She stands there with a sly expression, smiling.
Holding a huge scroll in her marble hands.
She notes life, death, and fame in her compiling,
Records all time, all people in all lands.
And she (who’s not to blame) gets bored and weary
With fates of slaves, chiefs, races, patriarchs.
But recently a curly-bearded, cheery
Wise man smiled up at her — a Karl Marx.
She stepped down swiftly from the pedestal:
"I beg you! Come up! I’m so tired of all
This writing, not knowing what links the chain!
In the museums and the libraries
I’ll find a home. But human destinies
And their untangling aren’t for a girl’s brain."
Она стоит с улыбкой лукавой
И держит свиток мраморный в руках,
Внося в анналы жизнь, и смерть, и славу,
Мелькающие средь людей в веках.
И скучно ей, ничуть не виноватой
В судьбе рабов, вождей, племен и рас.
Но вот мудрец кудряво-бородатый
Недавно улыбнулся ей, Карл Маркс.
Она сошла проворно с пьедестала:
"Прошу! Влезайте! Я ведь так устала
Записывать, не знаю что к чему!
В музеях и библиотеках
Найду приют! А судьбы человека
Разгадывать не девичью уму!"
«Along the hard crust of deep snows, / To the secret, white house of yours, / So gentle and quiet — we both / Are walking, in silence half-lost. / And sweeter than all songs, sung ever, / Are this dream, becoming the truth, / Entwined twigs’ a-nodding with favor, / The light ring of...»
«An as it's going often at love's breaking, / The ghost of first days came again to us, / The silver willow through window then stretched in, / The silver beauty of her gentle branches. / The bird began to sing the song of light and pleasure / To us, who fears to lift looks from the earth, ...»
«2 And just having searched in the past, you’ll unlock / The gloves so long as to elbow, / The Petersburg night, in the theatre’s box / That smell, suffocating and mellow, / And winds from the bay. And not far — what a shock! — / Between lines, void passionate clamor, / Will ...»
«(From the "Middle Night Poems") / / She was o’er us like a star o’er an ocean, / Seeking the last, decuman wave with beams, / You gave her name of woe and commotion, / And ne’er — of gladness of our sacred dreams. At day, she circled over us — a swallow; / A smile — she ...»