Osip Mandelshtam
O Lake Saimaa, you beautiful maiden...

O Lake Saimaa, you beautiful maiden, my boat you were swaying,
Swayed the lively and spirited skiff that like arrow was sharpened,
Heard a lullaby’s bliss did my soul in the watery spraying,
Saw away in the distance, like sisters, deserted escarpments.
Kalevala’s primordial refrains they were everywhere playing:
Hewn in iron and in boulder, a song of titanium’s lustre.
And a sandbank, as if it were cut by an evening shaft straying,
On a water mill’s purple gleamed bride with a virginal bluster.
Silent arrows were falling as if from a drunken sun’s spinning
To the depths they descended, and silent, the depths they ignited,
As an overripe apple, from tree of the garden’s beginning,
And too dazzling the sun was as stars in the heavens were lighted.
Having landed my boat on the silver lush beach I was walking;
Quite how long and to whom I was praying I cannot remember…
Boundless Saimaa with torrents of lava appeared to be stalking,
Vapour settled and billowed white silent on surface’s ember.

Translated by Rupert Moreton