Nina Berberova
To Shakespeare

O Stratford genius, come to us! Return
To Avon wreathed in fog and filthy air,
Where heroes swelled with greatness on the stage,
With hardihood and hoary-headed wisdom,
And come to us now as unexpectedly
As in the sixteenth century. Step
Into our world adorned in Flemish lace,
An old doublet, Hessian boots worn down
On boards well trodden. Formerly you were
Favored by kings — a jester and a god
Playing your parts to strutting savages.
Three witches whisper, whisper while they spin.
These are your progeny, your children trying
To call you to us in this louring hour
When Birnam Wood marches on Dunsinane,
When Polish marshes ripple in the wind,
And when a rainbow hung above the Volga,
And where between the Ilmen and the Don
A conqueror of the world confronts his fate.

They have fallen, millions of them, legions,
Mingling still more bones with Tatar bones,
With Lithuanian bones, and with French bones
There, where once — on the field of Kulikovo,
Once on the wide Poltavian steppe, and there
Where once on the Nevà our own first emperor
Cast his envious eyes westward to Europe.
They who have fallen will not rise again.
They sleep in a barbarian embrace,
They sleep well with the Poles of Gedimin,
With the Old Guardsmen of Napoleon,
And over them will rustle . . . may it be soon,
                      The Russian grain . . .
                                             But he who shakes the age,
His life can not be rounded without you.
                      O Stratford genius, batten onto him,
Lead him among your frightful swarm of fates
And cue his last confessional tirade!
Three witches whisper, whisper while they spin.
A subtle thread, a whisper indistinct:
The Birnam-Kursk that rustles around the tyrant
And bends the oaks, while still the thread runs on.
They sleep no more in that imperial palace
Constructed in the time of Alexander,
Here lived the whiskered savage with his medals,
In nineteen-eighteen here they tortured people,
And built a hospital in ‘thirty-one.
Now parquetry is overgrown with moss,
From the brocaded walls portraits of beauties
With asiatic eyes may still look down.
And now the forest stirs.
                                            He ventures out
On a foul Russian day to hear the uproar:
Will the old women tender him a dagger?
Will they assign him to another’s knife?
Or whirl him hence to banishment and exile?
Or take him in a cage to wicked Paris
Like a beast? The threading runs from darkness
Into darkness, and the twentieth century
Is indistinct: Tragedy leaves us cold.
Poetry, like a mother eagle, dead,
Lies in the ashes, music itself is dumb,
Love will not burn, and even thought grows scant.
Only blood flows. There is blood. We are all in blood.
Water in blood, earth in blood, and air
In blood. And he who never in his life
Ate carrion, like us, stands blood up to his breast.
O Stratford genius, o you powerful soul,
Who reveled in blood, come to us and help us
Quickly end this journey steeped in blood.

Translated by J. Kates