For four years on end
Immortal was I.
For four years on end
Light-hearted was I.
For I never knew I would die one fine day,
For I never knew I would not live for aye.
You who know how to make life sweet and pleasant,
Like children, immortal — believe not in death;
Death's time is the future — but never the present,
Though you may be breathing your very last breath.
Года четыре был я бессмертен,
Года четыре был я беспечен,
Ибо не знал я о будущей смерти,
Ибо не знал я, что век мой не вечен.
Вы, что умеете жить настоящим,
В смерть, как бессмертные дети, не верьте.
Миг этот будет всегда предстоящим —
Даже за час, за мгновенье до смерти.
«Who knows what such fame is like! / At what price did he buy the right, / The possibility or the paradise / To joke about it all so wisely and cunningly, / To be mysteriously silent, / And to call a foot a “footsie”?»
«I do not deserve this praise, rather, / And Sappho doesn’t matter in that, / I know the reason another, / But nothing of it can be read. / Let somebody save self by running, / And others — by nods from their "bliss". / These poems were all underlying / With text, that’s like look...»
«The twenty first. Monday. Night. / The outline of the capital in mist. / It had to be some idler who contrived / The happy fantasy that love exists. And from laziness or acclimation, / All believed him, and moved along: / Awaiting dates, and dreading separations, / And venerating love i...»
«I'm careless of the ode’s exalted sentence / And of the elegy’s delicious guile. / I say the verse should ill befit the senses, / Escape the common file. If you could know what gibberish empowers / The verse that grows, from all abashment freed, / Like dandelions’ yellow summer fl...»