Sergey Esenin
Soviet Russia

The storm has passed. And few of us survive.
At the roll-call of friends are many absentees.
Once more I go back to the orphaned land
I have not visited these past eight years.

Who is there I can call? With whom to share
The sad joy of having remained alive ?
Even the windmill here, that wooden bird
With one stiff wing, stands eyes shut-tight.

Nobody knows me here, and those who might
Remember me forgot me long ago.
And where my father’s cottage used to stand
Lie ashes covered by the roadside dust.

Life surges on. Around me throng
Faces of young and old, yet not one
To raise my hat to, nor yet one
Whose eyes afford me sanctuary.

A host of ideas surges through my brain. —
What is one’s ‘motherland’?
And is all this a dream?
For almost all these people here I am a gloomy pilgrim
Out of God knows what distant parts.

I! — A native of this village
Whose only chance of being known
Is that here a peasant woman spawned
An infamous Russian poet.

But reason’s voice speaks to my heart -
chink ! Why should you be offended?
This after all is but a new
Generation’s light burning in the cottages.

Already you’ve begun to fade.
Other young men sing other songs,
Which by your leave may be more interesting,
Being sired not by the village, but the world.’

Ah, home, my home, how funny I’ve become —
A dry flush flies to my sunken cheeks,
My native speech lies awkward on my tongue,
I am a stranger in my own country.

And this is what I see:
Peasants in their Sunday best gathering
At their Soviet as they used to at Church,
With awkward unwashed speeches to debate their ‘land’.

Already evening and the sunset sprays
Grey fields with watery gold.
The poplars stick their feet along the ditch
Like heifers poking through a gate.

A lame Red Army veteran with a sleepy face
Wrinkles his forehead to remember, with vast
Importance tells of Budionny, and of how
The Reds won through at Perekop at last.

‘Well, then, you see, we got him — once, again —
A bourgeois unit we beat in the Crimea...’
And the maples wrinkle long ear-like boughs,
And the old women groan into the silent dusk.

Young Communist peasants career down the hill,
Fervently pounding to the accordion,
Singing Demian Bedny’s agit-prop,
They deafen the valley with their happy shouts.

What a country! What perverse whim made me
Proclaim myself in verse the people’s friend?
My poetry is no longer needed here.
Yes, and perhaps I am superfluous too.

Well, then, forgive me, native shelter.
I am content as I served you well.
So let them not sing me today —
I sang when my country was sick.

I welcome everything, accept
Everything, as it is, ready
To follow to the end the beaten track.
I yield my whole heart up to October and May.
Only my gentle lyre I still hold back.

Her I will not yield up into strange hands,
Not to my mother, my friend, or my wife.
Only to me does she entrust her sounds,
Only to me she sings her gentle song.

Then flourish, young people! Be strong in body.
You have another life, a different song.
I journey alone towards an unknown region,
My rebel soul forever pacified.
But in that age
when enmity of nations is subdued,
When pain and the lie have vanished for good,
then will I sing with all my poet’s being
Of that sixth portion of the earth
called simply, Russia.

Translated by Geoffrey Thurley