to death himself with work and worry,
Addressed them in his simple, kindly way,

Talked about their famine-ridden village
And about the none-too-distant time
When an iron horse would do the tillage
And of how the yields would start to climb.

How life would flourish, filled with man-made wonders
And the people, happy in their hearts,
Would reap the golden harvest of abundance,
Gladness lighting up their native parts —

Only then the heavy, anxious feeling
Vanished from the bosoms of the three
And suddenly they too began discerning
Much that he alone till then could see.

And their knapsacks got undone as if by magic
Powdering the floor around with dust
And out of them too tasty to imagine —
Come home-baked krendels, little else but crust.

And they treated Lenin with those dainties
Offered with a humble, open hand.
Everybody ate. 'Twas sweet and bitter,
The meagre fruit of the tormented land.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg