What is the name of this street?
Mandelstam Street.
What the hell kind of name is that?
No matter how you turn it round,
It has a crooked sound, it isn’t straight.
There wasn’t much about him straight,
His attitudes weren’t lily-white.
And that is why this street
Or, better still, this hole
Was given its name after him:
This Mandelstam.
Это какая улица?
Улица Мандельштама.
Что за фамилия чортова —
Как ее ни вывертывай,
Криво звучит, а не прямо.
Мало в нем было линейного,
Нрава он не был лилейного,
И потому эта улица
Или, верней, эта яма
Так и зовется по имени
Этого Мандельштама...
«The scarlet of the dawn has woven on the lake. / In the pine forest the wood grouse are crying with ringing. There is an oriole crying somewhere, having hidden in the hollow. / But only I cannot cry — it is light on my soul. I know, by evening you'll come out by the ring of roads, / We'll ...»
«The high waters have licked / The bed with smoke. / The half moon has dropped / Its yellow reigns. I'm sailing a boat, / Colliding with the banks. / The churches have / Orange spires by the spinning wheel. With gloomy chirping / In the silence of the swamps / A black wood grouse / ...»
«The birch tree / Below my window / Has covered herself with snow, / Like with silver. On the thick branches / With a snowy trim / Have bloomed the tassels / Of white fringes. And there stands the birch tree / In a sleepy silence, / And there burn the snowflakes / In the golden fi...»
«Silence. In the junipers atop the valley, / Autumn — a roam mare — rubs her mane for dressing. Well above the wooded river banks — / That's the dark blue clang her horseshoes make. Wind, a monk, walks past with wary footsteps / Holding back the foliage on the pathways, Kissing, when h...»