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!"
«As a white stone in the well's cool deepness, / There lays in me one wonderful remembrance. / I am not able and don't want to miss this: / It is my torture and my utter gladness. I think, that he whose look will be directed / Into my eyes, at once will see it whole. / He will become more ...»
«But there’re, somewhere, the simple life and light, / Warm, gay and absolutely clear… / There, speaks a neighbor through the fences, light, / With a sweet girl, and only bees can hear — / The gentlest talking of this kind. But here we live — the solemn ones and toilsome — / And...»
«(From the "Middle Night Poems") Which a sonata will you be / Hidden by me in — with a care? / How uneasily, for me / Will call you, utterly unfair / Because so close and so good / You were for me, tho’ for a moment… / Your dream — dissolving in a solvent, / Where death —...»
«We know what is now on History’s scales, / What is, in the world, going now. / The hour of courage shew our clock’s hands. / Our courage will not bend its brow. / None fears to die under the bullet’s siege, / None bitters to lose one’s home here, — / And we will preserve you, O...»