Sergey Esenin
Returning home

Back to my birthplace, back to native haunts
I went — back to the country
Of my boyhood,
Where like a watchman's tower made of birch wood,
Shorn of its crucifix, the belfry soars.

How many changes there have taken place
In their dull lives of hardship and privation.
How many things came as a revelation
To me on every side, at every pace.

I could not tell
The house where I was born:
No maple boughs are swaying by the window,
Mother no longer sits there by the door
To feed her millet porridge to the chickens.

She's aged a lot, I guess...
She has indeed.
And with a grieving heart I look around me:
How unfamiliar are the surroundings!
This hill as white as ever gleams, I see,
And at its foot
Still stands the big grey boulder.

Here is the graveyard!
Where crosses decay
Like soldiers fighting hand-to-hand, who stay
Dead with their arms out, in that posture frozen.

An old man with a stick, who's been out wild
Herbs gathering, down the path to me advances.

"Friend,
Show me, I'll be much obliged,
Where is Esenin's place, I mean, Tatyana's?"

"Tatyana's… hem…
That cottage over there.
Are you
А relative?
Her son, perhaps, the stray one?"

"Yes, I'm her son.
Old man, why do you stare
So sadly with an air
Of consternation?"

"А fine thing, son,
You didn't recognize your grandad!.."
"Good heavens, Grandad, is it really you?"
And then a conversation sad and candid
Began, tears on the wild herbs fell like dew.
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"I reckon you, my lad, will soon be thirty".
I'm ninety".
And won't live much longer now.
It's long ago you should have been returning,"
He tells me, deeply furrowing his brow.
"Yes!". How time flies !..
You 're not a Communist?"
"I'm not!.."
"Your sisters joined the Кomsomol.
Disgusting! Rather anything but this!
They took the icons .yesterday off the wall,
The commissar tore the cross down from the steeple.
There's no place now where folk can go to pray.
Away into the forest I go stealing
And pray to aspens...
It may work that way...

"Let's go —
At home you'II see things for yourself."
And off we go, to the rough footpath keeping.
I smile at field and forest, well content,
While grandad wistfully looks at the steeple.
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"Hello there , Mum! Hello there, everybody!"
And once again I brush away a tear.
Even a cow would burst out bitterly sobbing,
Just looking at the poverty that's here.

Up on the wall a calendar with Lenin.
This is my sisters' life,
But not my own —
Yet all the same I'II gladly go on bended
Кnee to the countryside I love and know.

Some neighbours called...
А woman with a baby.
There's nobody here knows me any more.
Just as in Вyron our old dog came racing
To greet me with loud barking at the door.

Dear land,
You're not like
What you used to be.
And I myself have, naturally, altered.
The more distraught they are, mother and grandad,
The merrier is my sister's grin of glee.

Lenin for me is not, of course, an icon ,
I know the world...
I love my family...
Yet sitting down upon the bench beside her
I bow my head involuntarily.

"Well , what's your news?"
She opens a Bible-hefty
Volume of Capital and talks instead
Of Marx,
And Engels...
Whose works I have never,
Of course, in any circumstances read.

It makes me smile,
The way that bright girl , taking
Мe by the scruff of my neck, gives me what for…
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Just as in Byron our old dog came racing
To greet me with loud barking at the door.

Translated by Peter Tempest