To E. K. Gertsyk
When the love of flesh fades,
So goes the desire to create.
Your fingers don’t long to handle clay
Or chisel shadows into marble.
Your song halts in mid-word,
The brush freezes in mid-stroke —
Surprise…how little they matter.
Farewell, farewell to you, sublime lust!
The spirit’s last lingering joy.
Е. К. Герцык
Кто разлюбляет плоть, хладеет к воплощенью:
Почти не тянется за глиною рука.
Уже не вылепишь ни льва, ни голубка,
Не станет мрамором, что наплывает тенью.
На полуслове — песнь, на полувзмахе — кисть
Вдруг остановишь ты, затем что их — не надо...
Прощай, прощай и ты, прекрасная корысть,
Ты, духа предпоследняя услада!
«Poetry has to be strange / And senseless, vague, out of range, / And clear like glass, and also it / Must be as simple as day’s heat. Like moisture of a creek — clean / With everything alike and kin, / And branchy like a tree, alive, / And very brief like our life.»
«I remember: my Dad — he is full / Of vitality, trying to manage / All those packing; the cabbie — he's cool; / And the horse, and the springs of the carriage. A lonely streetcar in Moscow looks / Like an flimsy, old coach. The wheel rolls / With the flocks of the furious rooks / Ov...»
«Daughter of the daughter of the daughters of the daughter Pe / foreto the apple you ate of yee / beguiling Adam's heights foreto you favorite daughter of the daughter of Pe / being the Mother of the world and the world itself and the child of the world being / open the eye of the soul of gra...»
«To misfortune or good chances / Verity is such: / Never come to former places, / Even wish is much. Even if these hearth and home / Look like almost being, / Do not find what we look for / Neither you nor me. Backward travel I would firmly, / Finally restrain, / I ask you, as if a ...»