Don’t seduce me into captivity,
Don’t entice me with hearth and home,
Don’t immure me living and breathing
Inside four walls.
There’s no chamber for which a poet
Would exchange her homelessness, –
That’s why the cuckoo cuckoos
That she hasn’t got a nest.
Ты уютом меня не приваживай,
Не заманивай в душный плен,
Не замуровывай заживо
Меж четырех стен.
Нет палаты такой, на какую
Променял бы бездомность поэт, —
Оттого-то кукушка кукует,
Что гнезда у нее нет.
«I The Sayan rolls with one swell after another, / And with shores of chalk. / Here, is the brooding of the past, / Where time has turned numb. / Above, with a vast blanket, / The sails rustle ominously, / A shuttle boat perturbs the second / Sky of the river with its hulk bottom. / ...»
«1 I break the layered rocks / In the hour when the silty day / Is moulded, and my tired mule carries / The weighty lumps on its shaggy back. We carry them to the railroad, / Put them in a heap, — and to the sea again / The hairy legs lead us, / And the mule starts braying. And it br...»
«The city took off its wintery things. / The snows turned slobbery. / Spring has come again, / foolish and loose-tongued / as an army cadet.»
«The hooves clattered. / As if singing: / — Crib. / Grab. / Grub. / Gruff. Drunk with the wind, / ice-shod, / the street slid away, / a horse landed / with a wallop on its crupper, / and instantly, / gaper after gaper, / boot-cut pants on Kuznetskii, / ganged up / with ...»