Velimir Khlebnikov
Sayan

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.
What have you seen? Troops?
An assembly of mute priests?
Or has anguish led you
There, to the land of the fathers?
Why have you become morose and boring,
You were carried by the stream,
And have taken the wide oar
Out of the rowlock?
And, leaning towards the tip of the oar,
You stood bewitched,
The bleary glance was riveted
To the single stone.
A hunter came and shed off
The old garment,
And threw his hands up to the sky
With a trapper’s prayer.
A deep bow thrice,
The custom of a nomad.
“Understand, these are the ancestors’ images,
Neighbours of the white clouds.”
In the heights, where the pinewood rustled
And where the pine strings rang,
The master could carve out
The enigmatic runes of the fathers.
Your eyes, old god,
Peek from the cracks in the wall.
The ancient sons of the desert
Hobble and shepherd harts.
And the harts scurry behind
The austere cuneiform.
The fathers’ writings froze
As fabled birds in the firmament,
Below, the hoary redwood
Sings with the evening paridae.
In its wretched magnanimity
An elk ascends the mountain top
To observe the agreements with god
Over the sign-covered cliff.
He strokes the stone of his horns
Against the black stony threshold.
He snaps the branch, chewing the leaves,
And stares dully and wearily
At the crudely-ancient lineaments
Of that which is no more.

II

But above the belt of writings,
Somehow, the stricken drawing on the birch
Has been preserved,
Shining with old beauty.
With a child’s countenance, he bowed down
To the wide abyss in front of him,
Bent over the precipice as a nail,
Spared by the savage thunderstorm,
Covering the birch’s front with a board,
He, froze, spellbound.
Only the black raven, a loner,
Flew in the sky with a grim call.
Did the birch say something to him
With its clear bark,
And the precipice silence something
In front of the bewitched mountain?
He widened his foreign eyes —
A blue-lit garden in them —
Looking where the waterfall
Has dug its stream bed for the night.

Translated by Andrew Stempton