Osip Mandelshtam
The Twilight of Freedom

Let us proclaim, brothers, the twilight of freedom,
The great twilight year.
Into the seething waters of night
An enormous forest of snares has been lowered.
You are rising on years of suffocation
O sun, judge, people.

Let us proclaim the fateful burden
Which the people’s leader, steeped in tears, is carrying.
Let us proclaim authority’s twilight burden,
Its unendurable oppression.
Whoever has heart in him still, must hear, o time
How your boat is sinking to the bottom.

We in our warring legions
Have fettered the swallows — and look!
The sun is no longer in sight: the whole element
Twitters and shifts, is alive;
Through the close meshes of dense twilight
The sun is hidden and the earth drifts.

Let us try it then, this clumsy, tremendous
Grinding turn of the rudder.
The country drifts: take heart, o men!
As though we carved the ocean with a plough
We shall remember even in the frosts of Lethe
The earth was worth ten heavens to us.

Translated by Peter Russell