Sergey Esenin
Soviet Russia

To A. Sakharov

That hurricane is past. How few of us came through it!
To friendship’s call so many don’t respond.
I’m back in the bereaved land I have truly
For eight years not set eyes upon.

Whom can I ask to come and see me, sharing
With them the sad joy that I’m still alive?
Even the mill — a bird of timber bearing
A single wing — stands mute with shuttered eye.

There isn’t anybody knows me here.
By those who knew me then I’m long forgotten.
Where stood the family home in memory dear
Today lie dust and ash, the landscape blotting.

But life is seething still.
This way and that
Pass people young and old
All in a hurry.
But there’s no one to whom I’ll doff my hat,
In no eyes do I see a welcoming flurry.

Thoughts in my brain are swarming and I wonder:
What is the homeland?
Can this be a dream?
To most folk here a dour pilgrim, a wanderer
Come from God-knows-what distant land I seem.

And here am I!
Citizen of a village
Whose only claim to fame in future ages
Will be that here a woman once delivered
That Russian bard whose conduct was outrageous.

But reason's voice my troubled heart instructs:
“Hey there! What cause have you for indignation?
What flares there in the cottages is just
The new light of another generation.

"You're not the youth in full bloom that you were.
Now other young men other songs are singing.
More interesting, no doubt, because they’re children
Of not the village only but the world."

Ah, homeland! What a fool am I! My cheeks
Are dry and flushed, their hollows are deep-sunken.
So strangely fellow-citizens now speak
I feel a foreigner in my own country.

This I now see:
The peasants on a Sunday
From all sides congregate, churchgoer-like.
With phrases that are rough, unwashed, and rugged
They launch into discussion of their life.

Already evening. In soft gold steeping
The pale grey fields, the sun sinks in the west.
Like heifers’ legs under a yardgate peeping,
The poplars in the ditch their feet have pressed.

A sleepy-faced lame armyman is talking
With wrinkles on his forehead deeply drawn,
Recalling in a solemn tone Budyonny
And how the Reds took Perekop by storm.

“So here we struck the bastards ... let 'em have it —
That bourgeois scum... In the Crimea there..."
The long-eared maple branches listen avidly
And women gasp in the dumb twilight air.

Now down the hill with an accordion wending
Come country Komsomols, young girls and boys.
Bellowing sallies rhymed by Demyan Bedny,
Filling the valley with their merry noise.

That’s what the land is like!
Whatever made
Me bawl in verse how close I am to people?
My poetry's no more needed, I'm afraid,
Nor is, you might say, my own presence needed.

What then!
Forgive me, native haunts.
I’m pleased enough if you in any way I’ve aided.
What if my songs are sung today no more —
Was not I heeded when my land was ailing?

All I accept just so,
Nothing opposing.
I’ll gladly follow a well-trodden path,
Devote my whole soul to May and October,
But from my lyre alone I shall not part.

To other people I shall not entrust it,
Friend, mother, wife shall never it possess.
To me alone did it confide its music,
To me alone sang songs of tenderness.

Young people, thrive! Be fit and firm of body!
A life that’s different, different songs you know.
While I along my lonely road go plodding,
Forever having quelled a rebel soul.

But even then
When feuding
Lies and sorrow
No longer hold this world of ours in thrall
I still shall laud
With all my poet's power
This one-sixth of the world
Which "Russia" we call.

Translated by Peter Tempest