Valery Bryusov
Childhood fancies

Night again, white starlight and red-belted
Mars above me glitters in his pride.
Why should I, Earth’s prisoner in fetters,
Weave these dreams of folly starry-eyed?

They shall not come true, your childhood fancies!
You shall never witness, overjoyed,
Out in space a new light source advancing —
Our ship cruising through the boundless void!

That first soaring flight you’ll not accomplish,
In the papers you shall never read
That an unknown, henceforth famous, someone,
Like Columbus, has a New World reached.

So be humble! But the heart’s unwilling
From a cherished secret dream to part
And is joyfully through tears foretelling
The great Earth-name of the first to start.

Can it be the Earth, like a Red Indian,
Will to non-Earth visitors look strange?
Shall God’s favoured one come and rechristen
Hill and vale, the names of rivers change?

No! But we, who have the whole Earth mastered,
Reached the Pole and set a banner there,
We must fly to other distant planets
And from tiny Earth good tidings bear!

Translated by Peter Tempest