Lovely night, I will never retrieve it,
And I won't see my sweet precious love.
And the nightingale's song, I won't hear it,
Happy song that it sang in the grove!
That sweet night is now gone irrevocably,
You can't tell it: please come back and wait.
Autumn weather has now set in locally,
With perpetual rains, all is wet.
Fast asleep in the grave is my sweetheart
Keeping love, as before, in her heart.
And however it tries, autumn blizzard
Cannot wake her from sleep, flesh and blood.
So the nightingale's singing has ended,
As the song-bird has taken to flight,
And I can't hear the song now, so splendid,
Which it sang on that sweet chilly night.
Gone and lost are the joyous emotions
That I had in my life and conceived.
All I have now is chill in my conscience.
What is gone can't be ever retrieved.
Не вернуть мне ту ночку прохладную,
Не видать мне подруги своей,
Не слыхать мне ту песню отрадную,
Что в саду распевал соловей!
Унеслася та ночка весенняя,
Ей не скажешь: «Вернись, подожди».
Наступила погода осенняя,
Бесконечные льются дожди.
Крепким сном спит в могиле подруга,
Схороня в своем сердце любовь.
Не разбудит осенняя вьюга
Крепкий сон, не взволнует и кровь.
И замолкла та песнь соловьиная,
За моря соловей улетел,
Не звучит уже более, сильная,
Что он ночкой прохладною пел.
Пролетели и радости милые,
Что испытывал в жизни тогда.
На душе уже чувства остылые.
Что прошло — не вернуть никогда.
«The gun battery was over there, behind that hill. / We cannot hear it, but its thunder remains still, / around us, the corpses lie beneath the snow, / and in the icy air, their arms are still flailing. / Who would dare to trample this field now? / Today, the dead ones rise again. Now they...»
«I bid farewell to everything I was, / everything I despised, disliked, and loved. And now, a new life begins, / I bid farewell to yesterday’s skin. About me, I no longer need any news. / I bid goodbye — right to the marrow. At last, I look down on what I was, / see my separate soul, n...»
«The land swallows itself whole / and nuzzles the heavens, / patches up its memory’s holes / with grasses and a man. The grass is under horse’s hoofs, / the soul in a box of bones, / and only the word, the word alone, / looms under the full moon. Like Nineveh, the steppe stretches...»
«And now summer has left / as if it never came at all. / It’s warm still where the sun falls. / But it’s not enough. Whatever I wanted to happen / fell right into my hands / like a five-fingered leaf. / But it’s not enough. The just and unjust / played their necessary part / a...»