Vladislav Khodasevich
Orpheus Ascendant

Here I sit under lights from on high,
In my roundabout, circular room.
I peer at my stucco-bright sky,
At what sixty-watt sun-bulbs illume.

All around me illumined as well,
Are my armchairs, the table and bed.
Bewildered, I can’t seem to quell
How I wring hands and clutch at my head.

On my windowpanes silently bloom
The palm trees of whitish rime frost.
In my waistcoat, portentous of doom,
Ticking watch writhes in tempest time-tossed.

O the niggardly, loathsome disgust
Of my life’s hopeless, desperate way!
So pathetic, the furniture, dust,
How I pity these objects, my day.

And hugging myself by the knees,
I rock back and forth, grief disperse,
And then in a stupor I freeze —
And begin with myself speaking verse.

The lines are all passion, pretense!
Not a smidgen of logic they hold,
But sounds ring much truer than sense,
And the word beats all else fifty-fold.

Then the melody, music’s catharsis
Permeates and imbues my song’s whole,
Fine and slender and whetted to sharpness
Is the keen blade that impales my soul.

I expand into wraithlike domains,
Rise over life’s dead lifeless whirl,
My strophes in underground flames,
While my brow sports a starlit spit curl.

And I watch with my goggling-wide specs,
Look with snake eyes that slither along,
At poor things all around me, objects,
As they hearken to my feral song.

All awash with untamed fluctuations,
The room in a smooth dance respires,
And through the mad gusts of gyrations
Someone in my hands sticks a lyre.

And no more is my stucco-bright sky,
The sixty-watt sun-bulbs have dimmed.
On my smooth crags, on anapests’ sigh,
Leans sly Orpheus proudly and grins.

Translated by U. R. Bowie