The evening flares, the cat naps on a beam.
Someone is praying: “Lord Jesus.”
The twilight blazes, the fog kindles;
There is a scarlet curtain over the ornate window.
Spider webs stretch from the golden toolshed.
Somewhere a mouse is scratching in a closed cage…
By the forest meadow — bundles of wheat.
Firs, like spears, rest against the sky.
The dew-covered groves have started to smolder…
In the heart, only silence and relics.
Задымился вечер, дремлет кот на брусе.
Кто-то помолился: «Господи Исусе».
Полыхают зори, курятся туманы,
Над резным окошком занавес багряный.
Вьются паутины с золотой повети.
Где-то мышь скребется в затворенной клети...
У лесной поляны — в свяслах копны хлеба,
Ели, словно копья, уперлися в небо.
Закадили дымом под росою рощи...
В сердце почивают тишина и мощи.
«What street are we on? / This is Mandelstam Road. / Damned if I know what that name means. / It’s like a bottle you can’t get the top off. / It sounds all twisted and not very clean. The way he did things could have been straighter, / his self-control a little greater, / and that’...»
«I have learned the science of parting / In bare-headed laments of night. / The oxen graze, the waiting goes on — / The final hour of vigils in town, / And I honor the rituals of cockerel night, / When, bearing the weight of a journey endured, / Tear-stained eyes gazed into the void / ...»
«We shall meet again in Petersburg, / as though we had buried the sun there. / O. Mandelshtam A quarter century has passed abroad / and hope has become a joke. / The radiant starscape above Nice / is permanently my native sky. The stillness of the blissful South, / the murmur of waves, ...»
«We shall meet again in Petersburg / as if we had buried the sun there. / O. Mandelstam After a quarter-century overseas, / to cling to hope is ludicrous at best. / The radiant sky above adoptive Nice / is native sky to one so disposessed. The quiet of a southern paradise — / the rust...»