Drowsily an aged pine
rustles in her sleep.
Leaning on her coarse-grained trunk
Here I stand and speak.
«little pine-tree, just my age,
Give me of your strength!
Not the usual nine months,
forty years I carried,
forty years I had been bearing,
forty years I had been begging,
begged my heart out, got by pleading,
brought to term
my soul.»
Дремлет старая сосна
И шумит со сна.
Я, к шершавому стволу
Прислонясь, стою.
— Сосенка-ровесница,
Передай мне силу!
Я не девять месяцев, —
Сорок лет носила,
Сорок лет вынашивала,
Сорок лет выпрашивала,
Вымолила, выпросила,
Выносила
Душу.
«At blazing noon, in Dagestan’s deep valley, / a bullet in my chest, dead still I lay, / as steam yet rose above my wound, I tallied / each drop of blood, as life now now seeped away. Alone I lay within a sandy hollow, / as jagged ledges teemed there, rising steep, / with sun-scorched pe...»
«We pronounced / the simplest, poorest words / as if they had never been said. / We were saying / sun, light, grass / as people pronounce / life, love, strength. Remembered how we cleared / that eternal, accursed glacier / from the city streets — and an old man / stamped his foot...»
«He did not return, even after his death, to / That ancient city he was rooted in. / Going away, he did not pause for breath / Nor look back. My song is for him. / Torches, night, a last embrace, / Fate, a wild howl, at his threshold. / Out of hell he sent her his curse / And in heaven ...»
«"I am air and fire..." / – Shakespeare She has kissed lips already grown inhuman, / On her knees she has wept already before Augustus... / And her servants have betrayed her. Under the Roman / Eagle clamour the raucous trumpets, and the dusk has Spread. And enter the last hostage to her ...»