Valery Bryusov
The Voice of Other Worlds

Let life torment, and the day lived
Trouble with echoes of bitter thoughts,
And sorrow gnaw the soul cunningly.
Look in the skies of night;
Where the starry dew falls,
Where the Milky Way, like a streak,
Has lain to multiply light with light;
Look humbly into the miracles —
And Eternity will tenderly destroy
In you the earthly voices,
Upon the eyes of sleepless memory
Will put a patch of murk;
A tear, instilled, shall not fall down,
An instant, wearied by the shorelessness!

The holy shorelessness that heals
All pain, all greed, all worry,
Imperiously taming hopelessness
With dreams of another kind of being!
The night, concealing not its secrets of creation,
Streaming the light of countless stars,
Proclaims that near us is the closeness
of other worlds, that there — are the edges,
Where there is love and tenderness as well,
And life and death — who knows to whom
Does it belong?
That the sky — only a frontier
of planetary spheres, the distance — a furrow,
That the congregating suns and our “I”
Draws the inevitable in space.

Translated by Linda Southby