Where is the terrifying place
We’re bound for, Comrade Bigmouth-face?
How crumbles our tobacco blend,
My nut-cracking foolish friend!
A starling’s whistle might get us by,
We’ll have our fill of a nutty pie…
However it goes, it’ll end.
Куда как страшно нам с тобой,
Товарищ большеротый мой!
Ох, как крошится наш табак,
Щелкунчик, дружок, дурак!
А мог бы жизнь просвистать скворцом,
Заесть ореховым пирогом,
Да, видно, нельзя никак...
«The gun battery was over there, behind that hill. / We cannot hear it, but its thunder remains still, / around us, the corpses lie beneath the snow, / and in the icy air, their arms are still flailing. / Who would dare to trample this field now? / Today, the dead ones rise again. Now they...»
«I bid farewell to everything I was, / everything I despised, disliked, and loved. And now, a new life begins, / I bid farewell to yesterday’s skin. About me, I no longer need any news. / I bid goodbye — right to the marrow. At last, I look down on what I was, / see my separate soul, n...»
«The land swallows itself whole / and nuzzles the heavens, / patches up its memory’s holes / with grasses and a man. The grass is under horse’s hoofs, / the soul in a box of bones, / and only the word, the word alone, / looms under the full moon. Like Nineveh, the steppe stretches...»
«And now summer has left / as if it never came at all. / It’s warm still where the sun falls. / But it’s not enough. Whatever I wanted to happen / fell right into my hands / like a five-fingered leaf. / But it’s not enough. The just and unjust / played their necessary part / a...»