Nikolay Zabolotsky
Popryshchin

When roads are covered with ice
And the wind shakes the graveyard crosses,
Gogol, with twitching fingers,
Leads out his hunchbacked dreams.
And numbed by the bitter cold,
Beyond endurance oppressed,
The stony monsters reel,
As the wind aims straight at the head.
The wind is a rearer of wings,
Exploding the ashen snows,
And suddenly, lower and lower,
Prostrates itself at your feet.
Where is such majesty from?
No longer a demon, but this —
Popryshchin’s¹ eyebrows are raised,
He lifts his face to the front.
Wind, blow through the offices,
Sweep the pens off the desks,
Spreading its pearly fan
Spain will rise at your feet.
It will flourish a purple mantilla
Over our native fields,
And clamorous Seville will come out
In a body to greet its king.
And he, slender and drawn,
His suffering eyes aglow
Will rise...
Then darkness again.
A bed, a warden, a mattress,
The shirt cutting under the arm,
Medzhi’s² desolate whine,
Outside the first glimmer of dawn.
Wind, rage through the offices,
Drive the snow down the avenue,
Overturn the great man's coach,
Bury it in the drifts.
By windows, columns, porches,
By arches of concrete, flow;
Pluck the general's stars from his tunic,
Bury bridges under the snow.
Stretching its limbs it whirls,
Sets up an icy howl,
After it snow fiends tumble,
Racing over the roofs.
They grapple
The bell towers,
Explode in a peal of bells,
Lie down in brick slaughterhouses,
And again leap out from a corner,
Where in the blind hurricane,
Making a last brave stand.
In a white shirt there sways,
Dead-faced,
Ferdinand.

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1. Popryshchin is the character from Gogol’s story “Diary of a Madman,” a poor clerk who imagines himself to be Ferdinand, King of Spain.
2. Medzhi is a dog belonging to the daughter of the director of the department where P. works.

Translated by Daniel Weissbort